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Team Decision Making Techniques

The techniques described below are among the most popular, and also easiest to use, when it comes to helping teams make decisions reasonably quickly.

Note: As is the case with so many things in a coaching context, it’s up to the facilitator to recognize which of these techniques (or a technique not described here) is appropriate, depending on the particular context within which the team is operating. We’ll also briefly touch on the topic of heuristics, and how the choice of a particular decision-making technique might very well be part of a heuristic, whether we’re aware of it or not.

Roman Voting

Roman voting is a means of saying yes, maybe, or no, using a simple hand gesture.

To use this technique, the facilitator polls the group on a particular topic and asks them to indicate where they stand, such that:

• Thumbs Up: I support this idea.
• Thumbs Sideways: I am ambivalent; I can “live with” this idea. While it may not meet all of my needs, I don’t have strong reservations.
• Thumbs Down: I cannot live with this idea and have concerns that must be heard by the group.

If there are no thumbs down, this is a reasonably strong indicator that the team is comfortable with moving forward. However, before doing so, it’s important that we understand what motivated anyone with a Thumbs Sideways vote to feel less than enthused about the idea.

Why is it called Roman voting?

After the film Gladiator was released, the notion of “Roman Voting” entered the popular imagination, since the film portrayed what has been suggested by some historians, that crowds watching gladiatorial combat would indicate whether they wanted a combatant’s life to be spared via a hand gesture. (Even if Roman Voting was used in such a manner, there is still some debate as to which hand gestures might actually have been used.)

Fist-to-Five

Fist-to-five, also known as “Fist of Five,” is another approach that utilizes hand gestures to assess the extent to which there is team consensus on a topic.

Note: It is important to restate that in this context, “consensus” means that everyone in the group can support the decision; we don’t all have to think it’s the best decision, but we can all live with it.

To use this technique the facilitator restates a decision the group may choose to make and asks everyone to show their level of support, were they to move forward with that decision. Each person responds by showing a fist or a number of fingers that corresponds to their opinion.

As facilitators, we can frame what each vote means in a way that is most likely to resonate in our team’s context. Here is one common set of definitions:

• Fist. I am completely opposed to the proposal.
• 1 Finger. I have major reservations about the proposal.
• 2 Fingers. I have some concerns about the proposal that I would like to discuss with the group.
• 3 Fingers. I’m not in total agreement with the proposal but feel comfortable enough to move forward without further discussion.
• 4 Fingers. I think it’s a good idea/decision and agree with it.
• 5 Fingers. It’s a great idea and I fully support it.

It’s up to us as facilitators to work with the team to decide what the minimum number of fingers is for the team to move on without further discussion. For instance, if anyone holds up fewer than three fingers, then the working agreement for this exercise might be that they should be given the opportunity to state their objections and the team should address their concerns. Teams continue the Fist-to-Five process until they achieve consensus (e.g., a minimum of three fingers) or determine they must move on to another topic.

Dot Voting

Unlike the preceding two techniques, dot voting does not make use of hand gestures. Dot voting serves as a visual means of determining what is most important among a reasonably small set of ideas/topics to a group or team.

A common approach to facilitate dot voting is as follows:

• Write all of the ideas/topics down on a white board (whether virtual or physical) or on note cards or Post-it notes.
• Make sure there is shared understanding of what each item means
• Inform the group that each person has x number of votes (three is a common number of votes), where they can place all of their votes on the same item, or they can distribute them among two or more items.
• — For collocated groups, give them a writing utensil and have them mark their vote, where each vote is a dot.
• — For virtual groups, enable them to vote by marking an “x” next to their choice (or some similar form of notation) in a shared application (tools such as Jamboard, Miro, or Mural work well for this purpose)
• Tally up the votes.
• If it’s necessary to break a tie, do another round of dot voting, or use another technique to choose one of the items.

Applications of Heuristics in a Software Development Team Context

In the blog post What are Heuristics and How Can They Accelerate Decision Making?, Trent Hone points out the following:

A heuristic is a guide that aids decision making… Heuristics are powerful because they accelerate the process of making decisions. We don’t have to spend time assessing all the potential options, performing a cost-benefit analysis, and ranking alternatives. Instead, we employ a specific set of guidelines to quickly arrive at what we believe to be the best option.

Trent goes on to observe, picking up on concepts from a preceding post about Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), that the context within which Agile teams operate is an example of a CAS, and also that it’s important for such teams to engage in collaborative decision-making. And it is in that sense that teams may find it helpful to apply a decision-making technique such as one of those I mention above, because it can help them reach a decision both rapidly and collaboratively.

There are numerous other examples of heuristics within the realm of software development, such as:

• Usability Heuristics. In 10 Usability Heuristics for Interface Design, Jakob Nielsen describes 10 general principles, or rules of thumb, that tend to apply broadly in many different contexts to help us keep the needs of users top of mind when designing software.
• Software Design, Development, Testing, and Maintenance Heuristics. Stanislav Pankevich describes a nice set of heuristics that are based on his own experiences, along with techniques derived from various books, on GitHub.
• Exploratory Testing Heuristics. In their Test Heuristics Cheat Sheet, Elisabeth Hendrickson, James Lindsay, and Dale Emery share: on page 1, numerous exploratory testing approaches in web development that can help prevent against data type attacks; and on page 2, a broad set of general exploratory testing heuristics and decision-making frameworks that can apply to just about any software development context.

Conclusion

Team decision-making techniques are examples of heuristics that can help teams arrive at decisions reasonably quickly, while also ensuring that we hear the voices of all team members. These, in conjunction with heuristics that can help us design, build, test, and deploy software, are important things for any team to have in its toolkit.