Guidelines for the Decision-Making Framework
Introduction:
This framework is designed to help facilitate group decisions that involve voting. It will help you and your team think through some important factors that go into good decision-making and identify which voting method to use. It is useful for teams of two or more people.
Ideally, one or two people familiar with the overall project and team (e.g., the project manager or team lead) should go through this framework. You can hover your cursor over the boxes in the framework to access additional helpful information. Please consider filling out the feedback form once you are done to help us improve this tool over time.
We recommend taking notes on the takeaways from each step of the framework to keep track of different factors that will influence which voting method you choose. Please find the companion note-taking template here.
Explicit Values (Cardinal Information)
| Amount of Information Low (top) | Voting Method | Amount of information needed | Examples |
| Approval voting (Voters choose “Yes” or “No” for each option, and the option with the most “Yes” votes wins.) | Enough information for voters to answer yes or no to each option. | You want to narrow down a list of 100 research topics based on if they meet a certain set of criteria. | |
| Score voting (Voters give each option a score on some objective metric, and the option with the highest score wins.) | Enough information for voters to score each option from 1-5 (less information). Enough information for voters to score each option from 1-100 (more information). | You want to select 5 research topics to pursue this year from a list of 50 options. Your metric is: “How many studies have already been published about this topic?” | |
| Delphi method (Involves multiple anonymous surveys followed by discussions about the aggregate survey results until a decision has been reached.) | Enough information for voters to score each option individually according to an external, objective metric. | You are making a very important decision, you have a long time frame and high team capacity, you would like to reach a consensus, and anonymity among voters is important. |
Relative Values (Ordinal Information)
| Amount of Information Low (top) | Voting Method | Amount of information needed | Examples |
| First past the post (Each voter selects their favorite option, and the option with the most votes wins.) | Enough information for voters to pick a top 1 or 2 from the list of options. | You want to select the target for your next campaign from a list of 10 options based on how they compare to each other on estimated tractability for your organization. | |
| Multivoting (Each voter has a certain number of votes to place on any of the options.) STAR voting | Enough information for voters to pick a top 5 from the list of options. | You want to select 5 research topics to pursue this year based on how motivated research staff are to investigate the topics. | |
| Ranked choice (Voters rank options based on preference, then a winner is chosen based on majority of first preference votes.) | Enough information for voters to rank all of the options from highest to lowest preference. | You want to see which research topics are the most and least preferred by allowing team members to rank them all. | |
| Delphi method (Involves multiple anonymous surveys followed by discussions about the aggregate survey results until a decision has been reached.) | Enough information for voters to score each option individually according to an external, objective metric. | You are making a very important decision, you have a long time frame and high team capacity, you would like to reach a consensus, and anonymity among voters is important. | |
| Quadratic voting (Voters use credits on any option, but the marginal cost of adding an additional credit to an option is higher than adding the last credit.) | Enough information for voters to understand subtle differences between options so they can express a higher preference for a select few options over many others. | You would like to capture more details about voter preferences. You want to allow team members to vote multiple times for the same option if they feel strongly about it. |
Feedback Form
Please fill out this feedback form to share your thoughts about the decision-making framework. Your feedback will be taken into account in future iterations of this framework. Thank you!
