You cannot make progress, without making decisions - Jim Rohn

So, are you sick of reading me yet? Well, the good news is only two days to go. If you’ve been following along or read this far hopefully it’s been useful, or at the very least, tolerable.

Today we decide

I’m going to start by showing an image of how decisions are typically made by consensus.

The problem with this approach, is that all the regular voices are heard (typically also the loudest or most relentless ones), if you’re lucky, most people are ok to let the decision move forward (even if they don’t love it) and you end up most probably with a camel (a horse designed by a committee).

In short, it can be summed up like this..

in the original version of this image there’s actually another ‘solution’ bubble at the end. However, it doesn’t always lead to a solution, which is a whole other issue in and of itself.

However, for our decide day, we’re going to focus on only one part of the process at a time, everyone gets heard equally (without needing to take the stage) and we decide together. So it ends up looking more like this…

How we get there is a mix of individual thinking, keeping our ideas to ourselves and then voting without being influenced by voice volume. This day is taken straight out of the textbook, as the decision making process is really solid and should fit well with our team as well. It looks like this…

1. Art museum: Solution sketches go onto our Jamboard for review
2. Heat map: Review during our sole sessions, and use dot stickers to mark interesting parts.
3. Speed critique: Quickly discuss the highlights of each solution, and use stickies to capture big ideas in our remix session
4. Straw poll: Each person chooses one solution during async action, and votes for it with a dot sticker.
5. Supervote: The Decider makes the final decision, with – you guessed it – more stickers. Then we review in our wrap.

And the decision is made.

This is a big day, as once we have a decision, we need to storyboard out all the winning ideas with each other. However, this will probably be done by the facilitator, before we move into the big day to prototype our ideas.

The group will wrap by running a quick divide and conquer so we know who is going to be taking on tomorrow, and it’s time to proto

Wishing your big questions were being decided on? Easy, Go here > so we can include you!