There’s a familiar idea from the world of sport – that winning requires an elite team and not just a team of elite players.
Does something similar apply in the world of decision making?
In many situations, critical decisions are made by small groups. The members of these groups are often “elite” in their own right. For example, in Australia monthly interest rate decisions are made by the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia. This is clearly a “team” of elite decision makers.
However it is not clear that they are an elite team of decision makers. For current purposes, I define an elite decision team as a small decision group conforming to all or at least most of the following principles:
- The team operates according to rigorously thought-through decision making practices. Wherever possible these practices should be strongly evidence-based.
- The team has been trained to operate as a team using these practices. Members have well-defined and well-understood roles.
- Members have been rigorously trained as decision makers (and not just as, say, economists).
- The team, and members individually, are rigorously evaluated for their decision making performance.
- There is a program of continuous improvement.
Note also that the team should be a decision making team, i.e. one that makes decisions (commitments to courses of action) rather than judgements of some other kind such as predictions.
There are many types of teams which do operate according to analogs of these principles – for example elite sporting teams, as mentioned, and small military teams such as bomb disposal squads. These teams’ operations involve decision making, but they are not primarily decision making teams.
I doubt the Board of the RBA is an elite decision team in this sense, but would be relieved to find out I was wrong.
More generally, I am currently looking for good examples of elite decision teams. Any suggestions are most welcome.
Alternatively, if you think this idea of an elite decision team is somehow misconceived, that would be interesting too.
Tim van Gelder 
As you know, I am one who objects to any conflation of ‘critical thinking’ with ‘decision making’, ‘problem solving’ or any other higher order thinking process.
Why mention that here? Because while the idea of an elite decision-making team makes a lot of sense, I do not ever recall seeing anyone call for an elite critical-thinking team. This difference suggests to me that while decision- making can be seen as either the activity of an individual or a group,
that is not the case with critical thinking.
What about “Red Teams”? F.e. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-guide-to-red-teaming
To best of my knowledge, red teams are teams of experts, not decision makers, generally not elite, and not elite teams. But for all that, they may have their uses.