So, now we are moving from the problem space into the solution space. We are about to take a decision. Before we can make a decision however, we need to identify the decision criteria, look for options and choose the best option. This is what we are going to talk about in this section. We are going to look at the decision making process as a structured approach and learn the steps to it. And we are going to discuss some tools and techniques that can help you go through this process enter arrive at a good decision.

Step one of the decision making process is about defining the criteria that will help us evaluate the options we arrive at. Having these criteria early on in the process might help the team in many different ways. First of all, they can align on what a successful solution means for that common goal that they want to arrive at. It will create less potential for conflict later on defining an objective criteria that will guide the team together when they have to choose. So, our recommendation is do it early in the process, so that you can keep and make a decision faster. You can use different techniques to arrive at decision criteria that you want to use as a team.

In this lecture, we have picked just a few of them and we'll discuss them in a bit more detail. Note that most of those tools can actually be used in other steps of the process as well like brainstorming for example. So feel free to use them whenever you find appropriate One of the tools that we all know and we own use is brainstorming. And it's not a complex technique, we just want to remind you a few things you have to remember when you do brainstorming with your team. First of all, in brainstorming, we strive for quantity of ideas, not necessarily quality. At this step, we want to have a lot of ideas generated by the collective intelligence of the team.

Therefore, we don't judge ideas. When they come up, we just collect them and later on, we can go back and evaluate them. visualization helps in generating ideas so be as visual as possible. We'll also look at some other ways to do brainstorming that will support the creativity Have the team. In a standard brainstorming setup, we just collect the team together and provide them the space and time to start generating ideas. We can do it in many different ways.

Usually, we use sticky notes, or just write on a whiteboard, or a sheet of paper, our ideas and we collect ideas from all team members. some challenges related to that might be that we could have silent people in the group introverts that will not speak up. Therefore, we can use different variations of brainstorming to make sure that everyone is heard, like silent brain brainstorming. One person gets the marker and writes on the board, then gives it to the next person and so on. These guarantees that Everybody has the time to write. Another challenge with brainstorming might be that we can actually spend too much time collecting ideas.

And we might run into another extreme of not ending the collection of ideas at all. So it might be very helpful to actually timebox the brainstorming exercise. Just make sure that you allow the team enough time to arrive at crazy ideas. Usually in the first round of idea collection, they come up with obvious solutions. And later, under the pressure of having to think about more options, they can be really creative and come up with great ideas as well. Another idea for a brainstorming variation is what we call brainstorming on a white paper in Circle.

What we do in the white paper brainstorming is just to give one person in the group, a white sheet of paper, and ask them to come up with as many ideas as they can in two minutes. Once they're done with their two minutes, they pump the sheet to the next person in the circle. They also have two minutes to come up with their ideas, and so on and so forth. People can build on top of each other ideas, and they can generate new one. We'll repeat that until the sheet arrives at the original person who started the circle. Then we can look at the ideas and discuss them.

One of my personal favorite tools is the coaching wheel. I use it in a variety of situations to generate and evaluate it The wheel is a simple opponent, it creates a space for me to evaluate what are the pieces of the hole that I want to explore. So it creates a great space for teams to evaluate the important criteria that need to try their decision. How you use the tool, it's very simple. You just split it in as many pieces as you want, you can always add a new piece by just dividing one of the others into two. Then you write the criteria in each piece, one criteria per piece, and then you can start evaluating the criteria on a scale of one to 10 feeling in the circle as shown in the picture.

Another simple tool that can be used on multiple occasions Don't voting. We can use it when we need to select the final criteria that we want to use in our decision making process. As I said, it's very simple to use it, you just give a couple of dollars to each team member and ask them to vote for the two criteria that they think are most important from their perspective. Eventually, you come up with a list of top priority criteria that you will use together with the team. In case you have a lot of options, you might want to repeat the vote. Selecting the top for example six criteria, re voting and coming up with the top three that you want to use at the end.

You're probably feeling already that we are moving closer and closer to the point when we'll make a decision at this point. We have the criteria. Let's look at how the team is using this phase of the process.