It’s Only Common Sense: Become the Person Who Knows What Happens Next
Happy’s Tech Talk #50: Start Your Digitalization Strategy With Automation
The Chemical Connection: A Few Things That Still Scare Me
5. Sort ideas into groups
The purpose of this step is to collect those that go with each other. In silence, all team members should simultaneously begin moving the idea cards, collecting and arranging in columns the cards that each person believes belong together. All the cards should remain visible during this process so that everyone can consider the arrangement as it emerges. If cards are redundant, overlap them but in such a way that both can be read. Team members should freely change cards between groupings or create new groupings as they feel appropriate. Team members are allowed to disagree with a placement by making a new placement or returning to a previous one. Back and forth moves may occur for some time until the team settles on an arrangement that is acceptable to everyone. Some cards (ideas) may be loners that do not seem to fit in any grouping. They should be left that way rather than try to force-fit in any grouping. The facilitator helps resolve conflicts about ideas by changing their definition or creating a new Group.
6. Create header card for each group
The facilitator helps create with the team a header or definition of each group that captures the essential link among all of the ideas in that group and consists of enough words to clearly convey the meaning. Look for one idea that ties the whole group together. In many cases that central idea will not exist yet on a card. If it does not, the team should decide on a central idea and create a concise definition, usually three to five words. Figure 3 shows a photo of the idea grouping and the group headers.
Figure 3: The finished ideas groupings with headers.
7. Prioritize and rate each group
The Team needs to prioritize and rank each of the groups created by the last two steps (5 & 6). Three methods can be use:
Mulitvote: Each member of the team is given a fixed number of votes (usually the number of groups divided by three) to cast to the groups he/she thinks is the most important.
Ranking Vectors: Arrange each group in circular layout and connect by arrows as to which affects the other. Count the arrow-starts to give scores (Figure 4).
Figure 4: The Ranking Vectors method of determining prioritization.
Paired Ranking: This is the method I prefer. It simplifies the choices for voting and is the easiest to interpret. This is seen in Figure 5. Each Group is listed in the horizontal and vertical axis. A diagonal line is drawn. Discussion and voting is performed on each pair; 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5, then 2-3 (already did 2-1), 2-4, 2-5, then 3-4, 3-5 and finally 4-5. Which group wins get a “PLUS +”, ties get 0 and losers get “negative –“. The +, 0 and – are placed in opposite on the other side of the diagonal.
Figure 5: The Paired Ranking voting table and results (wins).
Coefficient-CN: The coefficients in the producibility score are the result of the prioritization process (Step 7). The actual voting scores of ‘wins+’ form the coefficients, Cn. In Figure 5, that is; 1 has 2 wins, 2 has 3 wins, 4 has none and is dropped (coefficient of 0) and 5 has 2 wins.
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