Once the 7 minutes is up— now everybody sticks their ideas on the surface (wall, whiteboard, whatever) as fast as possible, no need to be neat— just stick them anywhere – this should only require one-minute.

6. Vote on Solutions — 10 MINS

Remember this? We’ve done it before right? The moderator now gives each team member is stripped of six d0ts to vote on the solutions they think would best solve the HMW. Because the members will need to read each post-it, a little more time is given for this voting process: 10 minutes.

This image, out of context, zero sense.

7. Prioritise Solutions -30 Seconds

Deja vu! Just like we did with the problems, the team now has 30 seconds to make a prioritised list of solutions — Ignore anything with the less than two votes. You will now have something that looks like this:

8. Decide what to execute on — 10 MINS

It is clear that some solutions are more popular than others to test out, but it's important to know how much effort is required to execute the solutions – so here we use a simple effort/impact scale to determine which solutions to try ASAP, and which should be added to a to-do list, or however you store your backlog.

The moderator needs to be very proactive at this step, as it is the only one that has a tendency to open up discussion. The Moderator will now take each solution one by one and add them to the effort/impact scale. Effort, in this case is how much effort we as a team think it will take to implement and impact is the degree to which we think it would solve our problem.

So here’s what the moderator needs to do: Take the top voted solution, hovers it over the center of the E/I scale and simply asks “higher or lower” — usually some small discussions break out here, so the moderator has to be diligent in finding a consensus and stopping any conversations extending past 20 seconds. Once the effort has been determined, the moderator uses the same drill for impact: “Higher or Lower.” Once all prioritised post-its have been added to the scale, you’ll have something that looks like this:

Now you have a clear overview of what which high-impact solutions could be executed on and tested very quickly (In the green sweet-spot on the top left), and which high-impact solutions will take more effort (top right). The moderator should now quickly mark all post-its in the sweet spot with a contrasting dot so we can identify them later.

9. Turn Solutions into Actionable Tasks — 5 MINS

The moderator now takes the “Sweet Spot” solutions off the E/I scale and asks the person who wrote the solution to give actionable steps toward testing the solution. When I say actionable, I really mean something that could be executed on in the timeframe of 1–2 weeks. My rule of thumb is a 1-week experiment, but of course this will depend on what the solution entails.

Let’s look at one example:

Once all these solutions are written up, your team now has actionable tasks that can be committed to (depending on how your team deals with task management, that’s for another day). As for the solutions that didn’t make it in to the “Sweet Spot”? We actually turn all the high impact solutions into actionable post-its and add them to our backlog so they don’t get forgotten. What you might see happening is that the sweet spot actions actually end up solving problems in a way that the higher effort solutions become obsolete and you can later rip them apart!