All Important Voices Matter: Purposeful Diversifications of Pools of Participants in Open Decision Makings Through Technology

We embark on articulating an emerging IT-enabled managerial capability: purposeful diversifications of pool of participants in the open decision-making contexts. Drawing on an analysis of 45 in-depth interviews with experienced open decision orchestrators and using the NAF lens, our study uncovers that indeed different decisions might have varying diversity requirements. We find an array of several concrete ways in which decision orchestrators use technology purposefully and effortfully strive to include diverse participants decision-making pools to improve inclusive decision outcomes. Particularly, we showcase that understanding and achieving meaningful diversity in an open decision is a multi-need endeavour, which multiple affordances, leveraging different features of different technologies, are relevant. Moreover, we surprisingly found that technology use for understanding diversity requirement is limited in practise, compared to use technology for achieving diversity in open decision contexts. We discuss the implications for future research and practice in creating diverse participant pools in open decisions.