Basic Lightning Decision Jam
A lot of time and energy is invested in discussions around decisions. One of the ways in which you can minimise discussions is to have a Lightning Decision Jam around a topic to make sure the discussions are focused on where the most value will be generated.
Personally I have used thus to help define team’s roadmaps for the coming half year or quarter. But you can also use such a method for a varied amount of situations.
Ingredients
- In Person
- Sticky Notes
- Small Dot Stickers
- Pens
- Virtual
- Jamboard
- EasyRetro
What is an LDJ (Lightning Decision Jam)?
An LDJ is a lightweight and simple way for a team to make decisions without too much discussion. For example I used this method with a Central Technology Backend Team to define the whole next 6 months roadmap in around 30 minutes
The Premise
There are four stages of the LDJ:
- Gathering
- A five to ten minute time box where the team silently documents there ideas
- No Discussion
- Pitch
- Where each person presents each of their topics in a one to two sentence structure
- Clarity Questions Only
- Voting
- A phase where the team individually votes for the topics they see the most value by
- No Discussion
- Highlighting
- Where the topics are then compared with an Eisenhower Pitch like graph
- Discussion
Phase One — Gathering
In the Gathering Phase the team is given 5–10 minutes to gather their thoughts and for each item, logging it on a single sticky. There should be no discussion during this phase
In Person
Give everyone a pad of small sticky notes and a pen
Virtual
Create a FunRetro Board with three columns:
Ideation
Pitching
Pitched
Make sure the board’s tickets and authors are not visible. In Phase One focus on the “Ideation” column
Phase Two — Pitch
Once Phase One is over, ask everyone if they are good to continue. You should let people finish their thought process.
Now each person will go one by one and pitch their idea to the team in one to two sentences. One approach could be depending on the size of the team could be to set a timer for 1–2 minutes per person for this phase. Please remember that this is a phase for pitching and not discussing, questions can be answered but only for clarity purposes.
Ask the team to bundle similar topics when they see them, this will also help highlight synergy across a topic area.
The phase is over once everyone has pitched their ideas.
In Person
Pick a wall and then have each person come to the wall and one by one stick their ideas to it while pitching that topic
Virtual
Make the cards and authors visible and then have each person move their cards to Pitching (they should pitch) and then move to Pitch
Phase Three — Voting
Once all the topics have been pitched, it’s time to move onto the Voting Phase. The amount of votes should vary depending on how many topics there are. Usually a good ratio to think about is that for every 3 topics there should be one 1 vote (3:1).
The team is given 5 minutes to place their votes on the topics which they believe are important. After the 5 minutes are up there should be a clear picture what topics the team have highlighted as important ones.
In Person
Give each person an amount of sticky dots depending on how many votes there are and get the team to place a dot directly on the stickies they are voting for
Virtual
Adjust the voting number on the FunRetro board and get the team to vote on the cards they see the most important
Phase Four — Highlighting
You should now have a set of topics which are clearly the topics which the team feel are very important. The next thing is to then collect all of the topics with no votes and save them for now.
The next task would be to take the highly desirable task and have the team define where on a Eisenhower Matrix scale makes sense. Instead of Urgent — Important which is typically known for such a matrix, this time you will have Effort and Impact as the two scales.
This is the part which usually invests a lot of time from the team as generally the discussion on opinions will be happening in this section.
The focus usually should be on what is Low Effort and High Impact as these are usually defined as “quick wins”.
In Person
Create the above grid with just using a sticky not for each section
Virtual
Create a Jamboard with using sticky notes to highlight the various section in the Matrix and then create sticky notes for each of the topics the team will rate on the matrix keeping the number of votes per topic in a form like this:
Topic (Votes)
Closing the LDJ
One approach I like to use is to wrap up by explaining the various outcomes phase by phase and then opening the floor to the team to have any last remarks or comments.
Documenting the Outcome
Usually the best and easiest way to document the outcome is to take a picture or screenshot of the final overview and putting it in Confluence within the teams space
