Jonathan Courtney (AJ&Smart Berlin)

Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ)

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45 - 904 - 10 Medium

The problem with anything that requires creative thinking is that it’s easy to get lost—lose focus and fall into the trap of having useless, open-ended, unstructured discussions. Here’s the most effective solution I’ve found: Replace all open, unstructured discussion with a clear process.

What to use this exercise for: Anything which requires a group of people to make decisions, solve problems or discuss challenges. It’s always good to frame an LDJ session with a broad topic, here are some examples:

  • The conversion flow of our checkout
  • Our internal design process
  • How we organise events
  • Keeping up with our competition
  • Improving sales flow
1300

Attachments

Materials

    Instructions

    Choose a moderator

    You absolutely need to select someone on the team to take the role of the moderator. They can join in on the process but must focus on making sure no discussion breaks out and has to keep time. We rotate this role at AJ&Smart.

    Video summary:

    You can find a verbal explanation and illustration of this method in this YouTube video.

    Step-by-step guide

    1. Start with Problems — 7 mins

    The first step is simple: Everybody in the team sits at a table and without discussion they spend 7 minutes writing all the challenges, annoyances, mistakes or concerns that happened during the week. These can really be anything from “I don’t feel like we’re making progress” to “I feel like project X is getting more attention than my project”. Really anything that is bugging us. Once the 7 minutes are up, each person will have a pile of problem post-its in front of them.

    2. Present Problems — 4 mins per person

    The moderator now selects one person at a time to stand up at a wall/whiteboard to very quickly explain each problem as they stick them to the surface. Nobody else in the team is allowed to speak here. The moderator should give no more than 4 minutes per person.

    Once everyone has spoken and added their problems (we even include personal/health/mood) then everyone in the group has shared their challenges without going on 100 tangents.

    3. Select Problems to Solve— 6 mins

    The moderator gives each member 2 voting dots — Everybody must now vote on the challenges they consider to be the most pertinent to solve, without discussion.

    You can vote on your own posits here and you can put both your votes on one challenge if you feel strong enough about it. Once the 6 minutes is up, the moderator quickly takes the voted problems and arranges them in order of priority. What about the rest of the problems that were not voted on? Do they get lost? Well, more on that later.

    4. Reframe Problems as Standardised Challenges — 6 mins

    a.k.a reformat problems to standardised How Might We’s

    Now, only focussing on the voted and prioritised problems — the moderator is going to rewrite each one as a standardised challenge, this will help us create an array of solutions and be a little bit more broad at the start.

    Let’s look at an example: The top voted post-it here says “I have no idea what’s happening on “project x”. Because many people have voted on it, we can see it’s clearly an issue many people are having. Rephrasing the post-it in a “How Might We” format allows us to make it solvable and standardise the way the challenges are written.

    The moderator should quickly rewrite all the problems as quickly as possible, making sure they are still prioritised before moving on.

    5. Produce Solutions — 7 mins

    Now the top voted HMW problem will be used to produce solutions. If there are two top voted problems, or three just start with the one on the left first. Don’t worry about it and do not discuss!

    Now each team member is given in 7 minutes to write as many possible ways to tackle the How Might We challenge without any discussion. Removing discussion here also insures a variety of solutions. It’s important for the moderator to tell the team members here that we’re aiming for Quantity over Quality– Later we can curate.

    Solutions don’t have to be written in any particular way– but they must be understandable to people reading. There is no individual presenting of solutions as this creates a bias towards the best presenters.

    Once the 7 minutes is up— now everybody sticks their ideas on the surface (wall, whiteboard, whatever) as fast as possible, no need to be neat— just stick them anywhere – this should only require one-minute.

    6. Vote on Solutions — 10 mins

    Remember this? We’ve done it before right? The moderator now gives each team member is stripped of six d0ts to vote on the solutions they think would best solve the HMW. Because the members will need to read each post-it, a little more time is given for this voting process: 10 minutes.

    7. Prioritise Solutions -30 Seconds

    Deja vu! Just like we did with the problems, the team now has 30 seconds to make a prioritised list of solutions — Ignore anything with the less than two votes.

    8. Decide what to execute on — 10 mins

    It is clear that some solutions are more popular than others to test out, but it's important to know how much effort is required to execute the solutions – so here we use a simple effort/impact scale to determine which solutions to try ASAP, and which should be added to a to-do list, or however you store your backlog.

    The moderator needs to be very proactive at this step, as it is the only one that has a tendency to open up discussion. The Moderator will now take each solution one by one and add them to the effort/impact scale. Effort, in this case is how much effort we as a team think it will take to implement and impact is the degree to which we think it would solve our problem.

    So here’s what the moderator needs to do: Take the top voted solution, hovers it over the center of the E/I scale and simply asks “higher or lower” — usually some small discussions break out here, so the moderator has to be diligent in finding a consensus and stopping any conversations extending past 20 seconds. Once the effort has been determined, the moderator uses the same drill for impact: “Higher or Lower.”

    Now you have a clear overview of what which high-impact solutions could be executed on and tested very quickly (In the green sweet-spot on the top left), and which high-impact solutions will take more effort (top right). The moderator should now quickly mark all post-its in the sweet spot with a contrasting dot so we can identify them later.

    9. Turn Solutions into Actionable Tasks — 5 mins

    The moderator now takes the “Sweet Spot” solutions off the E/I scale and asks the person who wrote the solution to give actionable steps toward testing the solution. When I say actionable, I really mean something that could be executed on in the timeframe of 1–2 weeks. My rule of thumb is a 1-week experiment, but of course this will depend on what the solution entails.

    Once all these solutions are written up, your team now has actionable tasks that can be committed to (depending on how your team deals with task management, that’s for another day). As for the solutions that didn’t make it in to the “Sweet Spot”? We actually turn all the high impact solutions into actionable post-its and add them to our backlog so they don’t get forgotten. What you might see happening is that the sweet spot actions actually end up solving problems in a way that the higher effort solutions become obsolete and you can later rip them apart!


    Structure and Discipline create the Freedom

    That’s it! In a short amount of time, your team has been able to define important challenges, produce solutions and prioritise what to execute on almost entirely without discussion!

    We use this principle of cutting out open discussion in almost everything we do, from designing new product features to planning events or improving our office space.

    As I mentioned before: Creative problem solving is the core of design — so give it the respect it deserves and cut out the wasteful, demoralising, fatigue-inducing discussion.

    If you read this far, thank you. Please let me know if you used the LDJ exercise!!! Got questions? Of course i’ll try to answer any you post here, but i’ll definitely answer anything you DM/PM to me on Instagram or Twitter @jicecream.


    Frequently asked questions

    What about all the ideas we lose after the process, what if there are some great ideas that people didn’t vote on?

    Good ideas don’t matter, executing and testing is what matters. Even if the shittiest idea is voted to the top and then tested, you’re going to learn from it and it’s going to move you forward. Some of our clients like to document all the ideas produced during exercises like this but we try to move them away from doing this. Once you have a system for generating solutions to problems, you don’t have to be so precious about “good” solutions. So short answer: dump them!

    Isn’t voting a flawed way to decide on the most important things to work on? Isn’t this like design by committee?

    This is not a perfect system, but it’s 1000000000 times better than open conversation where nothing gets done, and people just concede to the loudest, most persistent person at the table OR walk away with nothing being done. Try it before you judge it, looking for holes in the system is just procrastination until you’ve done that.

    Hey Jonathan, you nerd, is this sort of exercise only useful in Design scenarios?

    Hell no! You can use this exercise for so many different things — and believe me, I do!

    • Planning a team retreat
    • Improving office environment
    • Marketing/Awareness challenges (How might we get in touch with “INFLUENCER”)
    • Sales (How might we increase client acquisition)
    • Sex (How might we actually orgasm) — ok I had to put one joke in there. Come on!

    Recommendation for playlist during the exercise


    Tips for running this activity online

    • Pick an online whiteboard tool that allows to use a large, zoomable canvas.
    • Set up each topic at a different area of the board, spread them out just like you would do it on a the walls of a room.
    • Invite participants to zoom in and visit each section and add their ideas as sticky notes once you reach that section of the exercise.
    • If you’re not using an online whiteboard, we’d recommend using a collaboration tool such as Google Docs to collect the information for each step under a separate heading. Invite everyone into the document but be very clear in regards to editing rights.
    • Use voting features such as Mural’s voting session tool during the dot voting process. You can also add comments inside Google Docs or ask participants to add a thumbs up emoji to an idea in Slack to collect votes when using those tools.
    • When facilitating group discussion, we’d recommend that participants use non-verbal means to indicate they’d like to speak. You can use tools like Zoom’s nonverbal feedback tools, a reaction emoji, or just have people put their hands up.The facilitator can then invite that person to talk. 

    Background

    This method was originally published by Jonathan Courtney on Medium.

    Jonathan Courtney is the Founding Partner and Product Design Director of AJ&Smart Berlin. He gives cheeky, energetic product design workshops and talks around the world. Follow, or get in touch with him on twitter or instagram: @jicecream.

    Comments (5) (4.8 avg / 4 ratings)

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    • Overall I really like this process. I just worry about the bandwagon effect and vote-splitting in dot voting.

      over 1 year ago
    • It is great to see how you set up the LDJ in Session Lab. It helped me to understand and use Session Lab by engaging with your example. I enjoy having inspiration to springboard off. I will let you know how it morphs. Thank you for sharing.

      over 3 years ago
    • Just love It! Will use it for sure!

      over 3 years ago
    • I am very happy I found this also here on SL, makes it easier to try it out! Thanks a lot for all your inspiring and free stuff!

      over 5 years ago
    • Thanks for sharing it on SL, very practical.

      almost 6 years ago