Research and development into the space of group decision making would benefit from having reliable metrics. While a metric for decision quality would be lovely, that will be exceedingly hard. Measuring the cost of decisions would be easier and still quite useful, because it allows us to:
Online-only communities and new decision-focused tools (like Discourse Forum, Tally, and Snapshot) provide an opportunity to measure people’s participation in decisions in a more fine-grained and quantitative way. We would like to collaborate in, and perhaps support, a project to develop and test different measures of the individual and aggregate costs of decisions.
How much does it cost to get to a decision?
How do the different facets of cost interact?
How does the cost change with…
What solutions do organizations use to drive down the costs?
…
Duration of time between spotting a decision and resolving it
Number of people involved in a conversation
Work per person (or total work)