Modified Nominal Group Technique For Group Decision-Making

Nominal Group Technique is a useful tool to solve group decision-making problems. The technique generates and subsequently prioritizes a large number of ideas in a group setting. It has the following steps: (i) statement of the question pertaining to the issue; (ii) silent generation of ideas in writing; (iii) round-robin recording of ideas; (iv) serial discussion on the ideas; (v) voting to select the most important ideas, and vi. discussion on the selected ideas. In the fifth step, the participants need to find out and subsequently rank the five most important ideas. In the existing framework of the methodology, there is no guidance to select the best five ideas, rather they (the participants) have to do it by a holistic approach. By means of two experiments, this research proposes and substantiates the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process to guide the participants to choose and rank the best five ideas. This is expected to give more rigor to the technique and continue to remain effective in solving group decision-making problems in diverse areas. The paper has further explored the issues related to Muslims that can be resolved through the proposed modified technique.