How to: Shared decision making

There’s a saying that goes if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. And that also holds true in business.

There will come a time where you can not make all the decisions alone and you need to come up with a way to make decisions where everyone feels heard, involved, and good decisions are being made.

Here I present a simple 5-step approach that forms a nice framework to start with:

1. Icebreaker The first step is the icebreaker. This is to snap everyone out of what they were doing and in the creative mood for brainstorming. Get people to actively participate and warm up a bit.
2. Gather data The second step is to gather data. Ask people for their input on the question or problem at hand. Let everyone brain storm in private, if possible with private mode so people don’t influence each other. Put all the stickies on the board for everyone to see.
3. Group and cluster Now you go over each sticky and ask the person that wrote it to explain what he meant. People that have similar stickies can now cluster their sticies. After this step you have important topics nailed down to talk vote on.
4. Vote and discuss Vote on what stickies everyone finds important. Usually we find that 3 or 5 votes per person in a team works well, this brings focus but also provides options. After voting is done you get a prioritized list of stickies to talk about.
5. Create actions and assign owners Go over each sticky and discuss them, come up with actions and assign clear owners to them. It is important to have clear owners and deadlines for the actions.

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