How much noise is there in a decision

Keeping their decision-making consistent is one of the thorniest tasks facing the jury members when they have to decide whether or not to sanction a rider and what measure of sanction to apply. In other words, every decision must appear fair and consistent with the decisions taken in the past in similar situations.

Generally speaking, the jury members or stewards are very experienced people and we can normally rely on them to take correct and accurate decisions. Nevertheless, no matter how strict and clear the regulations of each discipline may be, the jury members have powers of discretion, and incidents and inappropriate acts may occur in circumstances that are not sufficiently clear to allow straightforward application of the written rule. For that reason, these decisions sometimes appear to require something of a tightrope walk.

This discretion may lead to bad decisions as a result of the bias or prejudice any individual may have when going beyond the scope of the written rule. This observation applies as much to race stewards as to a judge in a court or the President of a company or the Director of a Sports Federation.

This sort of bias is something that each individual must work to eliminate or minimize when it comes to taking responsibility for important decisions, either individually or as a member of a team.

Another factor that influences decision-making is noise. Generally speaking it is this noise that leads to poor decisions. By ‘noise’, we mean an undesirable multiplicity of personal judgments in relation to the same type of case or problem. We must also take into account the fact that, as problems and cases are never exactly the same twice, we can never expect to have a single solution that fits them all.

One inevitable source of noise in our sport is the rotation of jury members. We therefore have to be attentive to clues and signals that show us when we have managed to achieve the necessary coherence between the facts and personal judgment. In other words, we must all ensure that the facts speak first, before we express an opinion.

There are a number of avenues we can explore to improve individual judgment and thereby improve the decisions that depend on it. A system of guidelines for example could be a great help. We know that some jury members do not readily accept guidelines because they are perceived as limiting their discretion. This notwithstanding, it is the safest way forward.

The creation of guidelines to ensure reliable decision-making is quite feasible.

Let us address a few points that could be addressed and assessed in the training of stewards who will take on the role of jury members:

1.- Training:

Learning to recognise bias (individual and collective) so as to understand how to navigate between possible personal judgments coming from different sources.

2.- Group work to learn about and discuss the opinions of others:

Group work can help the stewards to take more clearly defined decisions by encouraging the participants to engage with contrasting arguments with an open and active mind.

3.- Selection:

All the participants should receive a score depending on their degree of precision and the indications as to their aptitude to make the various grades from assistant to principal jury member or from steward to jury president.

These three points should be examined and improvements made in the interests of our sport.

We believe that it is important to draw people’s attention to these types of processes, as that is the only way to ensure that our sport takes the necessary steps towards improving the quality of the decision-making processes of its various jurisdictional bodies.

The AIMA Team