Note-And-Vote

Group Discussion process alternative to Brainstorming. From GoogleVentures DesignSprint team.

“Note And Vote”: How Google Ventures Avoids Groupthink In Meetings

*Meetings want to suck. Two of their favorite suckiness tactics are group brainstorming and group negotiation... Meetings rarely offer individuals time to focus and think.

How it works

1. Note (5min: each person writes down their own list)
2. Self-edit (2min: each picks couple favorites to share)
3. Share and capture (no discussion)
4. Vote (5min: each person privately chooses 1 favorite from the list
5. Share and capture: no changing your vote!
6. Decide: Who is the Decider? She should make the final call–not the group. She can choose to respect the votes or not.
7. Rejoice. That only took 15 minutes!

I'm dubious about the output-quality (after doing this a couple times).

• update: I can see this working as the 1st phase of a meeting, where you then discuss/refactor the "winning" handful, and then have some process of decision-making that ignores the relative votes from the 1st round...
• pivot to Opportunity Solution Tree: you could ask "what problem is idea1 solving?", generate the combined list of problems/opportunities
• then ask "are these all the Opportunities? or at least the Biggest Opportunities?"
• "Which of these is the single Biggest Opportunity? Which ideas were associated with that one? Can we generate other Solution ideas for that Opportunity?"