When people want to develop new ideas, they most often think out of the box in the brainstorming or divergent phase. However, when it comes to convergence, people often end up picking ideas that are most familiar to them. This is called a ‘creative paradox’ or a ‘creadox’.
The How-Now-Wow matrix is an idea selection tool that breaks the creadox by forcing people to weigh each idea on 2 parameters.
In this decision-making exercise, possible actions are mapped based on two factors: effort required to implement and potential impact. 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.
MoSCoW is a method that allows the team to prioritize the different features that they will work on. Features are then categorized into “Must have”, “Should have”, “Could have”, or “Would like but won‘t get”.
To be used at the beginning of a timeslot (for example during Sprint planning) and when planning is needed.
You can help a large crowd generate and sort their bold ideas for action in 30 minutes or less! With 25/10 Crowd Sourcing, you can spread innovations “out and up” as everyone notices the patterns in what emerges. Though it is fun, fast, and casual, it is a serious and valid way to generate an uncensored set of bold ideas and then to tap the wisdom of the whole group to identify the top ten. Surprises are frequent!
The 20/20 Vision game is about getting group clarity around which projects or initiatives should be more of a priority than others. 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. And defining the “bang” together helps ensure that the process of prioritization is quality.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a tool to sort tasks by priorities in one of 4 quadrants:
Important and urgent: these need to be done first
Urgent, but not important: delegate these, if you can
Important, but not urgent: block time to work on these tasks later on
neither important nor urgent: do not do them at all (if possible)
Definitions:
urgent = needs to be done now or very soon
important = will help you reach a goal or has impact on your life, your customers, your company
Use a remote-friendly version of the classic note and vote exercise to generate ideas quickly, vote on the most suitable, and turn them into how might we statements your group can move forward with!
Dot voting is a collective way of prioritizing and converging on a design solution that uses group voting.
To be used when there are more ideas than can be feasible to develop further.
In this method of prioritization, participants assign relative value to a list of items by spending an imaginary $100 together. By using the concept of cash, the exercise captures more attention and keeps participants more engaged than an arbitrary point or ranking system.
This process is used to prioritize certain factors among others. It is also referred to as identifying the "critical few" that play a significant role in whatever issue is being examined.
This is a simple method to prioritize actions as part of an action planning workshop, after a list of actions has been generated.
After coming up with great ideas, the next challenge is figuring out the best way to make them happen. This exercise is one of many types of “scenario” games which can be used to test ideas and try out different approaches to bring them to life.