An experiment on dyadic decision accuracy: Joint annotations as interface for decision making
Martin J. Eppler, Roland Pfister, Sebastian Kernbach · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2017
Management teams frequently make important decisions based on the graphic representation of quantitative evidence or projections (i.e., bar, area, or line charts). The extensive use of such charts creates a dual challenge: establishing a collaborative atmosphere to make sense of the evidence, while still staying close to the actual data. One way to support such decision and communication processes is to give managers the opportunity to jointly annotate the presented charts. The purpose of this paper is to show–based on experiments with students and real-life managers–that such annotation dramatically improves the decision accuracy of managers. To assess the impact of visual annotations on the decision accuracy of dyadic groups, we conducted a case-based experimental study with 264 subjects. The participants were divided into two groups, those working with visual annotations and those working without joint annotations, and were then organized into teams of two. Each pair of participants had to resolve a project prioritization task based on quantitative evidence and projections. The results indicate that joint sketching and annotating quantitative charts significantly increased the accuracy of decisions made in dyadic discussions (compared to simply taking notes or writing down calculations). The findings of this study encourage managers to use joint visual annotations and to avoid deliberations based only on one-way presentations. Instead of using individual notes and ephemeral conversations, they should gather around large-scale data posters and jointly annotate them to clarify the interpretations and consequences of the presented evidence. The originality of this research lies in the fact that it is the first study to show that annotating charts significantly improves the accuracy of decisions made in dyadic groups. Its value consists of giving managers a simple way to improve evidence-based, joint decision-making.