Leadership retreats and decision-making
What activities improve team decision-making?
For Managers, project teams, leadership groups, and facilitators
- Last updated
- Reading goal
- Choose activities that reveal and practice decision processes
Planning answer
Activities improve team decision-making when they make the process observable: people form an initial view, share different information, compare criteria, make one decision, and reflect on how it changed. Useful formats include individual-then-team ranking, hidden-information cases, premortems, scenario prioritization, decision journals, and red-team review. The activity should practice a specific behavior and end with a debrief; a clever puzzle or high score alone is not evidence of better decisions.
Decisions to settle
- Capture independent views before open discussion.
- Give different participants information the group must combine.
- Require decision criteria and reasons, not only a vote.
- Debrief how information and influence moved through the group.
Which decision-making activities are most useful?
| Activity | Behavior practiced | Simple format |
|---|---|---|
| Individual-then-team ranking | Independent judgment and revision | Rank alone, agree one team order, compare reasons |
| Hidden-information case | Information pooling | Distribute different facts, then require one explanation |
| Premortem | Risk identification | Assume the plan failed and list plausible causes independently |
| Scenario prioritization | Tradeoffs under constraints | Choose actions with limited time or resources |
| Decision journal | Calibration and learning | Record choice, assumptions, confidence, and review date |
| Red-team review | Constructive challenge | Assign a group to test assumptions and failure modes |
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Group-decision research shows why independent input matters: discussion does not automatically pool all the information held by members, and early consensus can hide unique evidence. An individual-first phase gives each participant a reasoned starting point before social influence increases.Royal Society Open Science
Try it: choose the first three workshop improvements
Purpose: notice how criteria and reasons change an individual judgment. Plan 12 minutes for groups of 3–5. Materials: this prompt, paper or a shared document, and a timer. This is an original illustrative case with no universal answer key.
Rank independently · 2 minutes
Each person writes all five actions in order and one reason for their top choice. Do not discuss yet.
Hear every view · 3 minutes
Take turns sharing the top choice and its reason. Ask questions before arguing for an order.
Agree one order · 4 minutes
Choose two decision criteria, then agree the team's five-action order. If agreement is incomplete, record the disagreement rather than calling a majority vote consensus.
Compare and debrief · 3 minutes
Compare initial and team rankings. Ask: Which criterion changed your view? Which assumption stayed untested? What would you ask the workshop organizer next?
Expected output: individual rankings and one team order, two criteria, one unresolved assumption and any remaining disagreement. Judge the clarity of reasoning, not whether the team found a supposed correct ranking.
Try it: make a handover decision with incomplete information
Purpose: practice inviting information before converging. Plan 15 minutes for groups of 3–5. Materials: three separate slips containing the facts below, paper and a timer. The facilitator reads the common prompt aloud and gives each slip to a different person; with four or five people, the remaining members act as questioner and recorder. This fictional case is illustrative, not a model workplace policy.
- Slip A — The receiving team has two people available from 16:00. Neither has used the new registration template. A 15-minute walkthrough is possible at 15:30.
- Slip B — The current team can stay until 17:00. Six registrations still need confirmation; three attendees have asked for joining instructions by 16:30.
- Slip C — The joining link is ready, but the new template contains an old room location. One person can correct and check it in 10 minutes. The organizer is reachable until 15:45.
Read and decide privately · 2 minutes
Read your own slip and write an initial recommendation. Questioner and recorder note what they need to know from the common prompt.
Pool the facts · 4 minutes
Invite every person to share their information aloud or in writing. Separate facts from assumptions; do not require anyone to memorize a slip.
Make the handover plan · 5 minutes
Choose proceed, delay or limited handover. Write the next three actions, a responsible role and deadline for each, plus one check that could change the plan.
Debrief · 4 minutes
Ask which fact changed the decision, what arrived late, and how the team checked that the handover had an owner. If everyone saw all slips early, discuss information use rather than claiming a hidden-information effect.
Expected output: a handover decision, three actions with owners and deadlines, and a remaining uncertainty. Compare the reasoning before and after information sharing; do not score participants or infer real operational readiness.
Try it: find risks before a small pilot
Purpose: practice surfacing concerns without asking someone to defend a failed project. Plan 12 minutes for groups of 3–5. Materials: the prompt, paper or an accessible shared document, and a timer. Use this invented pilot rather than a sensitive real project.
Generate reasons independently · 2 minutes
Each person writes two plausible reasons for the disappointing result. These are hypotheses, not facts or accusations.
Share without defending · 3 minutes
Hear every reason, cluster overlaps, and retain a minority concern. Allow written contributions.
Choose two preventive actions · 4 minutes
Pick two risks the team can influence. For each, write a low-cost preventive action, a responsible role and an observable early warning.
Debrief · 3 minutes
Ask: What concern might ordinary planning have missed? Which risk is only an assumption? What evidence would make you change the plan?
Expected output: two risk/action/owner/warning records and one question to investigate. This exercise explores possible failure; it does not estimate probabilities or prove the pilot will succeed.
How do you facilitate the practice?
Name one behavior
Choose information-sharing, criteria, dissent, escalation, prioritization, or revision. Do not try to fix every aspect of decisions in one activity.
Give everyone thinking time
Ask for notes, a preliminary choice, or a confidence estimate before the first person speaks.
Require an explicit team output
The group should state the decision, criteria, important assumptions, dissent, and what new information would change the choice.
Introduce a useful change
Add one constraint or new fact and observe whether the group revisits its criteria or merely defends the first answer.
Debrief the mechanism
Ask when useful information entered, whose view changed, what remained unspoken, and which practice should transfer to real meetings.
A controlled meta-analysis of teamwork training found positive effects on teamwork and performance across multiple intervention methods. Its findings support deliberate practice and reflection, but they do not show that one activity permanently changes a team or that a game score predicts workplace outcomes.PLOS ONE
How can you tell whether the activity helped?
- Participants can name the decision criteria before debating options.
- Unique information is invited and summarized before convergence.
- The team records assumptions and identifies what would change its mind.
- Dissent is acknowledged in the decision record rather than erased.
- A later real meeting uses the same practice without facilitator prompting.
Use the result to examine process, not people
Decision Challenge asks each person to rank first, then asks the group to negotiate one team ranking. The reveal gives the facilitator a concrete way to discuss revision, influence, and reasoning.
The score compares answers inside the scenario. Use it to discuss the decision process, never to rate intelligence, leadership potential, or team effectiveness.
Sources and limits
The cited research supports deliberate teamwork practice, not diagnosis of a particular team. We rechecked Ocean Survival and the scoring explanation on August 29, 2026.
- Making Better Decisions in GroupsRoyal Society Open Science, 2017. Research synthesis on independent judgment, information pooling, and group decision processes.
- The Effectiveness of Teamwork Training on Teamwork Behaviors and Team PerformancePLOS ONE, 2017. A systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled teamwork interventions across varied settings.