Stepping Down as a Dictator: Giving Great Teams Permission to Make Awesome Decisions.

Copied from an article by Phil Bennett

But one thing that I’ve learned this last year is that if you put a group of amazing people in a room, they struggle to make decisions. The deeper a team thinks about its problem space, the more it generates strong, convincing ideas and solutions. And therefore, the harder it is for the team to decide how to move forward.

Unblocking Collaboratively in 5 Easy Steps:

1. Understand the Problem

The first step in any decision-making process is fully understanding the problem you’re trying to solve.

2. Explosive Creativity

Get everyone in on the solutions part of the process, give them all time to draft, sketch and propose ideas. Give them permission to be creative.

3. Collect Solutions

…present… the ideas should be clear and stand up on their own, without spending time digging into the details.

4. Vote

everyone gets some voting points; they spread the voting point between the ideas that they think are best.

The best idea wins.

5. Own it

What is so amazing about this process is that involving the whole team in every step of the process breeds a fantastic level of ownership. These solutions belong to the group, not the manager, designer, or product owner.