Lightning

Decision
Jam (LDJ)
An exercise to solve any problem,
without unstructured discussion,
by AJ&Smart.
INTRO

Creative problem solving and clear decision-making is what separates

good designers and managers from the best. The problem with anything
that requires creative & critical thinking however, is that it’s easy to get
lost, lose focus and fall into the trap of having useless, open-ended,
unstructured discussions. Projects stall, teams lose momentum, and
everything goes over-budget, causing many products and services to be
released late and full of compromises, all because the team is so fatigued
from working on endless, unprioritized problems.

The solution:

Replace all open, unstructured discussion with clear process.

At first this might feel weird, but the only way you’re going to see the
results of this is to try it for yourself. The freedom to discuss might seem
conducive to creativity, or more informed decision-making, when it’s
in fact the enemy. Structure and discipline create the freedom needed
to be creative.

The Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) is an exercise created by AJ&Smart as

an easy way to make faster decisions and find quick direction. The LDJ is
inspired by the core principles of the Design Sprint:

- Work together, alone

- Tangible items are better than discussion

- Getting started is more important than being right

- Don’t rely on creativity

If you don’t feel like reading this booklet, we also have a video demon-
strating the exercise on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/ajsmart
(or just google Lightning Decision Jam)
What to use this exercise for:

Anything which requires a group of people to make decisions, solve prob-

lems or discuss challenges. It’s always good to frame an LDJ session with a
broad topic, here are some examples:
- The conversion flow of our checkout

- Our internal design process

- Improving our office environment

- How we organise events

- Keeping up with our competition

- Improving sales flow

- Tactics for the next sales push

Supplies you’ll need:

- Rectangular sticky-notes, we like yellow

- Square sticky-notes (2 different colours, we like pink and blue)

- Sticky dots, 2 different colours

- Sharpies or whiteboard markers (has to be fat marker, so that partici-

pants are forced to write short notes)

- A Time Timer

- A nice playlist of focus music, this is the one we use at AJ&Smart, feel
free use it! (AJ&Smart Workshops on Spotify)

Ideal group size

To make this exercise worthwhile you’ll need a range of input and opin-
ions, but you don’t want so many people that the logistics of running the
exercise gets difficult. You can technically use the LDJ with just 2 people,
although we usually recommend a minimum of 3. An ideal size is 4 to 6
people, and the maximum is 8 (more than this and the whiteboard gets
crowded and the sticky-notes become hard to keep track of).

Total time needed

The times we’ve suggested in the exercise are more of a guideline and
may only be relevant to the first time you run through it. The exercise itself
usually takes between 30–45 mins. For larger groups (or tackling multiple
problems) all the steps can take up to 1.5 hours.

Choose a moderator

You absolutely need to select someone on the team to take the role
of the moderator. They can join in on the process but they must focus
on making sure discussions don’t break out and they need to keep the
time. We rotate this role at AJ&Smart.

Steps

1. Start with things that are working

2. Capture all the problems

3. Prioritize problems

4. Reframe the problems as standardized challenges

5. Ideate without discussion

6. Prioritise solutions

7. Decide what to execute on

8. Make solutions actionable

STEP 1: Start with things that are working
 10 mins
Materials: Square sticky-notes (pick a colour) and markers

Start by drawing a sailboat on a whiteboard. It needs to have water line

half way down, a billowing sail, and an anchor that hangs down below
the water. The top half (the wind in the sail) represents things that are
moving us forward or working well, and the bottom half (the anchor)
represents things that are holding us back or not going well. Make sure
there’s enough space for a good number of sticky-notes in each half.

The first step is for everybody in the team to sit at a table and (without
discussion) spend 4 minutes writing all the things that are working well
with the topic. These can really be anything from “we all get along well
as a team” to “the quality of our designs lately has been really high”. Re-
ally anything that people are happy about and want to continue. Peo-
ple should write one problem per sticky-note, and once the 4 minutes
are up, each person will have a pile of sticky-notes in front of them.
Encourage the team to try and write as many as possible. The moder-
ator now selects one person at a time to stand up at the sailboat and
very quickly explain each sticky-note as they stick them in the top half.
Nobody else in the team is allowed to speak here unless they don’t
understand something on a sticky-note. The moderator should give no
more than 1 or 2 minutes per person. Make sure to not spark any dis-
cussion. Only allow questions to clarify the content of a sticky-note.

You won’t actually end up using these sticky-notes going forward, but
it’s really important to start with the positives for two reasons:

1. Thinking about the positive things first makes it easier to find corre-
sponding negatives/problems in the next step.

2. If the group starts with negatives immediately, the atmosphere can

quickly turn to criticism and complaining, instead of problem solving.
STEP 2: Capture all the problems
 5 mins
Materials: Square sticky-notes (same colour) and markers

Now the team spends 4 minutes writing all the challenges, annoyances,
mistakes or concerns with the topic. Again in silence, without any dis-
cussion. These can really be anything from “I don’t feel like we’re mak-
ing progress” to “I feel like project X is getting more attention than my
project”. Really anything that is bugging us. Encourage the team to try
and write down as many problems as possible. Our experiences shows
that the most important problems arise quickly.

There are constant There seems I still don’t see

distractions while to be no end to the point of the
I’m trying to work “Project X” Monday standup

I have a budget Don’t have time

The onboarding
but don’t know to read relevant
of “Product X” is
which conference books for work
loosing customers
to go to (e.g. Sprint)

This time the team does not read out their sticky-notes. Instead, when
the 4 minutes is up, the moderator tells everyone to stand up at the
same time and put all their sticky-notes in the bottom half of the sail-
boat. This should take about 1 minute.
The reason this is done without explanation is to avoid any personal
criticisms. Let the sticky-notes speak for themselves.
STEP 3: Prioritize problems
 3 mins
Materials: Sticky-dots

The moderator gives each member 3 sticky dots—Everybody must

now vote on the challenges they consider to be the most pertinent to
solve, without discussion. People can vote on their own sticky-notes
and can put more than one dot on one challenge if they feel strongly
about it. They should not use dots on the positive sticky-notes, only the
problems.
Once the 3 minutes is up, the moderator quickly takes the voted
problems and arranges them in order of priority.
STEP 4: Reframe problems as standardised
challenges
 3 mins
Materials: Rectangular sticky-notes and markers

Now, the moderator is going to rewrite the top-voted problem in the

form of a standardised challenge. This will help us create an array of
solutions and be a little bit more broad at the start.

Let’s look at an example: The top voted sticky-note here says “I have no
idea what’s happening on project x”. Because many people have voted
on it, we can see it’s clearly an issue many people are having. Rephras-
ing the sticky-note in a “How Might We” (HMW) format allows us to
make it solvable and standardise the way the challenges are written.
Here’s how that problem might be re-written into a more general chal-
lenge:

HMW

Make sure everyone stays in the

loop HMWall running project e
with
n e stays in th
eryo
ake sure ev ing pro
ject
M runn
ith all
loop w
Optional Step:
If you’d like to try to solve more than one problem, repeat step 4 for
each problem you’d like to solve, rewriting each sticky-note as a HMW.
Then continue with steps 5-8, identifying solutions for multiple problems
at the same time. Any problems you decide not to solve now, can go into
a problem backlog and can be picked up from step 4 another day.
STEP 5: Ideate without discussions
 6 mins
Materials: Square sticky-notes (the other colour) and markers

Now each team member is given 5 minutes to write multiple solutions

(1 per sticky-note) for the HMW, in silence, without any discussion.
Removing discussion here also ensures a variety of solutions. It’s impor-
tant for the moderator to tell the team members here that we’re aiming
for quantity over quality – Later we can curate. Solutions don’t have to
be written in any particular way – but they must be understandable to
people reading. There is no individual presenting of solutions as this
creates a bias towards the best presenters.

Once the 5 minutes is up everybody sticks their ideas on the surface

(wall, whiteboard, whatever) as fast as possible, no need to be neat —
just stick them anywhere. This should only require 1 minute.

Mid-week check Invite full product Start using

in to discuss all team to project something like
projects “kickoffs” Slack!

Short, informative Physical “project

End of week
“mini podcast” board” showing all
“Retro” with all
about what’s going current work +
teams
on in the company! deadlines, etc.
STEP 6: Prioritise solutions
 5 mins
Materials: Sticky-dots and rectangular sticky-notes

First, another round of voting. The moderator now gives each team
member 6 dots and 4 minutes to vote on the solutions they think
would best solve the HMW.

Just like we did with the problems, the moderator now makes a prior-
itised list of solutions—Ignore anything with just one vote. You will now
have something that looks like this:
STEP 7: Decide what to execute on
 10 mins
Materials: Whiteboard (or surface to draw the Effort/Impact Scale) and
markers

Now that you have a list of solutions that should solve the most impor-
tant problem/s, it’s important to know how much effort is required to
execute the solutions so you can really decide which ones can be tried
quickly and which ones might take more time to implement. Here we
use a simple effort/impact scale to determine which solutions are sim-
ple enough to try right away, which are more effort and should be add-
ed to a project backlog, and which perhaps shouldn’t be addressed at
all.
Impact

Effort
The moderator needs to be very proactive at this step, as it is the only
one that has a tendency to open up discussion. The moderator will now
take each solution one by one and add them to the effort/impact scale.
“Effort” is how much time and energy we think it will take to implement,
and “impact” is the degree to which we think it would solve our prob-
lem.

So here’s what moderator needs to do:

1. Draw the Effort/Impact scale;

2. Start with Impact:

a. Take the top voted solution sticky-note

b. Hover it over the center of the Effort/Impact scale

c. and simply ask “is the impact higher or lower?”

3. The moderator should then move the sticky-note up or down the

Impact axis until the team members stop saying higher or lower. Often
some small discussions break out here, so the moderator has to be dili-
gent in finding a consensus and stopping any conversations extending
past 20 seconds

4. Once the impact has been determined, the moderator uses the
same method for effort: saying “is the effort higher or lower.”

5. This time the moderator moves the sticky-note left or right, until the
group stops saying higher or lower

6. Repeat the process for the other top-voted solutions

Once the top voted sticky-notes have been added to the scale, you’ll
have something that looks like this:

Impact

Effort
Now you have a clear overview of which high-impact solutions could
be executed on and tested very quickly (In the yellow sweet-spot on
the top left), and which high-impact solutions will take more effort (top
right). The moderator should now quickly mark all sticky-notes in the
sweet-spot with a contrasting dot so we can identify them later.
Impact

Effort
When we were at the LEGO office running a series of these LDJ work-
shops, we saw that they were using a simple way of categorising each
of the four quadrants. They use these definitions to decide how and
when to action all those top ideas:

Do Make a
Now project
Impact

Make Forget
a task for now

Effort
STEP 8: Make solutions actionable
 5 mins
The moderator now takes the “sweet-spot” solutions from the Effort/
Impact scale asks the team and to come up with 3 actionable steps to-
ward testing the solution. The person who wrote the solution can start
with a suggestion. A good guiding principle is that the action steps to
test out the idea should be able to be completed in a timeframe of 1-2
weeks.

Remember, these actions steps shouldn’t outline the entire solution.

Only a small version of an initial test to validate if the idea will work.

Don’t overthink it. The first step should be the most frictionless step,
which could be done immediately. This also motivates people to just
get started.

Don’t get discouraged if the solution doesn’t work after a couple of

weeks. Not all solutions will solve the problems. This exercise is made
to get the team used to solving problems and trying out approaches
without overthinking or over-discussing.

Let’s look at one example:

2 Week test of Slack for entire

team - starting Monday
Start using
• Quick onboaring tutorial
something like Monday morning
Slack! • No e-mails for 2 weeks
• Specific channels for each project
Once all these solutions are written up, your team now has actionable
tasks that can be committed to. As for the solutions that didn’t make it
in to the “sweet-spot”, you can put all the higher effort solutions (from
the top-right quadrant) into your backlog so they don’t get forgotten.
What you might see happening is that the sweet-spot actions actually
end up solving problems in a way that the higher effort solutions be-
come obsolete!
CONCLUSION: Structure and discipline
create freedom
That’s it! In a short amount of time, your team has been able to define
important challenges, identify possible solutions and prioritise what to
execute on almost entirely without discussion!

We use this principle of eliminating open discussion in almost

everything we do at AJ&Smart. From designing new product features
to planning events or improving our office space.

As we mentioned before, creative problem solving is the core of de-

sign. So give it the respect it deserves and cut out the wasteful, demor-
alising, fatigue-inducing discussion.

Please let us know if you used the LDJ exercise!!! And do you have
any questions? Of course we’ll try to answer them! Get in touch
with us via Instagram @ajsmartdesign.
Drop Penny a message if you want to chat about Design Sprints!
[email protected]

 ajsmartdesign