Strategy season is here, which means I’ve been living in decision-making land. And the more workshops I run, the more one question keeps nagging me: why do the tools work great, and the decisions still don’t stick?
Today’s post is part lay of the land, part confession. If you’re new to facilitation, you’ll get the toolkit. If you’re a seasoned pro, you’ll get what’s been bugging me, and an invitation to figure it out with me this month.
The Toolkit (quick version)
Heat maps (dot voting). Everybody gets a handful of sticker dots (three, ten, or unlimited if you’re critiquing solution sketches) and puts them on the ideas they like. No debate, no justifying. When everyone’s done, the wall shows clusters of energy. I love it because it skips the part where the loudest person in the room talks everyone else into things. Put all your dots on one idea if you feel strongly. Vote for your own. It’s mostly anonymous.
Straw polls. The softer sibling. It’s a temperature check, not a binding vote. Everyone places one dot on the single most impactful option, then gets about a minute to say why. In a group of five to seven, that’s a great way for the leader to hear everyone before they decide.
Matrices. I am, truthfully, a little obsessed with a good two-by-two.
* Eisenhower Matrix: important vs. urgent. It sorts your stuff into four boxes so you stop treating those two words like synonyms. Here’s a link to my FREE mini meeting masterclass where I teach you how to use the Eisenhower matrix to plan meeting agendas.
* Impact/Effort: a cousin that asks a different question. What will move the needle toward the goal, and what will it cost in time, or engineering days if you’re in product? Start with the quick wins, plan toward the high-impact/high-effort work, and ditch what isn’t worth it.
* The Foundation Sprint’s Differentiation Map and Magic Lenses, from Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s Click. Differentiation Map: plot every competitor on your two most differentiating traits and see where you actually win (think coffee shop: “warm and lovely to sit in” vs. cost). Magic Lenses: run your candidate ideas through customer, pragmatic (cheap and fast to ship), growth, and differentiation lenses. It’s a great gut check on how much conviction your team really has.
Pincus said in Life at the Speed of Play that our instincts are right about 95% of the time, but our ideas only about 25%. The Foundation Sprint matrices are a smart way to test your ideas against the core instinct.
The Decider Vote
All of those tools are the beginning of deciding. Then comes the Decider, a principle from the original Sprint book: one person with the actual authority to make the call, so you don’t leave the room with a pile of sticky notes and no direction. They pick the target customer, the solution to prototype, the North Star. It isn’t about hierarchy or the boss steamrolling the room. It’s about focus.
I agree with this 100%. And here’s my confession: not every Decider decides the same way.
Confession: I’m a gut decider
I’ve been into Human Design lately (yes, I know, hippy-dippy, we can debate later), and my chart says I have sacral authority. Translation: I decide from my gut, out loud, in the moment. Ask me “where do you want to go to dinner?” and I’ve got nothing. Ask “pizza or Chinese?” and I know instantly.
Reading that cracked something open. Other people have splenic authority, emotional authority, whole different ways of getting to “yes.” That’s exactly what I’d been watching in workshops without naming it. And now I feel bad about every time I’ve said, “Come on, what does your gut tell you?” to someone whose gut doesn’t work that way.
Two Decider patterns I can’t stop seeing
1. The blender. They want to combine the ideas. Sometimes that really is the better call! But often it isn’t deciding. It’s the opposite of deciding. It’s people-pleasing in a strategy costume. Nobody wants to be the one who says “not yours,” so everyone gets a little bit of what they wanted and nothing gets decided. Refusing to decide is still a decision, just with a cost: it costs you focus and framing.
I saw this in a design sprint I facilitated. The Decider wanted this and this and this in the prototype. We got great feedback, but couldn’t tell which part of it was actually valuable, because we’d tested too many things at once. It’s basic science: no control, no variable, no learning. One genuine bet you’re willing to fail fast on will teach you more than a hedge of three.
2. Decision whiplash. This is the one that really gets me riled up. I push someone to be the Decider. They make the bold, genuinely innovative call in the room, the one I actually think is right. Then a week later, they quietly walk it back to the safe option.
And I keep asking myself: did I just push someone into a gut decision when they don’t decide from their gut? Was it ever going to stick? Is there something I should be doing to help them feel safe enough to take the risk?
I don’t have the answer. I’m not handing you a framework with a bow on it. These are observations, and I’m grappling with them going into strategy season. After our last strategy retro I told my senior leaders I’d commit to reading up on how we can better support people who make decisions differently. Helping people surface and challenge their own assumptions is the facilitator’s job, so I’m doing it to myself, in public.
What’s next?
Honestly, I’m having some whiplash on whether I am going to have another bookclub series in Q4 and if it will be behind a paid tier. Honestly, I’m really busy so I am going to lay low and appear when it aligns for now. If you enjoyed this substack, please comment and/or share!
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