Wisdom of the Team?

A consensus decisionmaking activity involves three steps:

  1. Individual participants to arrange a list of items in an order.

  2. The participants form teams to share their individual arrangements and arrive at a consensus arrangement.

  3. The participants compare the order of their team’s arrangement with the order provided by experts.

In this process, the participants discover the factors that influence decisionmaking in teams.

Do you know, which letter is most frequently used in English? It is the letter “E”; it is used 12 percent of time in English words.

The following consensus activity requires the participants to arrange a random set of letters according to their frequency of use in English words.

Synopsis

The participants arrange five English letters according to their frequency of use. Later, the participants form teams, share their arrangements, and arrive at a consensus. The team compares its order with the correct order computed by analyzing a set of 40,000 English words.

Purpose

To discover the advantages and disadvantage of making decisions in teams.

Participants

  • Minimum: 3

  • Maximum: Any number

  • Best 12 to 30

Time

15 to 30 minutes

Flow

Display five letters. Show a slide with these letters. Or write them down on the flipchart: JLOST. Ask the participants to study these letters.

Arrange the letters in order of frequency. Ask the participants to work independently and arrange the letters in order of their frequency of occurrence in English words. Announce a 2-minute time limit.

Form teams. At the end of 2 minutes, blow the whistle and ask the participants to stop rearranging the letters. Organize the participants into teams of 3 to 5.

Work in teams. Tell the participants to share their individual arrangement of letters. Ask them to discuss differences among different arrangements. Within a 3-minute time limit, ask the teams to rearrange the letters to reflect their consensus. Ask the participants not to make any changes in their original individual lists and write the team’s list in a new piece of paper.

Present the correct data. Show a slide with the letters in this sequence: T O S L J. Or write the letters in this sequence on the flip chart. Explain that this is the correct order of frequency obtained by counting letters in a random sample of 40,000 English words. Pause to permit the participants to study the order.

Compare with the team arrangement. Ask the participants to compare their team list with the correct list. Ask them to rate their team’s performance.

Compare with individual arrangement. After a suitable pause, ask each participant to compare his or her list with the correct list. Also ask the participants whether their personal arrangement was better or worse than the team’s arrangement.

Debrief

Conduct a discussion about this activity, using these types of questions:

  • Was your original arrangement more accurate than the team’s consensus arrangement?

  • Was the team’s arrangement different from your original arrangement?

  • During the discussion among the team members, who dominated the conversation? Did this person have specialized knowledge about letter frequencies.

  • Which would have been better: working independently on this task or working collaboratively with the members of a team?

  • What are some tasks in your workplace that would benefit from teamwork? What tasks are suited for individual work?

  • In general, which approach do you prefer: working independently or in a team?