A 1 hour exercise to solve any problem,
with any amount of people.
This is a workshop exercise that you can use for ALMOST ANYTHING involving getting a few people in a room to define and solve challenges.
What kinds of things? How many people? ANYTHING. ANY AMOUNT. We’ve run it for C-Level executives at high-end automotive companies on new strategic initiatives, we’ve run it on ourselves at Studio Rhoad to come up with new ways to engage our clients. It’s just an insanely flexible combination of exercises, taking the best of the world’s problem-solving processes (Design Thinking / Gamestorming / Design Sprints / Agile to name a few) and crushing them down to their absolute essence.
Why Decision Jam?
Automotive product design, new website feature, marketing campaign — whatever you’re doing — in the end, if you’re creating value, what you’re really doing is creative problem solving. It is the only non-commoditizable attribute of the parts design process, the only part of the process that you can’t just throw money at to get done right. It’s being able to assess what the real challenges are, prioritize them, produce solutions and measure their effectivity. Creative problem solving is a cornerstone skill that separates good designers from the best designers. Everything else is production work.
The problem with anything that requires creative thinking however, is that it’s easy to get lost — lose focus and fall into the trap of having useless, open-ended, unstructured discussions. Many automotive products end up being released late and full of compromises to the original vision simply because the team is so fatigued from bashing heads together on endless, unprioritized problems.
The Solution?
Replace all open, unstructured discussions with a clear process. At first this will feel weird. We’ve seen the skepticism on the faces of automotive companies who are used to battling through passionate back-and-forths with colleagues until eventually one person gives up, or someone says “let’s test it” (often used as a ‘get out of jail card’ for anyone wanting to end a tricky discussion). Freedom to discuss might seem conducive to creativity, when it’s in fact the enemy. Structure and Discipline create the Freedom needed to be creative.
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 Decision Jam session with a broad topic, here are some examples:
- Website Features
- Product updates or development
- Improving customer service
- Organise events
- Internal processes
- Keeping up with our competition
- Improving sales flow
- Tactics for the next sales push
Ideal Group Size
To make this exercise worthwhile you’ll need a range of input and opinions, but you don’t want so many people that the logistics of running the exercise gets difficult. You can technically use the Decision Jam with just 2 people, although we usually recommend a minimum of 3. An ideal size is 4 to 6 people, and the maximum is 8 (more than this and the whiteboard gets crowded and the sticky-notes become hard to keep track of). As mentioned earlier, you can run an Decision Jam session with as many people as you like, but we will need to split them into smaller groups.
Time Needed
The exercise itself usually takes between 45–60 mins. For larger groups (or tackling multiple problems) all the steps can take up to 2 hours.
FAQ
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 worst 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.
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 1000 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.
is this sort of exercise only useful in Design scenarios
Absolutely not! You can use this exercise for so many different things — and we do!
Questions?