Depending on your workshop, you may choose to allow participants to vote with multiple dots on the same sticky note if they feel strongly about it. Many facilitated decision-making processes go something like this: first we brainstorm options, then we vote on them, then we choose one or more to continue working on and refining. What decision do you have to make? First, focus feedback on the decision or discussed strategy, not on the individual. The How-Now-Wow matrix is an idea selection tool that breaks the creadox and helps the group sift through plans to select the Wow ones they wish to continue to work on. Helps with: Collaboration, decision-making Why decision-making is important for problem-solving: Making decisions isn't easy, but indecision leads to team paralysis, stagnant thinking, and unsolved problems. You have many decision-making examples in daily life such as: Deciding what to wear Deciding what to eat for lunch Choosing which book to read Deciding what task to do next And so on. Affinity diagram structures ideas according to their relationships and correlations, helping the team make mental connections and arrive to decisions faster and with more ease., The core of the exercise is simple: you just need to group the ideas based on their affinity, or similarity!, This exercise from the Design Sprint method is perfect if your solution is complex and involves several steps, as it allows to map out each step of your solutions and clarifies which part of your solution you need to concentrate on or test later.. Place the action on the start date - with reference to the timeline you have already created on the wall. Since its debut in 1969 when Simon Herbert introduced the model in the Science of the Artificial, Design Thinking has revolutionized business models, education systems, processes of innovation, product and service design and human mindsets. Step 2: Create a core group of two members and have them discuss the task or issue. Sharing what we need to start, stop and continue will of course lead to a discussion. Ask the participants to take 5 minutes to look out for solution material from previous exercises that can be used, and put it on the whiteboard in the corresponding cell. How to prevent it from happening?In general, groupthink is less likely to happen the more trust there is in the team. In effect, the proposal is co-designed by the entire team through a structured process. Next, in a second round: what are we already doing that looks like that (and we therefore should stop doing)?Laughter often erupts, issues that are otherwise taboo get a chance to be aired and confronted. A typical decision-making session scenario includes team members talking over each other, more introverted participants being overpowered by the loudest people in the room, andteam politics impeding real progressJust talking about this makes our heads hurt! *Deciding collectively is not always necessary (see this blog piece for more on decision-making rules and possibilities), but it can be a key to obtaining high levels of buy-in and enthusiasm from all. Roadmap 8. You have a brainstorming session to make the "dumb ideas" feasible. Your dad told you to clean up your toys, but you're having fun. Some important things to take into account here are: Pro tip: After the Dot Voting is done, you can visualize the priority of your top-voted items by rearranging them in order of decrease with the most number of votes on top, and fewer votes underneath. ), decisions come quickly and efficiently. At a minimum, these will create momentum, and that may make a BIG difference. We learn to understand one anothers needs and concerns better, both in a personal sense and in terms of the needs of the different roles and departments. Rather than using generic terms such as vote for your favorite or put three dots on the idea you think is best, take some time to consider what kind of direction you are really looking for. Facilitation often focuses on the divergent part of a group process, brainstorming and creativity, but decision-making can be fun as well! Participants navigate the map differently based on their choices, then regroup at the end to discuss. Since laughter often erupts, issues that are otherwise taboo get a chance to be aired and confronted. Once the direction has been set collectively, what are the practical next steps? Like other solutions such as Gradients of Agreement and Feedback Frames, it is based on the idea of giving participants more options than just Yes or No, in this case inviting them to show interest in a certain proposal on a scale from 0 to 5, with a show of hands (or, better, of fingers).This 1-minute activity can on its own be enough to quickly clarify which course of action the group should take. Lastly, make sure to mention that its okay for participants to vote on their own ideas. Decision Making Worksheet 1. If there is no time left for that, you can still use a variation of the same activity, simply asking each participant for one action they will start, stop and/or continue in order to make sure the decision is implemented effectively. Finally, the outcome of a decision may be influenced by elements as simple as the choice of the groups messenger. It's important for a team to build a shared understanding of the different possible ways a decision can be taken. When the group agrees on the impact, stick the note to the whiteboard at that spot and leave it there. In the end, they all arrive to the final. Read on for step-by-step instructions on how to run the Action Board workshop here. It is often used at the end of a workshop or programme. Choose a heterogenous group over a homogenous one (most of the time). Participants are asked to rank a list of items, initiatives or ideas based on how they would allocate an imaginary budget spending to each.By using the concept of cash, this decision making technique captures more attention and keeps participants more engaged than an arbitrary point or ranking system. Each of these members brings with them their ideas and opinions about the problem at hand. In other words, we need to decide. ), The Agreement-Certainty practice from Liberating Structures. Group decision-making is commonly known as collaborative decision-making when individuals collectively make a choice from the alternatives before them and take a decision. In this post, well share our favorite online tools you can use to make your job as a facilitator easier. The convergent phase of a decision making process flows best when constraints are clearly identified. Ideas and solutions are sifted in rapid fashion. Trying to imagine how to reach a decision in a group without the support of facilitated activities or processes is hard indeed! Each person votes for the options they think are the strongest, and that information is used to inform a decision. #decision making#u-certified#remote-friendly, Objective is to support a group which needs to prioritize and/or decide among various available solutions. However, this method lacks objective standards for determining the weights of decision makers (DMs) and assigning weights to evaluation criteria, which will affect the rationality and accuracy of the decision-making results . Set the timer to 10 minutes and start sorting out the ideas according to their similarities or relationship. What weve learned from behavioral science. Here are four examples of complete workflows going from brainstorming all the way to implementing a shared decision. All team members should be sorting the notes simultaneously in together alone mode, so with no talking involved! The Agreement-Certainty practice from Liberating Structures invites participants to sit in small groups with the question What type of problem are we facing? Participants are invited to place their current challenges in a matrix based on these two questions: An awareness of the distinctions between simple, complicated, complex and chaotic scenarios is an important part of a teams journey toward decision making mastery. In this decision-making exercise, possible actions are mapped based on two factors: effort required to implement and potential impact. While you, Its useful to have the artefacts from the ideation session handy so that you can incorporate bits and pieces of what youve already came up with directly into your storyboard. The underlying issue, however, is that conventional collaboration scenarios dont address that! A group of friends is saying some pretty mean things about another friend. The participants are divided into two groups. This sequence can apply, for example, to a consultation process, in which a team lead might ask the group for recommendations on actions to take in the next few months. But bringing more minds together to solve a problem has its advantages. Your storyboard will end up looking somewhat like this: Now its time to fill in the rest of the cells. Provide a safe space to speak up. When people are given an opportunity to express their opinions and take part in shaping a decision, they will be more likely to support its implementation. In theory, the more people you have involved in a decision the more knowledge and intelligence you are applying. At the 2022 Facilitation Impact Awards, co-host Shalaka Gundi reminded the assembly to encourage the expression of all perspectives, including unconventional ones. GroupMap offers over 80 brainstorming templates to get your planning, discussions, workshops, and activities started quickly and effectively! In this method of prioritization, participants assign relative value to a list of items by spending an imaginary $100 together. This version of what is also known as quality voting comes from the work of Sam Kaner and associates in the classic Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. It's also a good idea to check that your decision-making process is not disjointed from the rest of the problem-solving cycle and plugs right in to the next steps. Where do you have discretion and freedom to act? When we wear the black hat we are looking for risks, weak points and blind spots. Create your activities from one of our ready-to-use templates or design your own easily. With creative destruction come opportunities for renewal as local action and innovation rush in to fill the vacuum. And defining the bang together helps ensure that the process of prioritization is quality. Its a flexible, basic tool, easy to adapt to online environments as well. When people want to develop new ideas, they most often think out of the box in the brainstorming or divergent phase. You can use arrows to visualize the flow and interactions between elements. 4.9. Breadboarding 6. Share collective responsibility. Here is a great example of putting it all together in a design-sprint inspired flow!Start by framing the challenge, go on to ideating solutions, dot-voting, prioritizing via an impact/effort matrix, and selecting actionable tasks for implementation. Join the 100,000+ facilitators using SessionLab. List the options. This tool supports inclusion by ensuring team members have an opportunity to specify the level of their agreement or disagreement with a decision under discussion.By marking their choice of a statement ranging from whole-hearted endorsement to vetoing, participants can express views in a more nuanced way than a mere yes/no vote. You can tap the know-how and imagination that is distributed widely in places not known in advance. A very pragmatic, lighting-quick approach to going from ideation to decision comes in this method card contributed by AJ&Smart. It is often used at the end of a workshop or programme. What to use this exercise for: Anything which requires a group of people to make decisions, solve problems or discuss challenges. Dont set vague or unrealistic timescales - have a diary or calendar around, and make sure you are working in the real world, taking holidays and busy operational times into account. Research demonstrates that making them part of the decision-making can sway the team to adapt their opinions to those of the expert or make overconfident judgments. Youll need to estimate the right amount of dots to distribute to each participant to make sure the voting sessions narrow down your choices. While this is similar to a cost benefit analysis, one bonus is that this matrix visualizes your various options as a basis for comparison and discussion. Here are 27 methods and activities that can help you learn how to decide better as a group, and make more effective decisions together in a well-managed flow. In this article, we have proposed a multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) with a new scenario or new condition named Chaotic MAGDM, in which not only the weights of the decision makers (DMs) and the weights of the decision attributes are considered, but also the familiarity of the DMs with the attributes are considered. This simple in-person analog tool uses secret score voting to recognize nuanced gradients of agreement towards consensus and avoid traditional voting problems such as groupthink and vote-splitting, which are common in sticker dot voting. Weve found it an effective way of making business decisions as a team. We're here to help with this collection of simple and effective team building activities! Required fields are marked *, Effective online tools are a necessity for smooth and engaging virtual workshops and meetings. It makes sense to use it after a decision making process if the decision is long-term and implementation steps are not yet clear.In a bit of time-travel, the facilitator invites participants to describe what success will be like in, say, 5 or 10 years if the decision is implemented. The 20/20 Vision game is about getting group clarity around which projects or initiatives should be more of a priority than others. You can clear space for innovation by helping a group let go of what it knows (but rarely admits) limits its success and by inviting creative destruction. Over and over again though, we see how involving stakeholders and potential users can save a lot of trouble, time and resources in the long run. But in repetitive tasks, requiring convergent thinking in structured environments, such as adhering to safety procedures in flying or healthcare, homogenous groups often do better. In De Bonos classic thinking hats method, the different hats represent different points of view on a topic with the facilitator (blue hat) inviting everyone to wear the different hats in turn. Because employees attention is so often divided among multiple projects, it can be refreshing to refocus and realign more intently with the projects that have the biggest bang for the buck. Fill the screens with places that users go to, the affordances they find to take actions and the sequence of actions they take - in words only. In the specific context of decision-making, here are 4 decision-making techniques that support psychological safety and will help you avoid groupthink! Short, focused sessions like this are great for making decisions quickly and effectively as a group. It helps if you have prioritised these in an earlier exercise as you will be able to organize them better. Make sure to stress that this is about small, easy actions (a phone call, an email, setting a meeting): taking action immediately is a boost to motivation, empowerment and self-organisation. Heat Map 3. However, context matters. 1. You can ask team members to record their ideas independently and anonymously in a shared document, for example. Dot Voting is super easy to run: you just set the timer to approximately 5 minutes, and let your team place their votes on ideas they think are the best. Feedback Frames are a colorful and fun solution designed by Jason Diceman in 2014 to facilitate the expression and visualization of preferences after a brainstorming or ideation session. Participants know that their fears will be kept into consideration and included in the decision, as long as they see clear risks to the group and its mission.In this activity, youll find a summary explanation of how consent works in teams. Once a team is skilled in using it (which, disclaimer, can take some time and training! Dont have the time to sketch out your entire solution step-by-step? Collective Decision making: Let's check resistance ! And just like that, you have now prioritized your potential solutions and have a clear action plan for every idea. Just like in the storyboarding exercise, 8 tends to be the sweet spot between going too high-level and too granular, but feel free to experiment and see what suits your challenge best., Pull up the artefacts from the ideation session so that you can incorporate bits and pieces of what youve already came up with directly into the exercise.. 20/20 Vision#gamestorming#action#decision making. In these lessons, the students were given the responsibility to initiate and direct their own activities. Lets all wear the black hat for a moment and see if we can come up with thoughts on why this is not a good idea! The Liberating Structures Matching Matrix in Chapter 5 can be used as the first step to clarify the nature of a challenge and avoid the mismatches between problems and solutions that are frequently at the root of chronic, recurring problems. Delegation Levels#leadership#decision making#agility#empowerment#wondercards, The delegation levels are a model help leaders to find the appropriate level of delegation depending on the assessed situation. Downloadable! Heres the most effective solution Ive found: Replace all open, unstructured discussion with a clear process. (. However, when it comes to convergence, people often end up picking ideas that are most familiar to them. Dot Voting is a great way to narrow down the amount of ideas and possible solutions without digressing into circular discussions. Deciding on our own might be the fastest solution (and is sometimes a perfectly adequate one, see this blog article for more on why), but deciding together leads to more sustainable decisions in time. Therefore group decision-making allows the team to discuss the different viewpoints and objectively look at the options. The Heat Map exercise is best used when you need each participant to make one vote on a big idea among many, and each idea has a lot of details (for example, if you need them to make a decision on a detailed concept!). From Strategy and Design Thinking to Agile Retrospectives and General Brainstorming, GroupMap means you can design . This refers to the risk that people will prefer harmony over innovation and, in any decision-making process, will go with whatever is the most popular optionor the option preferred by whoever is in charge! Its usually easier to start with the first cell, then move on to the last, and start filling in the rest only after youve defined those two. Your Effort/Impact Scale will look something like this: Start by gathering all your solutions, concepts, and ideas that you have already generated.. Estimating that number is more an art than a science. If you have any new ones, consider adding them to SessionLabs library of methods: as mentioned above, facilitators tend to have a richer toolkit for divergence than for convergence, so lets work on closing that gap! Add a separate sticky note and - again with the input from the group - define success criteria.. When this is the case, individual biases can easily influence the decision of an entire team. Objective: For people to get together as a group and participate in a group decision-making process. The How-Now-Wow matrix follows a similar principle, but while the Impact and Effort matrix is focused on return on investment, this one is designed to select the most innovative and original plans. In closing, its useful to support individuals in understanding what individual action they will need to take personally to implement the decision. During this step a group should analyze the problem and the group's relationship to the problem. The Impact-Effort Matrix is a simple yet powerful tool. Moreover, all members should feel accountable for the groups decision making process and its final outcome. The benefits of group problem-solving activities for team building include: Better communication Improved collaboration and teamwork More flexible thinking Faster problem-solving Better proactivity and decision making Without further ado, check out this list of the 14 best team-building problem-solving group activities for 2023! Categorizing ideas along these lines is a useful technique in decision making, as it obliges contributors to balance and evaluate suggested actions before committing to them. These exercises will help you come to a decision faster, with less overwhelm, and sans circular discussions! Ask each manager to think of the dumbest solution to the problem. This method is often applied in a workshop format with stakeholders participating. It led to a cascade of realizations; talking about this difference in our preferences and styles brought us to a wiser place, where I take decisions for the team if a situation is risky, and he does the same in safer spaces, leading to a better balance and a forward momentum in our team! Its always good to frame an LDJ session with a broad topic, here are some examples: Consent decision-making, as described by practitioners of Sociocracy, is a highly effective way to reach group decisions. This exercise, based on Kahneman and Tverskys classic study, illustrates how the framing effect influences our judgement and our ability to make decisions. At SessionLab we use a structured decision making process to set priorities and decide what we will work on each quarter. There are three basic elements required to create a safe space and harness a groups diversity most effectively. For high-stake decisions that require many people to participate in implementation, its important to know how to involve everyone in the process of deciding together. Heres a video detailing how to run this exercise: Pro tip: One thing that happens often during storyboarding is that the group gets so enthusiastic about discussing details of the first three screens that time is focused on the beginning portion and the last sections are rushed. Fist to five#decision making#vote#empowerment#practice. Either way is fine, so pick whatever works best for you and your team., Depending on the scope of your solution, determine an appropriate time frame. 15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. The How-Now-Wow matrix is an idea selection tool that breaks the creadox by forcing people to weigh each idea on 2 parameters. Place two of the four boards end to end on the ground or floor. Depending on the voice of the group, move the sticky note left and right along the effort scale and stop at a point where the group seems to agree.. (16) $12.50. Team members have to choose the best course of action through negotiation and creative thinking. But Working-style differences, politics , and asymmetrical knowledge are just parts of the overall problem. After all, more minds are better than one, right? Group Decision Making. Backcasting is a wonderful tool for transforming a common goal into a practical plan. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. A seriously playful approach to decision-making, Training activities to learn about decision-making, Decision-making tools for ranking and prioritization, Exercises that mitigate the risk of groupthink in collective decision-making, Decision making activities to converge upon a solution, Closing activities to turn a decision into action, Activity flows designed for taking collective decisions. It is one of the hottest buzzwords of today, easily found in articles and in the news. It simply asks participants to share their responses to 3 questions: What do we need to start doing? 1-2-4-all is the essential go-to method to combine in a single, effective flow, individual reflection, paired discussion and shared opinions. Offering activities for participatory decision making will reduce the effort needed later to ensure tasks get done and work goes ahead. The NUF Test helps with this by encouraging team members to test a potential decision against three limiting factors: is it New? Team building activities can prove to be the missing link that will help your group feel more connected and able to collaborate more effectively. This is called a creative paradox or a creadox. Therefore, invite experts to provide their opinion on a clearly defined topic, and position them as informed outsiders in relation to the group. Raw eggs - one for each group, plus some reserves in case of accidents! Repeat the process until youve places all of your potential solutions on the board. And share collective responsibility for the outcome. For your decision-making sessions to be truly effective, you need to make sure that you're trying to make headway on the right initiative to start with (by defining just the right angle to tackle! Dont over-rely on experts. What You'll Need Ideally at least six people in each team. In this simulation meant to stretch our moral and ethics muscles, the group discusses options they would take in a difficult scenario. Nows the time to discuss with your group: you can talk over the reasons for moving the ideas to a specific category, and the relationship between the categories. Dont try to come up with a sketch for. The 100$ test activity leverages this to speed up decision making and keep discussions grounded in the realities of resource allocation. Gradients of Agreement#decision making#consensus building#convergence. Include a line for each idea, and rank solutions in terms of novelty, feasibility, and usefulness. The education and business fields are going crazy over it, books are written about it, and service designers, creative agencies, career coaches, trainers and facilitators are using it. Through deciding together, a team grows! Here is a fun decision-making activity that both the adults and the kids will love. The next 5 decision-making tools are great to close a workshop session on a pragmatic note, ensuring that everyone leaves with a clear sense of their personal next steps. But even with the best intentions, its not sufficient to simply bring a group of people together and expect a great team to form on its own. To make use of those upsides and increase the chances your team will land on a successful solution, the authors recommend using seven strategies, which have been backed by behavioral science research: Keep the group small, especially when you need to make an important decision. The key to effective group decision making is constructive dissent disagreements that respectfully and productively challenge others' viewpoints, according to Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino. Research shows that empowering at least one person with the right to challenge the teams decision making process can lead to significant improvements in decision quality and outcomes. Larger pools of knowledge are by no means a guarantee of better outcomes. A seriously playful approach to decision-making Facilitation often focuses on the divergent part of a group process, brainstorming and creativity, but decision-making can be fun as well! Move the sticky note up or down. It might be hard for some people to discard ideas and that might stall your entire session! Then move over to the scale and hold the sticky note in the middle of the four quadrants, where the two dotted lines cross each other., Start with the effort scale and ask the group directly: Would you rate the effort of this idea as higher or lower?. Set the timer to 15-20 minutes and tell your participants to go through every concept or big idea and use the voting dots to call out good parts that stuck out to them. What can you do without more resources or authority? Use this quick, practical decision making technique to encourage participants to take immediate action to implement a decision they have just taken. What are the benefits of using decision-making techniques? Stop doing? Ask your team to pull up their calendars so they can be realistic about their available time to deliver the actions and projects. Shifting a few grains of sand may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape. In the NUF Test, participants rate an idea on three criteria: to what degree is it New, Useful, and Feasible?