 This is the perfect one-hour workshop if you're looking to bring a group of people together to define problems, generate and prioritize ideas and then take action on solutions without discussion. It's called Lightning Decision Jam and we're going to take you through it step by step. Oh yeah! Decision Jam is a crazy flexible workshop type that you can use for almost anything if you need to bring a group of three people together or if you need to bring a group of 75 people together and run a workshop for them, come up with solutions and actually have some outcomes. This is the perfect exercise to use. So in the example we're going to show you today, the team that's coming together, they have some issues with the office environment but everyone has something a little bit different so we couldn't come to any conclusions so we're going to use Lightning Decision Jam to actually solve that. Yeah it's going to be really exciting. Or it won't be. It won't be boring. It's not going to be boring. I think you'll like it. Yeah. You'll definitely like it. Let's show them how it works. Okay so here are the supplies you're going to need to run Lightning Decision Jam all by your lonesome. The first thing you're going to need is rectangular yellow posting. The second thing you're going to need are square post-its in two different colors. We like blue and pink. And pink. Sticky dots and you're going to need two different colors of sticky dots. We like to have little red dots and big green dots. Little red, big green. We're going to need also some sharpies or whiteboard markers. You want to make sure they're actually kind of big and fat so people have to be very kind of clear and concise with their note-taking. What are you saying? What you're also going to need is a time timer or something to show people how much time is left. This is a bit expensive so maybe don't throw it. There you go. So it's a time timer. What's the last thing? The last thing is probably the most important thing. You're going to need a really nice playlist for like deep thinking. Concentrated. And we have one. We'll also put that link down below. It's our own workshop Spotify playlist that is open to the public so that you can use it. I'm sorry. The perfect size for a group is around three to eight people. But you can have a giant room full of like 100 people. We've done this many times before. But just split those teams into teams of seven, something like that. And this workshop is going to take anywhere from about one hour to an hour and a half depending on how many people you have in the room. Okay so the first step of Lightning Decision Jam is to choose a facilitator in the group. It doesn't need to be someone who's a professional facilitator. Just has to be one person who's selected and says I'm going to facilitate this LDJ session. So they're going to actually like keep the time on all the exercises and explain how to do the exercises as well. So one of us should probably be the facilitator so we can show how that works in the V-roll. It probably should be me, right? I think maybe it should be me actually. Let's do one, one out of one. Rock, paper, scissors. Step one, the facilitator is going to draw a sailboat. Yes, a sailboat on a white board or a big piece of paper that's very visible to everybody in the room. And the idea behind the sailboat is that it's going to help us start this exercise in a way that doesn't need a lot of explanation. So what's the idea behind a sailboat? So you actually need to make sure your sailboat when we draw it has a sail and also has an anchor. So all the things that we're going to be coming up with are going to be positive things and negative things. So the sail is where you're going to put all the things that are pushing us forward as a sail does. Sails do that? Sails do that I think. And then the anchor is where we're going to put all the challenges that are holding us back which is what an anchor does. It actually stops the boat from going forward. So now that the sailboat is up we can start the first exercise that everyone's going to do together. The facilitator is going to ask everybody to take a block of blue post-its and a sharpie and the facilitator is then going to ask everybody to work in silence for four minutes writing the things that are pushing this team forward. So the team we're looking at here is working together on a project and they're having a couple of problems but one of their main problems that they brought up with this facilitator is we have problems with the office so the facilitator is saying okay we're talking about the office what's actually pushing us forward what are the good things so everyone's going to write the good things one person on the team might write there's lots of natural light we have lots of big windows each good thing is written on a separate post-it not everything on one post-it and at the very end of the four minutes when the timer goes off each person is going to simply walk up to the sailboat stick their individual post-its on maybe they'll have four maybe they'll have five maybe they'll have more good things and they're going to say them to the rest of the team so one of the participants is simply just going to walk up and say there's lots of natural light in this office I like that so we're starting with the positive things. So there are two reasons why you're doing this the first is that if you get people to start with the positives it actually makes it a bit easier for them to come up with the corresponding negatives and the second reason is that if you start people off by thinking about challenges and problems kind of creates a bit of like a negative atmosphere and you want people to think a little bit more positively so they're thinking about the solutions to challenges so let's move on to step two okay so step two is you're going to get everyone to start coming up with challenges or problems that they're facing so you're going to give the team four minutes we're using blue post-its again and you're going to write one challenge per post-it get them to come up with basically as many as they can within the four minutes and now you're going to get the whole team to stand up and everybody's going to at the same time put up their post-it challenges actually on the anchor of the sailboat so these are the things that are holding us back remember so we're putting them below the sailboat anchors hold boats back anchors actually stop boats from moving forward yeah they don't move forward anymore when you have an anchor down now this time we're not actually going to say the challenges aloud and the reason for that is that you don't want to draw attention to certain challenges some people are facing if others would maybe draw judgment because of that or something like that you want to keep this as a very level playing field and this brings us to the most important principle behind lightning decision jam and actually also behind the design spring process which we talk about a lot of this channel as well and it's working together alone and the idea is that we're working towards a challenge together but we're not speaking and we're working on our own and it just kind of starts working because people don't have to discuss yeah so in this kind of challenge where we're talking about like an office environment some of the challenges that are coming out are um you know uh it gets quite noisy in the office it's because i work here because we have this CEO that just comes in and just runs around screaming talking about my hair all the time okay step three what we're going to do now is prioritize problems so what the facilitator is going to do is give each person on the team three dots and they get three minutes to silently vote on the problems that they subjectively feel are the biggest problems now they're not going to discuss they're not going to be like oh i wonder if this one is this one and if they see a duplicate just take that duplicate off and cover the other one so don't discuss anything you have three minutes you have three votes you can also vote on your own you can put two dots on one there are basically no voting rules besides do not discuss so three dots and we like to use the little red ones okay so to finish up step three all you're going to do as a facilitator is you're going to take all of the voted out post-its and arrange them in order of priority with the most voted one on the very top and creating like a little tree like structure yeah it might look like a weird tree it might look like a pyramid sometimes don't worry how it looks okay all right and now let's move on to step four okay we're on to step four and this is where the facilitator really really comes in and has to use their brains and step four is really reframing the problems so the top voting problem as a challenge now one thing i want to say is what if you have like three problems on the very top like layer and then you don't know which one is the one that you should take first just yeah it's a classic just take the one on the left you can do the other ones later as well so today we're just going to focus on one problem we'll show you how to do the other ones later we're going to take the top left problem or the top problem and today that problem happens to be office is too loud office is too loud that's a big problem so most of the people in the room think that the office is too loud there's some consensus around that it's just a general vibe what we want to do right now is we want to take this problem and we want to turn it into a challenge a positive challenge that we can create solutions for and how we're going to do that is that the facilitator is going to create a how might we a how might we is just a really basic way to rewrite problems as challenges that they're a little bit more broad and a little bit better for creating solutions let me show you how to do that so the facilitator is going to write h m w on a rectangular post that on the top left which means how might we and the facilitator is going to look at this office is too loud what is the core of that problem I'm going to rewrite that and in this case the facilitator decided to rewrite it as how might we accommodate people who need quiet in the office so it's not as specific as or it's not as kind of like it's too loud in the office it's how might we accommodate people who need quiet in the office so it's a little bit more positive and allows it kind of leads us into creating different types of solutions so you're going to take three minutes to write this and there shouldn't be much discussion the facilitator writes the how might we and then we move on to the next step all about ideating without discussion this is the best part it really is it really is too excited no it was really good I think it was just the right amount of excitement so what you're going to do is give the team five minutes and a block of pink posters and you're going to get them to come up with as many solutions as they possibly can one on each little post it in that five minutes and the solution remember the solutions they're coming up with are the solutions to the how might we so this is going to be a silent exercise again you can turn on your trusty workshop music if you'd like no one should be talking and everyone should really be focusing hard at coming up with as many solutions as possible so what would be a few examples if we were looking at how might we accommodate people who need quiet in the office what would be a few examples of these solutions that people will be writing or our ideas sometimes it's just ideas great question John and I happen to have three right here one is to get one of these noise canceling phone booths that would be an idea that's an idea not a bad idea either get everyone noise canceling headphones that would be an idea that's an idea and the last one is uh to have quiet days so let's say no sales calls on Tuesday and Thursday for example oh not a good idea no it's a fine idea so the important thing here is that these sentences that are written down on these individual post-its are self-explanatory because you're not going to be able to present these back to the room everything's just going to be stuck up like the previous exercise so your participants need to really be clear what they are writing exactly so the next thing we're going to do is all the post-its like last time are going to go up onto the wall this shouldn't take more longer than like 30 seconds to a minute because we're going to just splodge them yeah just take them all up splodge so it's the same it's the same idea and this keeps happening in this exercise where people write alone they stick everything up alone and then like last time they vote alone exactly all right let's move on to step six which is the voting and prioritizing voting and prioritizing very good how many dots everybody gets this time judgment moderating now gives each team member six dots and four minutes we knew it we just wanted to show this cute thing okay so everybody's going to get six dots and four minutes to browse around read all the solutions this actually does take at least like this will take the full four minutes and everyone is going to vote on the solutions that they think would best solve this how might we problem and it's subjective to themselves right you don't need to discuss and once again if you see a duplicate just take it off and stick it on top of the other one no discussion just voting you could put all your dots on one if you really like it you can vote on your own nobody knows because it's completely anonymous again so the next part of the step six is to just prioritize all of the solutions with the votes just like you did in the problem section so you're going to have them in some sort of pyramid or just some sort of thing and again you can probably ignore the number ones like anything that has one vote or less just ignore those don't bother adding them to the prioritize pile and what you have now at this part of ldj is the team has figured out what problems are most important to them and they've also figured out which solutions seem to be the best possible solutions to move forward with what are we going to do with this giant pile of solutions that's what we want to know do we is it maybe part of the exercise i think so okay cool let's move on let's move on to step number seven oh there's nowhere to go i'm back this is step seven and in step seven we're going to be figuring out which solutions from the prioritize pile of solutions are going to be the best solutions to execute on which ones should we actually try out so step one is very simple we're going to draw an effort impact scale it's very very simple it's a graph with impact on the y scale and effort on the x scale impact is basically how much of an impact and how successful do we think that this solution will be based on our how might we challenge and the effort is how long is it going to take how expensive is it going to be and we're going to be trying to get a general idea of what this might look like for all of these ideas so we can decide which ones are we going to execute on now effort impact scales are something you might have seen if you work at any companies like mckinsey or any of these consulting firms we're taking it out simplifying it and using it to make decisions so this kind of seems like it's going to be a little bit of a complicated process right like i'm imagining a lot of discussion going on a lot of back and forth a lot of arguing how will we mitigate it johnathan we're going to mitigate it by using simple facilitation techniques of telling people to shut the so britney you're right we're going to have to get all of these posts that's on the effort impact scale and without discussion that's going to be pretty tricky because some people are going to be like i think this is going to work some people are going to be like oh it's going to be this difficult but people are not going to necessarily agree but we just want a general idea this doesn't need to be accurate so what we're going to do is that the facilitator is going to act as a very very strict guide through the process so how that's going to work is the facilitator is going to take starting from the very top in terms of priority it's going to take the first post it with the most votes and start at the center of the effort impact scale and simply put it in the middle of the graph and ask the participants higher or lower impact so all they're going to say is higher or lower and then the facilitator is simply moving this post it up and down the effort impact scale until there seems to be a general consensus and the facilitator really needs to say it's not important that we get this right it's just important that we get them on at first so as long as you have the first post it on there it sort of acts as the anchor so everything else is relative to this post it and makes it a lot lot easier so the team has 10 minutes in total to get all of these solution posts it's onto the effort impact scale but don't worry if you don't get them all on by the end of it you just need the important one and at the end you have something that looks like this which is essentially an effort impact scale with a lot of solutions on it and you might be wondering what do we do next what do we do now so now you're going to decide on the one solution to test to move forward with basically and how we do this is you're going to take the one solution that is closest to the top and closest to the left so the farthest top left so that's going to be the solution that we're going to actually move forward with and turn it into an experiment so let's take one of those and let's move on to the final step which is actually making this actionable hey so now we're moving on to the final step in the lbj good work if you've gotten this far in the video and if you've enjoyed it so far give it a like maybe subscribe maybe leave a comment that actually helps more people find it and we're just like hanging in this room alone right now making this video so it always helps our ego if you leave a comment give it a like give the share give the share give it a freaking share why don't you all right let's move right along so then the final step is a short one it only takes five minutes and what you're going to do is take that sweet spot solution which in ours was buy everyone noise canceling headphones that was the winning solution very cool so what we're going to do now is make sure that we don't just pull the solution and it then flutters off into you know never neverland no one ever hears or sees of it ever again you're going to create actionable steps in order to really make sure that this experiment happens and you're not just going to create actionable steps you're going to have someone take responsibility for taking these steps as well very true john very good point so what we're going to do is the first step is going to be to buy three pairs of noise canceling headphones and then you're going to the second step will be give these people these noise canceling headphones so when they arrive hopefully you've ordered on prime and they'll arrive the next day we both didn't make that different time the third step is that you're going to then after two weeks check in with these three people and ask them if this actually helped solve this problem so within this meeting we're also going to set a calendar invite so that we really meet these people again and we really talk to them about using these noise canceling headphones get rid of the noise in the office problem for you and if it didn't then we take the next solution right we try out the next experiment in the top left pile and we're slowly working our way to the right so we're trying to try the easy solutions first to see if they work in this case this is a real case study that we're showing you that was actually the solution there was a couple of people in the company maybe like 15% who really didn't like working in a loud office office environment and instead of rebuilding the entire place or buying phone booths or all of this other stuff we bought them some kind of expensive noise canceling headphones which was a lot less money than rebuilding and the complaints completely stopped yeah and now it's part of our on-boarding process that everybody gets a set of noise canceling headphones when they start working at AJ and SMART just so that they can block out the noise of john so in the space of about one hour what you've been able to do with your team is go from a broad set of challenges and ideas to actually having an actionable solution and experiment without very much discussion let's do a quick recap of each exercise just to remind you of what actually happened so the first thing we did was we thought of all the nice positive warm fuzzy things that we could think of the second thing was looking at the biggest negative challenges as a group but not discussing sticking them up and then actually just voting them up so we can see which ones are actually the most important for the group and then what we did was we reframed the the problems and challenges into how might we didn't do that for too many we just took that for the one so once we had the how might we the entire team was able to work on coming up with solutions and ideas for this how might we and basically without discussing we had a big pile of ideas we're able to vote them up and see what the group thought were some interesting experiments to try out then we took the top boat of solutions and put them on an effort impact scale without discussing that's really great because once we were able to get them on the effort impact scale the entire team was able to have a look at where these solutions kind of sat in terms of how difficult it would be and how much they're likely to work we're then able to just take something from the top left and turn it into an actionable experiment so that the meeting actually has an outcome and doesn't just sort of fade off into the distance and become another meeting dancing you know yeah music okay so thanks so much for watching this ldj video i really hope this helps you in your organization to make decisions faster we've been using this in companies all over the world we've seen some of the biggest friends using it and really having a lot of success with it we hope you love it and actually just as a reminder if you want the pdf of this for free there's a link right down there in the description on the youtube page if you're watching this somewhere else just go to the youtube page there'll be a link there thanks so much for watching this please give us a like please leave a comment please subscribe if you like this sort of thing share it just do be our marketing department that always helps us thanks so much for watching it goodbye thanks guys thank you goodbye now thanks for watching i'm back bye