Workshop activity: vote with your feet
Quick thought on an alternative to voting in workshops.
Updated September 29, 2020, published September 15, 2020
Many workshops generate a large list of things, and then participants vote to choose the thing that’s most important by some criteria: most valuable, most preferred, or most feasible, etc.
Myself, I don’t like voting. (Stephen Anderson agrees.) It’s not the only way to prioritize or make a decision. Teams can decide or prioritize with a range of methods like voting, dot voting, stack ranking, pyramid ranking, and matrix ranking.
Voting with your feet might be an alternative.
How it works
At the end of the workshop, once the group has created the list of ideas, ask everyone to choose the one idea they want to help bring to completion. If in person, people can move around the room to the idea they like. If remote, use dots to signify interest. This creates a new groups of participants, each group interested in a single idea.
The group now takes a few minutes to meet, do ice breakers, agree on roles and responsibilities, review next steps, and decide a check-in cadence to support the idea after the workshop.
The workshop ends, and the group has both momentum and structure to continue after the workshop.
Alternately, earlier in a workshop, participants can vote with their feet to choose an idea or problem of interest. For example, vote with their feet to choose a persona to explore or a journey to map. Some groups may be too large. Perhaps cap group size. If a group is too large, ask people to voluntarily choose an item of next-most interest?
Why vote with your feet
Where voting ostracizes participants who don’t vote for the winners, voting with your feet means that if you want to support an idea, you can choose it and work to make it happen, even if you’re by yourself.
When to use
You need to plan for these outcomes during workshop design. The essential question is: “What should we do with the workshop outcomes?” If the organization is serious about pursuing change, encouraging a couple working groups to emerge out of the workshop is probably one of the best ways to make sure you get the best return on the investment of time, money, and attention.
What if…
In Dave Gray’s Liminal Thinking group on Facebook, Noreen Whysel (@nwhysel) expanded into some additional scenarios:
I would be interested in what happens in the case that an idea only gets one vote, Ie only one person standing alone by that idea. It may feel even more ostracizing to be that person than to be the single dot unrepresented by a name.
Another scenario is if a person is available and able to work on more than one idea. How might a person split themself so they can be part of both conversations?
I think the answer may be in the context of the vote, and some underlying assumption that each idea is valid, feasible, viable, etc.
She also mentioned a variation to dot-voting she uses with her students:
Btw with my students I’ve expanded dot voting to include negative votes. It’s interesting to see where the no’s cluster and have a conversation about why an idea is particularly unloved.
Anyway…
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