 Hi, I'm agile leadership coach Jeff Watts and I just want to tell you about this cool deck of decide cards that I created with my good friend and agile coach Paul Goddard. These decide cards are a great way to help teams improve their ability to make decisions as a self-managing team. It's a bit of a game-like process, similar to planning poker or delegation poker if you've ever played either of those. And it allows teams to iterate through their decision-making process, being agile about it. Self-organization is a great idea and it's core to agility, but quite a lot of teams will struggle when it comes to making decisions as a team. Quite often it's the loudest or the most senior person who gets to decide or maybe the team end up with a majority vote style result or some other equally ineffective method of making a decision that takes ages and is really painful. Now that's totally normal because making decisions as a team is not something we're particularly experienced in. Often a manager is paid to make decisions, but that's not very participative or engaging. So this pack of decide cards will give your agile team a structure and a process to reach consensus in a healthy and quick way. Each of these decks contains eight sets of decide cards and some instructions and they can be used to help teams discuss a proposal by stating their current position before deciding what to do next. Basically, you just set a short time box so that you can discuss a topic and it could be anything from how are we going to design the new architecture to where should we go for our first team social event after the latest lockdown restrictions are lifted. After that time box is up, we ask one member of the team and usually we recommend the quietest person because they're usually the best listener. We ask them to summarise the discussion that they've heard and then put forward a proposal based on what they've heard. And then we ask each team member to pick a card that represents their level of support for the proposal and then as a team we discuss the results and we might repeat that voting process if necessary. One team member might defend that idea because they think it's pretty good. Another team member might inquire about it because maybe there's some aspect they want greater clarity about. Someone else in the team might concede because either they don't mind either way or they don't really think it affects them. Well, another team member might want to iterate and so they make a counter-proposal or suggest tweaking the proposal slightly. Of course, someone in the team might think this proposal violates one of their or the team's values or maybe they just generally think it won't work so they could deny the proposal and some people might endorse it straight away. After we voted, we could set another time box. We could answer the questions around clarification, perhaps we could cover the concerns and the counter-proposals and then vote again. What we've found is that teams who use these cards benefit from increased engagement in the decision-making process because everyone's involved in it and as such, you get greater buy-in to the decisions that the team makes. The team will explore a wider range of solutions and ultimately it takes less time for them to get to consensus. So why not decide to try decide cards and let your agile team iterate their way to successful decision-making?