Team Decision Making Exercise

[MandyRollins]

Purpose: Provide a decision-making framework for the team to use to evaluate options/solutions from multiple perspectives. (Note: This exercise is a combination of Co-Active Balance coaching and Lean Sigma tool for decision making).

Instructions:
1. Identify the decision that needs to be made.
2. List and capture the “critical considerations” for the decision from the team’s perspective. For example, a critical consideration could be a time frame, quality metric, cost, brand expectation, etc.
3. Identify all possible stakeholders (customers, end users, senior leadership team, other functions, etc.)
4. Divide the room into the number of stakeholder groups identified and label each area.
5. Have the team physically move together as a group from stakeholder area to area sharing what perspective this group has/might have regarding this decision. Capture the information on separate flip chart pages for each stakeholder group.
6. Have the team sit back down and review the information captured on the flip charts. Identify any new “critical considerations” from the stakeholder perspectives.
7. Write the new list of “critical considerations” (5-7) at the top of a white board (horizontally)
8. List the options/solutions the team is evaluating down the left side of the white board.
9. Have the team rate how each option/solution aligns with the critical consideration (0 = no alignment, 1 = little alignment, 3 = some alignment, 9 = great alignment)
10. Add across the rows, then rank the options/solutions from the highest to the lowest “total” numbers.
11. Have a discussion, do a “gut check” with the team. Do these options/solutions make sense?
12. Select the top 2-3 options/solutions and agree to implement. (Note: there is usually a natural break in the “total” numbers so that may help the team identify the number of options/solutions to bring forward).
13. The next step would be to begin the implementation planning process.

Timing: This can be done in one session (60 – 90 min) or can be broken into two sessions if the team members need to interview or get feedback from various stakeholders in order to understand and articulate the stakeholder perspective. In this case, Session 1 would be steps 1-3 and Session 2 would be steps 4-13.

[AVDeaton]

Very well described, Mandy. I can imagine trying this with a team and them seeing things much more completely when it comes to the impact of a decision. I’m going to post a reminder of a tool that is also helpful in decision making—Kaner’s gradients of agreement. Sometimes teams “agree” to an action or project, but their “degrees” of agreement vary. I’ve found Kaner’s “gradients of agreement” tool useful in enabling team members to weigh in on a scale instead of just thumbs up or thumbs down (Sam Kaner, Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making ). This enables team members to more readily surface lukewarm support and stay in the conversation until all voices are understood and included.

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