Facilitating collaborative design decisions

If we want to make sustainable design decisions for our architecture that are embraced by everyone, the most effective way is to do this collaboratively. Everyone can feel a part of the decision and can potentially give the input they have. The group is aligned and knows what is to be expected onward.

On paper, this sounds great, but in reality, we know it is hard to do because we need to deal with all sorts of group dynamics. Dynamics like cultural differences, conflicts of opinions, cognitive biases, and polarities that the group is part of. These dynamics cause people to stop sharing what they want, which ends up in resistance behaviour from sarcastic jokes, to stopped communication or leaving the session. No wonder a lot of people resort to a more autocratic form of decision-making, where the architect analyzes and makes the decision. So how can we make collaborative decision decisions better?

Join Gien, Evelyn and Kenny in this hands-on workshop where we explore different models of decision-making that can help facilitate collaborative design decisions. We will dive into a variety of facilitation techniques such as:

• Working with climate reports to trigger hidden group conflicts
• Visualising trade-offs of different models with the pro-con-fix list
• Taking group decisions with full buy in with Deep Democracy