How To Enforce A Commitment?

How To Enforce A Commitment?

Commitment mechanisms are strategies, agreements, or institutional arrangements deliberately established to ensure adherence to decisions made at an earlier time. How to design them?

Values: How They Form and Change

Values: How They Form and Change

Several psychological and sociological mechanisms have been proposed to explain the formation and change of values in individuals. What variables and relationships do these mechanisms highlight?

Expectations: How They Form If Decision Makers Are Distant

Expectations: How They Form If Decision Makers Are Distant

How public expectations form is interesting for decision governance because they concern decision situations in which there is considerable distance between stakeholders and decision makers. How do expectations form about distant decision makers?

Competence → Authority: More Is Usually More

Competence → Authority: More Is Usually More

Competence plays a significant role in shaping authority and influence in group decision-making. Individuals perceived as competent often hold greater decision-making power, influence group consensus, and guide the strategic direction of collective choices. Why is this common?

When To Delegate Decision Authority?

When To Delegate Decision Authority?

One of the questions when designing decision governance is whether to motivate an individual with authority to delegate it to someone else. Why would they do it?

Goal Displacement: What It Is And How To Mitigate It

Goal Displacement: What It Is And How To Mitigate It

Goal displacement refers to a situation where an individual, group, or organization shifts its focus from the intended objectives to secondary or substitute goals. Which factors increase, and which decrease the probability of goal displacement?

Incentives: Negative Consequences of Incentive Mechanisms

Incentives: Negative Consequences of Incentive Mechanisms

Let’s assume that decision governance in a firm includes an incentive mechanism which is designed to financially reward decision makers in proportion to the number of options they consider in a decision situation. What could go wrong?

Social Learning: How to Accelerate It

Social Learning: How to Accelerate It

Social learning accelerates under conditions where respected models demonstrate behaviors, reinforcement and repetition increase exposure, observability clarifies benefits, similarity between the observer and model exists, perceived risk is low, and benefits are high.

Power: How Can Low Power Decision Makers Be Credible?

Power: How Can Low Power Decision Makers Be Credible?

An important question that power, as control of resources, raises for decision governance is this: How to make sure that specific decision governance is credible when specific individuals whom it assigns roles have different levels of power (occupy different levels in a power hierarchy)?

Goals: How to Improve Alignment to a Team Goal

Goals: How to Improve Alignment to a Team Goal

Given some factors which influence goal selection, what can we do to help a team member select a goal that the team needs to achieve? In other words, how can we align an individual’s goals to the team goals? This is the topic in the rest of this text.

Goals: Factors Influencing Goal Selection

Goals: Factors Influencing Goal Selection

Understanding how individuals choose goals can provide insight into human decision-making and inform strategies for influencing the choice of goals through decision governance.

Goals: Factors That Stabilize and Destabilize Goals

Goals: Factors That Stabilize and Destabilize Goals

Goal stability and change are influenced by a complex interplay of commitment strength, feedback mechanisms, external pressures, cognitive dissonance, and social reinforcement. Understanding these factors allows individuals and organizations to design decision making environments that either reinforce goal persistence or facilitate adaptive goal adjustments when necessary.

Goals: How Goals Form and Change

Goals: How Goals Form and Change

Understanding these mechanisms can help improve decision-making quality, improve leadership effectiveness, and help organizations design better incentive structures to align individual goals with priorities.

Goals: How Goals Shape Decisions

Goals: How Goals Shape Decisions

Goals shape how decisions are made by influencing information processing, risk preferences, decision complexity, strategy adaptation, and trade-offs between short-term and long-term objectives.

Social Hierarchies: How They Form and Change

Social Hierarchies: How They Form and Change

Decision governance can play a critical role in creating, maintaining, and adapting social hierarchies. The design of decision governance systems influences both the stability and adaptability of hierarchies.

Slow & Complex Decision Governance and Its Consequences

Slow & Complex Decision Governance and Its Consequences

A common problem with governance is that rules accumulate over time. They are added and adapted to handle new situations, new behaviors, and, or have a broader and deeper impact. As rules accumulate, and become more interdependent and specialized, complexity of governance increases. What are the consequences?