General Manager
The team exercise I would like to see more often is one where the best information is not in the opening presentation. Someone in the room has a fact that changes the decision, but the group has to discover that it exists and understand why it matters.
That is a more useful challenge than asking several people to agree with a polished recommendation. It creates observable work: asking, listening, distinguishing assumptions from evidence and revising a view without treating revision as weakness.
A team decision exercise should reveal whether relevant information changes the decision, not simply whether everyone speaks. More airtime is not automatically better reasoning, and agreement is not automatically a sound outcome.
Consider an illustrative operations exercise. The group must choose how to handle a delayed service rollout. One participant knows the customer's critical deadline. Another knows a capacity constraint. A third has information about a dependency that changes which workaround is feasible.
Each participant should know that other roles may hold relevant information. The purpose is to practise drawing it together, not to punish people for failing to guess an arbitrary secret. Give the group a clear objective and enough time to exchange information meaningfully.
Keep the underlying facts coherent. If two records conflict, make the conflict intentional and provide a legitimate way to investigate it. A confusing authoring error is not a realistic test of ambiguity.
I would avoid naming an obvious hero or assigning the most important fact to the most senior role every time. The exercise should make expertise discoverable through the work, rather than build the answer into status.
Ask participants to note an initial preference and its assumptions before discussion. After they decide, ask them to record which information changed or confirmed their position. A changed mind can be a useful result when the evidence justifies it.
Do not turn the initial note into an individual ranking. It is a way to understand the decision process. Someone may reasonably favour a different option when they have only part of the information.
The facilitator can then trace a small number of moments: a question that surfaced a constraint, a challenge that exposed an assumption, or a fact that was mentioned but never integrated into the plan.
Mesmer-Magnus and DeChurch's 2009 meta-analysis covered 72 independent studies, including 4,795 groups. It found a positive relationship between information sharing and team performance, with important differences by task and how sharing was defined. That supports attention to the process; it does not validate this exercise or establish an Altaius effect. [1]
The distinction between sharing and using information is important in practice. A team can hear a capacity warning, acknowledge it politely and still approve a plan that assumes the capacity exists.
For each fact that could change the choice, I would record:
These are proposed observation questions, not a psychometric scale. Avoid inferring a fixed personality trait from a single exercise. A participant may be quiet because the task is poorly designed, the information is inaccessible or the group never gives them a relevant opening.
In the next attempt, change which role has the critical constraint, or alter a dependency so that the earlier answer no longer works. Keep the intended skill stable while varying the case.
This fits Practice-Native Learning because the team has to act on a realistic decision and can inspect the consequences of its process. The immediate evidence concerns the exercise. To evaluate workplace transfer, follow a later real decision with appropriate consent, access and a proportionate review.
The question I would leave with a sponsor is specific: can your team explain which information changed its last important decision? If it cannot, that is a useful place to begin designing the practice.
Practice-Native Learning: the Altaius methodology
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