ELEMENTS OF THE SPAN TECHNIQUE FOR MAKING GROUP DECISIONS.

This article presents elements of a technique used for making group decisions. Within large organizations, managers or administrators, especially those in middle positions of power, daily make decisions that reflect the organizational norms and, in doing so, may impede the creative thrust within themselves and their personnel. With these contexts in view, and with the objective of promoting sound, liberating, and widely shared decisions, this paper will present a method for gathering individual judgments and converting them into group decisions, together with relevant methods to be used for comparative study. The method goes by the acrostic name Successive Proportional Additive Numeration,which also serves as a mnemonic for its iterative calculation process. Power concentrations, such as these, occur for many reasons including nonparticipation in voting, indirect appointments, long tenure in office, and close similarity between the platforms of opposing candidates. Some effects of concentrated power, however, are not salutary.