How US public service executives make decisions
Senior government executives often depend on groups of advisors to help them overcome the challenges of decisionmaking. But this raises the risk of “groupthink.” In a study of executives in the US federal government, Steven Kelman, Ronald Sanders, and Gayatri Pandit find that the dominant technique for avoiding technique is vigilant decisionmaking, which involves active solicitation of dissenting views and close scrutiny of alternatives. But successful executives are also found to have a bias for action. “What distinguishes outstanding executives,” the authors find, “is not vigiliance but decisiveness.” Read the article.
