Group Thinking tools for Agile Team

I get this question from my scrum masters,

How do I engage all my team members in major decision making process? esp in Sprint Planning meeting, Problem solving session etc.

We have piloted below approach in few of the scrum teams and it is working fine for a 10 members team.

Group decisions is not an easy job. Most of the time team members are getting into conflicts. Facilitator like scrum master has tough time to run the show.

We have been trying a different techniques to address this challenge.

The Stepladder Technique was introduced to maintain a balanced problem solving structure in the organization.

By enabling members to participate fully, commitment, intrinsic interest, creativity and the input of all members’ abilities, knowledge and skills are increased.

For distributed team, it is a very powerful techniques to engage all the team members in decision making process.

Developed in the year 1992 by Janet Barnes-Farrell, Steven Rogelberg and Charles Lowe, the Stepladder Technique allows the group members to take up the decision individually before applying it on others.

The stepladder technique increases the likelihood of each individual member being heard, opportunities for the best individual member to display his or her expertise are increased considerably. This is important because recent research has shown that unless the best individual member happens to be assertive and dominant, he or she is unlikely to influence team decisions sufficiently. Where expertise and ‘air time’ are correlated, teams tend to perform well. In poor performing teams ‘air time’ and expertise tend to be uncorrelated

How we are doing this exercise?

1. Allow 10 minutes – all individuals within the team engage in analyzing the problem and coming up with potential problem solutions.

2. Allow 10 minutes – team members work in pairs to present and discuss their respective solutions separate from other team members.

3. Allow 10 minutes – two pairs of individuals present their solutions to each other and discuss the solutions. This process continues until the whole team comes together.

4. The whole team considers solutions presented, final discussions take place and a decision is made. About 40–60 minutes should be allowed for creating the one best solution for the problem.The overall purpose of this method of decision making is to make sure you hear from everyone equally

This approach improves team performance significantly.

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