#Culture
How many people have arrived at a meeting table, got up two hours later exhausted and bewildered, looked at their colleague and said: “So what?!”
This happens because usually during brainstorms and meetings one tries to explore a problem without having a real idea of how to solve it: one proceeds by trial and error, talks in circles to make one’s own idea prevail, and leaves the room without having really decided what actions can be taken the next day to improve the current situation. To remedy these drawbacks, AJ&Smart, a leading Design Sprint agency, has come up with the Lightning Decision Jam, a tool that can help companies and start-ups not only make decisions, but also identify applicable solutions, eliminating unnecessary discussions and wasted time.
Imagine you have to make a cake: you may have the ingredients, you may know what they are for and what combinations go best. However, if you don’t have a recipe to follow with dos and don’ts, you are unlikely to achieve a result worth serving to friends. Meetings are just that: a collection of ingredients that often nobody knows how to combine. The Lightning Decision Jam – often abbreviated to LDJ – is the recipe you need to follow to realise your creation: a one-hour workshop made up of exercises and specific questions, designed to help companies that know they have problems but do not know how to identify them and, above all, do not know where to start to solve them.
Among the advantages of this tool, in addition to the results that can be produced in an hour, is the possibility of involving more people in the project, managing to give space to everyone’s idea, without the more lively ones prevailing over the silent ones (who often have the most brilliant ideas, but are unable to bring them to the surface). This is because, thanks to the post-it notes, we work together but alone, so that everyone has the opportunity to voice their thoughts; moreover, the exercises produce real actions, which can be applied the following day. The workshop is moderated by a facilitator who guides participants through the exercises, explaining the objectives of each one and ensuring that the timetable is adhered to. The contexts of application can be the most varied: e.g. a section of the website that is not performing as expected, improving a digital product such as an app, optimising sales flows, improving the working environment and employee satisfaction.
During the workshop, which lasts only one hour, it is important to respect the timing of each exercise, so as not to risk spending too much time on some parts and finding yourself sacrificing it in others. Furthermore, having a pre-determined amount of time allows you to focus effectively on a single question in order to produce relevant answers.
After deciding what the topic of discussion will be, a small boat is drawn on a blackboard in the middle of the sea: each participant has a few post-it notes on which he or she writes what he or she thinks works about that situation. Let’s imagine, for example, that we want to improve our working environment and start writing on post-its all the things that make us feel good at the moment. It can be anything: the fact that we each have a workstation well spaced out from our colleagues, having large windows that let in natural light, the possibility of having a cup of tea or coffee at the vending machines and so on. Each participant, after writing down all the positive aspects on post-its , stands up and sticks them on the top of the boat.
In the next three minutes, you do exactly the opposite: you individually write down all those things that you think are wrong with that given situation. Going back to the previous example, examples of problems could be everyone working in a large open space that is not conducive to concentration, never being informed about project progress and so on.
At this point, each participant has three stickers to vote for the challenges they consider most important to solve. It is crucial that there is no discussion among the participants during this phase. Then everyone stands up and, after quickly reading through all the problems, they vote by placing the three dots on the three post-it notes that tell the most urgent situation to solve in their opinion.
Turn every challenge into an opportunity: this is the goal of the fourth step. Once the three problems to be solved have been chosen, each participant has to rephrase the sentence to turn it into an opportunity. Here, not being informed about project progress becomes a “how could we make sure that everyone is always aware of the status of projects?”
At this point, participants are invited to write various solutions to their chosen problems on new post-it notes and stick them in a white space on the board. At this stage it is important to produce many simple ideas rather than a few elaborate ones. The problem with project flows? A solution written on a post-it could be “Let’s start using Slack”. The workspace too noisy? “Let’s all use noise-cancelling headphones” and so on.
It’s time to vote for the solutions you like and convince the most . Each participant has six stickers and can vote for the best ideas by applying more than one sticker to a single solution, thus giving more weight to the one chosen.
Ever heard of the Eisenhower matrix? This scheme is used to order priorities, separating what is urgent from what is superfluous, thus classifying tasks according to their degree of urgency and/or importance. The matrix consists of a square divided into four quadrants, labelled as follows: not very demanding/very important, very demanding/very important, not very demanding/unimportant and very demanding/unimportant.
We start by sticking the top-rated solutions on the post-it notes, trying to define what impact those activities will have on solving the problem, placing the post-it note on the vertical axis, either downwards or upwards, depending on how little or much impact it may have. You then move to the right or left on the horizontal axis, depending on how much effort it might take to implement that solution. The effort can be quantified in time, money or any other resource required. At this point, the situation should be clear: the solutions to the problems found will occupy the four different quadrants of the matrix and will be prioritised:
Once the solutions have been found and implemented immediately, we move on to the final part of the Lightning Decision Jam: the detailed drafting of how the chosen solution can be implemented. If, for example, ‘Start using Slack’ becomes the final preferred choice, on a post-it note you will write down some indications on how this can be implemented immediately, e.g. ‘two weeks of testing starting on Monday, for the whole team, with a dedicated channel for each project’.
A Lightning Decision Jam is just that: an organised meeting to arrive at a quick and efficient decision. So, to answer the initial question: no, meetings are not useless, but it is important to know the right recipe to bake the perfect cake!
