In t r odu ct ion : Th e Pow er of In clu sive Decision M ak in g
More headlines appear every day about the lack of workforce
diversity in even the world?s most successful companies.
Despite substantial investments of time and money, change isslow. A focus on diversity often means a focus on hiring, and it
takes a long time to turn the tide for companies with thousandsof employees. But a focus on inclusion and diversity changes
the conversation. By expanding the frame, inclusion highlights
an immediate opportunity to activate the decision-making
power of the diversity already present in high-performing
global workforces.
Our research shows inclusive decision making drives better
company performance and gives a decisive competitive
advantage. Inclusive decision making leads to better businessdecisions up to 87 percent of the time. Business teams drive
decision making twice as fast with half the meetings. Decisionoutcomes can improve by 60 percent.
Companies can put inclusive decision making into practice bysystematically measuring and improving key metrics focused on
the who, how and what of decision-making processes at every
level of management:
Th e Wh o: Include diverse people throughout thedecision-making process to improve business decision
results.
Th e How : Systematize the way people frame up, collaborate
on and commit to business decisions to improve
decision-making efficiency.

We've long said
diversity andinclusion must go
hand-in-hand todrive results.
Cloverpop's
research bolsters
the case that
employers whobuild diverse andinclusive teams see
the best outcomes.
Laura Sherbin,
Director of Research,Center for TalentInnovation

Th e Wh at : Transparently communicate what is decided andmeasure what happens as decisions are made to accelerate
decision-making improvements.
Inclusive decision making also offers concrete help to address
the broader challenges of diversity. Managing diversity requires

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change at all levels of business and society. Cultural changes
take generations. Changing the diversity of a large employee
base is the work of many years. But inclusive decision making
can drive meaningful change in months because it focuses on
the inclusion of people already employed by organizations,using consistent processes combined with transparent metrics
to do this systematically.
It?s time to start using inclusion and diversity to improvebusiness performance via the decision-making process.
Inclusive decision making activates diversity to improve
innovation, engagement, and performance across theenterprise. It gives outstanding companies the opportunity tomake quantum leaps ahead of their competition. This white
paper shows how.

Th e Com pet it ive Race For Bet t er Bu sin ess Decision s

A Bain & Co.
st udy found t hat
decision m aking
is 95 percent
correlat ed wit hcom pany
perform ance.

Inclusive decision making focuses on businessdecisions. These are decisions that involve
discussions with other people before adecision is made and require other people to
make changes and help successfully executethe decisions afterward. Typical businessdecisions include hiring and staffing, projectplanning and prioritization, policy changes,
resource allocations, proposals and other suchtraditional management responsibilities.
Business decisions are never trivial. They aresometimes strategic and may be difficult toundo. They are always important to more than
one person. And together they have a huge,
direct impact on how a company performs.
Because business decisions have consequences that impact
other people, they involve many meetings, side-conversations
and email threads with a select group of people over the courseof several weeks. The decision makers reach out to theseNo act ivit y ism ore im por t ant
t han decision
m aking.
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people for advice and information, and also to build support
and commitment after making a final decision. All this meansthat business decisions are a lot of work -- managers andexecutives can usually make only 1 to 2
business decisions each week and juggle only
5 to 10 ongoing business decisions at any one
time.
Executives at high performing companies
understand that better business decision
making confers a critical competitive
advantage. And the very best companies are
only becoming more competitive. An
astounding 93 percent of executives at themost decisive companies believe further
decision-making improvement is important,and 76 percent believe their company is
receptive to changes required to make that
happen. By comparison, only 31 percent ofexecutives at the least decisive companies
believe it is important to make improvements, and only 12
percent are receptive to change.
Today, companies support business decision making withsophisticated collaboration technology that manages meetingsand messages, and business analytics tools that provide thebasis for data-driven judgments. But even in very highperforming organizations, the actual decision-making process is
usually haphazard. Companies do not communicate decisions
consistently and measure the outcomes of decisions directly.
They do not keep records of who was involved in a given
decision, what exactly they decided, why certain choices wereselected or ruled out, what outcomes they expected and what
happened after putting the decision in place. As a result, no
performance metrics are tracked to improve the effectivenessof the decision-making process itself.

An ast ounding
93 percent ofexecut ives att he highest
perform ing
com panies
believe furt her
decision-m aking
im provem ent is
im port ant .

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Competitive companies can?t afford to be left behind in the race
to improve decision making.

Dat a-Dr iven In sigh t s Abou t Diver sit y An d
Decision -M ak in g
Research has long associated diversity with better decision
making and higher business performance (see Resources). But
up until now, the research has been based on either academic
studies of students in artificial environments or large economic
studies that identify correlations without identifying the causes.
This research in this white paper is different.
Cloverpop is a cloud-based platform to communicate, measureand manage decision making across the enterprise. We use ascientific approach to drive innovation and improve businessdecisions. Thanks to the support of our pioneering early
customers, we amassed enough data to analyze the businessdecision-making process in detail. That gives us a unique view
into how real teams make real business decisions, across awide range of companies.

The m orecreat ive t het eam , t he bet t er
t he decision.
Team s t hat
ident ify 7 orm ore choices
m ake bet t er
decisions
92 percent oft he t im e.

And from that perspective, one insight stands
out: diversity drives better businessperformance because diverse teams drive
better decision making.

Team s + Diver sit y = Bet t er Decision s
On average, teams make better businessdecisions than individuals about 66 percent of
the time. Teams of people are better at
identifying new and better choices that were
not previously considered, resulting in a better
decision. They bring more perspectives,
experience, and information, which helps toreduce cognitive biases and improves
accountability.

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But not all teams are created equal. We wereable to measure the decision making of teams
based on the gender, age range andgeographic location of team members, and theresults are remarkable. The top line
observation is this: as the diversity of teams
increases so does the chance of making better
decisions. In fact, the most diverse teams
made better decisions 87 percent of the time
(p=0.0002). Inclusive decision making delivers
better decisions, with high statisticalconfidence (see Appendix).
It is critical to understand that thedecision-making teams studied in this research
all used the Cloverpop platform to frame theirdecisions, weigh in with feedback, record
details of the final decisions and track results compared to
expectations. Because of this, decision team participants were
not just ?sitting in the room? when a decision was made -- theirperspectives were purposefully recorded and actively includedin the decision-making process.

Inclusive decision making is not just about having diverse
perspectives present in a team. It?s about whether thedecision-making process actively incorporates those views. That
applies to both the up front process of framing and making
decisions, and how teams then put decisions into operation.

Unfortunately, many companies currently find themselves
operating in the worst of both worlds.

While it is hard tochange how ourbrains are wired,it?s possible tochange thecontext ofdecisions byarchitecting
decision-making
teams for morediverseperspectives.
Francesca Gino,
Harvard Business School

Over com in g Th e Oper at ion al Fr ict ion of Diver sit y

While inclusive decision making delivers better decisions, we
also found that diverse teams are more likely to encounter
operational friction when executing decisions after they arewww.cloverpop.com

made. This is consistent with previous research (see Resources).
In simple terms, homogeneous teams make worse decisions,and diverse teams struggle to put their decisions into action.

We looked at how likely different team combinations were toboth make a better decision up front and also deliver
operational results that meet or exceeded expectations
afterward. It is relatively common for
low-diversity companies to have all-maleteams (i.e. lower decision quality) makedecisions and then have diverse organizations(i.e. higher operational friction) execute them.
We found that this worse-of-both-worlds
combination is woefully ineffective -- only 28
percent of such decisions were both better
upfront and also delivered results that met or
exceeded expectations, performing 15 percent
worse than average.

By comparison, decisions that were both madeand executed by gender diverse teams
performed 6 percent better than average.
Adding age diversity increased performance to
45 percent better than average, and adding
geographic diversity boosted performance anincredible 60 percent above average. In other words, highly
diverse teams were twice as likely to both make better choices
and also deliver results that met or exceeded expectations.

Inclusive decision making not only drives better decisions but
also overcomes the increased operational friction of diversity
by including wider perspectives every step of the way.
Companies have a tremendous opportunity to activate diversity
in their existing workforce to improve business performance.
We found that only 62 percent of business decision making
includes direct participation by a mix of both men and womenHighly diverset eam s were t wice
as likely t o m ake
bet t er choices
and m eet or
exceedexpect at ions.

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in an average company. Thus, the average company has theopportunity to improve their rate of inclusive decision making
by 1.6 times.

The payoff is even larger for companies likethose in the technology industry with below
average diversity in their employee base.
Gender diverse teams make less than half ofthe decisions in these companies today, whichmeans they have the opportunity to more thandouble their rate of inclusive decision making.

Pull quot e t ext .

All global enterprises, even the least diverse
companies, already employ thousands of men
and women with a wide range of ages across a
broad set of geographies. Inclusive decision
making points the way for companies toactivate the power of their existing diversity
now.
The opportunity is there. It?s time to act.

Th r ee Pr act ical Hack s For In clu sive Decision M ak in g

We can make concrete statements about what goes into
inclusive decision making, and what holds it back, because the
Cloverpop enterprise decision-making platform gathers thedata required for clear insight. Our recommendations arepragmatic, effective and fast to implement. So we don?t callthem strategies or best practices. In a modern can-doentrepreneurial spirit, we call them hacks.

h ack [hak]verb: t o im provein a clever way
noun: a t ip, t rickor efficientm et hodTh e Team Hack : In clu sive Team s M ak e Bet t er Decision s
To build better decision-making teams, purposefully include
diverse people in the decision-making process. Gender diverse
teams make better business decisions 25% of the time, andwww.cloverpop.com

including age and geographic diversity increases that
advantage to 50%. Our research shows that the benefits ofinclusive decision making happen as soon as you include justone woman and one man, one older and one younger person,
or someone from another geography.
This hack is easy to understand, but it can be hard to do for adiverse and geographically distributed group of people.
Inclusive decision making doesn?t happen just because diverse
people are listed on org charts, added to email threads andchat channels or sitting in rooms during meetings. To make thiswork, each person has to be comfortable actively weighing inon decisions, and able to do it easily. Time zones, power
dynamics, cultural challenges and personality differences can
all get in the way.

The UK Inst it ut e
for Em ploym ent
St udies foundt hat decision
m aking underlies
50 percent ofem ployee
engagem ent .

Cloverpop turns this from a massive headache to a simple hackby creating a secure platform where people can quickly andeasily weigh in on decisions with confidence.

Here?s how it works. A decision maker frames a decision andinvites participants to weigh in. They are quickly guided
through an easy-to-use decision flow to assess existing choices,add new ideas and review feedback from others. The
experience is based on behavioral science and specificallywww.cloverpop.com

designed to increase clarity of thought and the quality of
feedback. This process takes a few minutes and happens on
their own time, without having to wait for the next meeting. The
decision maker gets an automatic summary of the group?s
perspective, highlighting the best choices and any missing
information.
Inclusive decision making is so effective that most of the time,
that?s all that?s needed, even for tough decisions. The decision isclear. No meeting re-runs, delays, and dead-ends. No burningand forking email threads. Getting the right people involved is
as easy as adding names to an invite.
Th e Ch eck list Hack : Seven Sim ple St eps St op M ist ak es An d
Speed Up Decision s
Checklists are boring. So why do fighter pilots and brain
surgeons use them? Because they work, very well, every time.
Even the most highly trained people make mistakes. Checklists
stop stupid mistakes from happening.
Our previous research published in the Harvard Business
Review detailed a seven step checklist to improve the quality of
every business decision:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

Include a diverse team of three or more people.
List the business goals impacted by the decision.
List at least four realistic choices.
Identify any critical missing information.
Explain the expected future impact of the decision.
Record and communicate the decision in writing.
Follow up to assess how well results meet expectations.

This research aligns
with behavioral
economics theory,
which has clear
implications forresults-focusedcompanies.
Business strategy
should revolvearound adecision-making
process.
David Daniels,
Stanford University

By following a checklist to reduce mistakes, teams not only
make better decisions, but they also make decisions faster withless wasted effort. Amazingly, teams that check off these steps
make decisions at least twice as fast with ½ as many meetings.

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Unfortunately, 98 percent of decision-making teams skip thesesteps, usually because it?s too hard and they?re too busy.
Calendars stay clogged, decisions are delayed, and mistakes get
made. Oh, the irony.
Cloverpop solves this by making the checklist invisible. The
platform uses design and technology to simplify thedecision-making process, tracking the checklist in the
background so teams don?t have to. Decision makers can easily
dial the team effort up or down depending on the decision.
Companies can create templates for frequent decisions. And it
all happens automatically.

Unfort unat ely,
98 percent ofdecision-m aking
t eam s skip t hesest eps.
Calendars st ay
clogged,decisions aredelayed, andm ist akes getm ade.
Oh, t he irony.
As a result, every decision checks the boxes. Teams include theright people and make fewer mistakes. Decisions happen
faster. Meetings disappear.
Th e Tr an spar en cy Hack : Sh in in g A Ligh t On Decision
M et r ics Acceler at es Ch an ge
To make inclusive decision making happen, just get the rightpeople doing the right things. That?s easy to say. And Cloverpop
makes it easier to do. But changing how people do anything,including how they make decisions, is still hard.

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In this battle, data is your ally, and transparency is the winning
strategy. This has to happen at three levels.
1. Sh ar e t h is r esear ch . These data-driven insights are aclear call to arms. If your company doesn?t act, yourcompetitors will. And most likely, the very bestcompanies will act first.
2. Sh ar e you r decision s. Transparency starts at the microlevel by setting examples for others to follow.
Communicating the who, why and what of every decision
made sets the expectation that decision making is a
critical process and brings it out of the shadows.
3. Sh ar e t h e m et r ics. Transparency transforms at themacro level by sparking questions that lead to action.
What gets measured gets managed, but only if everyone
on the team can see it. If you report the level of inclusive
decision making out to the company, it will improve.
Doing this can improve inclusive decision making rates by 40%
in six months. When people see the data, they?re not only moreaware, they also get curious about what?s happening andmotivated to make it better. This spotlights the problem for
managers and executives, who are responsible for overall teamperformance and trained to manage to the numbers. And
remember, business people are competitive. Keeping scorechanges the game.

In t his bat t le,dat a is your ally,
and t ransparency
is t he winning
st rat egy.

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Ou r In clu sive Decision -M ak in g St or y
Inclusive decision making is a simple idea -- if you measure,manage and improve who is involved and how businessdecisions are made, you can improve how well your businessperforms.
Our own experience shows just how profound the results canbe. We were shocked when we looked at our company?s
inclusive decision making as part of this research.

At the time, 37 percent of our employees were women,
including several executives. We valued diversity and hadoutstanding decision-making practices, so we expected to beamazing when it came to inclusive decision
making. Instead, we found that only 56 percent
of our decisions included women. In otherwords, we were decision software experts andbelow average decision makers.

The num bers ont he scoreboard
showed we were
losing.

The numbers on the scoreboard showed wewere losing. But not for long.
We audited our decisions and found manyreasons this was happening. A female
manager on an interview team removed
herself from engineer hiring decisions because
she thought she wasn?t technical enough. Our
CEO neglected to involve the CFO in a few
financial decisions because her husband was
sick. We had no senior female engineers, so agroup of men made many technical decisions. But the biggest
reason was that we were overconfident and unaware of the
problem.

So we fixed t heproblem .

So we fixed the problem. Because we were already tracking all
our decisions using the Cloverpop platform, it was easy to see

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who was involved and make sure each team was as diverse as
possible. We prioritized hiring women on the engineering team,and now over 45 percent of our overall employees are women.
And within six months, we?d increased our inclusive decision
making rate to 92 percent, way above average, and well on our
way to our goal of 100 percent.
The improvement went beyond just those numbers. Ourrevenue grew. Innovation accelerated. Our market
understanding improved. And strikingly, our engineering
productivity improved by 133 percent per person even as wegrew the size of the team substantially, blowing away the time
honored theory of the ?mythical man-month? which says thatper person productivity tends to decrease as team size
increases. Our inclusive decision making is way up, and ourcompany performance is, too.
Learn more about how we can help your company put inclusive
decision making into practice at www.cloverpop.com.

The revolution inwork won't comefrom automation,
but rather power ofbehavioral data inprofessionalsettings. Cloverpop
is one of the leading
voices in this space;
and this study
proves it.
Laura I. Gómez,Atipica CEO,Founding member ofProject Include

APPENDIX - Resear ch Su m m ar yThis decision study was based on 566 real business decisions
made by 184 business teams in a wide variety of companies
from July 2015 through June 2017. The decisions were pulledfrom aggregate anonymized data in the Cloverpop
decision-making platform, allowing analysis of an average of
350 data points for each decision. These were typicalmanagement and executive decisions about hiring and staffing,project planning and prioritization, policy changes, resource
allocations, customer proposals and similar management
responsibilities.

The study was able to measure when teams made better
decisions by tracking how often the decision maker changed
their mind based on the input of the team. This is presumed to
be a better decision since the Cloverpop process ensures thatdecisions are well framed with clear goals, adequate
information and multiple alternatives to avoid groupthink.
Decision makers changed their minds based on team feedback
for 66 percent of decisions overall -- a strong argument for
involving teams of people when making decisions. The impact
of different team compositions was compared to this average.
There were not enough all-female teams in the sample to draw
statistical conclusions about their performance.

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This table summarizes key results:% Bet t er
Decision sNp-valu e

All-Male

58%

95

0.07

Overall

66%

566

-

20+ Year Age Range

72%

127

0.13

2+ Office Locations

72%

240

0.04

Gender Diverse*

73%

217

0.05

Geographically Diverse* *

75%

117

0.04

Gender Diverse, 2+ Locations

79%

173

0.0005

Gender Diverse, 20+ Yr Age Range

80%

94

0.005

Gender, Geographically Diverse

87%

69

0.0002

Team Com posit ion* Gender was self-reported and not available for all decisionparticipants. To be marked as ?gender diverse?a team had toinclude at least one male and one female.
* * Geographic diversity was measured using geographic location.
To be marked as ?geographically diverse?a team had to include
members from at least 2 different continents.

Decision results were measured 2-3 months after the fact byasking the decision maker to review the decision expectations
written at the time the decision was made and compare those
expectations to the actual results. Overall, about half ofdecisions results met or exceeded expectations. This analysis
uncovered an interesting bias -- controlling for teamcomposition and comparing how male and female decision
makers rated their results, we found that male decision makers
inflated their decisions results by 7 percent compared tofemales. Also, after controlling for other factors, the study
found that mixed gender teams are 13 percent more likely tomiss expectations when following through on decisions
compared to all-male teams.

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Decision inclusion was confirmed using a separate market
research survey of 304 managers and executives, comprised of
49 percent companies with 100 to 999 employees and 51
percent companies with more than 1000 employees. While theaverage organization included a mix of genders in 62 percent ofdecisions, decision diversity and inclusion varied significantly
based on the percentage of female employees in theworkplace. Mostly female organizations were 44 percent more
likely to include both men and women in decision making (69percent of decisions) compared to mostly male organizations(48 percent of decisions):

Decision s M ade
By Gen der Diver seTeam sLess Th an
30% Fem ale

30% t o 70%
Fem aleM or e Th an
70% Fem ale

48%

63%

69%

Additional interesting findings:
On average, a team of men and woman working across 2
continents with an age range of 20 years between the youngest
and oldest members is 30 percent more likely to come up witha better choice than a similar group of just men.
The wider the range of ages involved in a decision, the betterthe decision making. Teams with an age range of less than 10
years made better decisions 67 percent of the time, while thosewith an age range greater than 25 years did so 79 percent of
the time.
While the range of ages had a significant impact, the averageage of the team did not affect the quality of decision making.
There was no difference between teams with an mean age lessthan 35 and those greater than 45.
The more functional departments involved in the decision, thebetter the decision making. Teams with only one functional
area made better decisions 44 percent of the time, while teams
with 3 or more functions did so 71 percent of the time.

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Ot h er Resou r ces
Checklists to improve decision making:hbr.org/2016/03/a-checklist-for-making-faster-better-decisions
Correcting decision-making biases:
hbr.org/2015/05/leaders-as-decision-architects
Employee engagement and decision making:www.employment-studies.co.uk/report-summaries/
report-summary-drivers-employee-engagement
How inclusion activates the value of diversity:
hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation
The competitive advantage of diversity:www.morganstanley.com/pub/content/msdotcom/en/blog/
women/gender-diversity-work/
The creativity and productivity benefits of diversity:
www.scientificamerican.com/article/
how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/
The financial benefits of diversity:www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/
our-insights/why-diversity-matters
The importance of decision making to business performance:
hbr.org/2010/06/the-decision-driven-organization
The operational friction of diverse teams:
hbr.org/2017/06/does-diversity-actually-increase-creativity

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