Prioritisation: is collective agreement enough to validate a ranking?
Ranking work together seems a reasonable way to allocate limited time. Yet the managerial question is specific: should individual information and rankings be collected before seeking agreement on priorities?
What the literature establishes
Garold Stasser and William Titus (1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) showed in a group decision-making experiment that discussion could favour information already shared by members over information held by just one person. Bringing people together therefore does not guarantee that their knowledge will actually be pooled. For prioritisation, this suggests a risk: ranking work on the basis of what everyone knows rather than everything that matters.
When convergence does not correct error
Jan Lorenz, Heiko Rauhut, Frank Schweitzer and Dirk Helbing (2011, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) studied social influence in quantitative estimation tasks. Access to other people's estimates could reduce the diversity of responses without improving their accuracy, while increasing participants' confidence. This mechanism does not prove that a collective ranking will be poor; it explains why agreement alone cannot establish its quality.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that discussion should be replaced by an average of individual rankings. That would confuse independence of judgement with sound decision-making: a legal obligation, a public health risk or a technical dependency cannot be reduced to a vote. The aim is to preserve distinct information before the discussion, then make explicit the reasons for the chosen order. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not establish
These experiments concern structured decisions and estimates, not the day-to-day management of a portfolio of work in Berne. They establish neither guaranteed time savings nor the universal superiority of individual rankings prepared in advance. In practice, however, counting how many people agree remains insufficient: that measure does not reveal which information was considered or rejected.
A practical check in Berne
Within SHR's « Gestion du temps & priorisation » programme, an exercise suitable for Berne is to ask participants to prepare independently a ranking and one piece of information that could change it: a regulatory deadline in the federal administration, a public health risk, a network dependency in telecommunications or a tolerance requirement in precision manufacturing. Before the collective decision, these contributions are retained, and each distinct item is given a written status: considered, rejected with reasons or requiring verification. Across several prioritisation decisions, measure the proportion of these items actually examined, alongside subsequent changes in ranking caused by information that was available but omitted. This tracks the quality of information pooling without treating convergence of rankings as proof of good time management. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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