Prioritising: does information everyone knows dominate the decision?
Allocating a team’s time often requires bringing together information held by different functions. The management question is specific: how can we prevent a priority from being selected because everyone already knows its supporting arguments, while a decisive constraint remains with a single specialist?
What the literature establishes
Garold Stasser and William Titus (1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) showed experimentally that group discussions can favour information initially shared by members over information held by just one person. When unshared information is needed to identify the best option, discussion therefore does not guarantee that it will be pooled. For prioritisation, this suggests a risk: confusing collective familiarity with a case and the strength of its justification.
Why some information circulates more readily
Garold Stasser and William Titus (1987, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) examined how information load and the proportion of shared information influence the dissemination of unshared information. The mechanism involves a simple asymmetry: information known to several people has several opportunities to enter the discussion. Repetition of an argument therefore does not necessarily provide independent confirmation of its importance.
The tempting but premature conclusion
One might conclude that information supplied by just one person should always take precedence. That would replace a bias with an unsupported rule: uncommon information may be inaccurate, outdated or irrelevant to the decision. The aim is to make it available for scrutiny before deciding, then assess its relevance and reliability. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings cannot promise
These experiments involve controlled group decision tasks, not the everyday allocation of time in precision industries. They do not establish that collecting information beforehand will shorten lead times or automatically improve priority rankings. A prioritisation board can still be incomplete if each function records a preference without stating the facts behind it.
A practical check in Neuchâtel
In a Neuchâtel team working in microtechnology, watchmaking or precision microelectronics, SHR’s “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme could incorporate a test: before priorities are set, each function separately records a documented constraint that could change the order of work. Over a trial period defined in advance, measure the proportion of these constraints explicitly examined before the decision, retaining the reasons for accepting or dismissing them. Also record priority changes prompted by a constraint discovered afterwards. Comparison with the preceding period would provide useful evidence, without establishing that the procedure alone caused any improvement. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Neuchâtel in the canton of Neuchâtel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Neuchâtel
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