What’s your go-to activity when you need ideas?

For many teams, the answer is a brainstorming conversation. But those fully unstructured conversations rarely produce sound and strategic ideas, and often they look more like this.

I love this image from Jake Knapp’s book Sprint, and it really captures the essence of many brainstorming discussions.

A critical weakness of the traditional brainstorming approach is that people are simultaneously trying to internally imagine and reflect while simultaneously externally sharing and responding. The human brain doesn’t work like that, so the discussions stay scattered and shallow. 

But ideation sessions don’t have to be like that. 

By applying a technique like note-and-vote, you add just enough structure to the conversation to allow ideas to effectively be formed, shared, evaluated and chosen. 

How do you move from the chaos of a hundred ideas to prioritized, focused action?

Note-and-vote is simple yet powerful. It can be used in critical strategy sessions or even to set a real-time agenda for a meeting. 

As you might expect, the process has two steps, note and then vote. I’ll explain each in detail so you can apply it to your next meeting.

Note

The note phase combines two ways of thinking internal asynchronous and external collaborative.

Internal asynchronous.

The team starts by stating the problem being solved or the question being answered. Then each person begins the individual asynchronous work of writing down ideas. 

Instruct everyone to write their ideas on sticky notes with one idea per note. 

This is a time for internal processing, reflection and slow thinking. There is no talking during this time, though playing a little music can help those who struggle with silence. The key is to give people space to think and write.

People will write what they might not say.

The silence draws out a depth of thought where the volume of brainstorming sessions keeps you shallow.

This phase is time boxed to a few minutes. It’s best to have a visible timer, so everyone knows how long they have. Once the timer goes off, let everyone finish writing that last thought and move on to the next phase.

External collaborative.

Now that you’ve drawn out the depths of ideas, it’s time to expose everyone to one another’s depths.

You're going to go around the room, and one person at a time will read each idea out loud and stick it to the board. They can add a sentence for context if needed, but ideally, the words on the note should stand on their own, so people don’t have to expend energy remembering what it means. 

This is an interactive time to connect and build on each other's ideas

Then the next person will do the same thing reading their notes to the team and adding them to the board. If they have an idea similar to a note on the board, they can put them close to each other. 

If team members have questions about a note, they can ask, but this isn’t the time for evaluating yet. 

Once all the notes are on the board, it’s time to organize them.

Group similar notes, create category labels or write a new note that summarizes two or three others. But leave those original notes with it because they likely include more detail and nuance. 

This is an interactive time to connect and build on each other's ideas. You’re adding breadth to the depth from the beginning of the exercise. 

Encourage discussion during the process to allow for nuance and understanding. Once the team is satisfied with how they’ve organized the notes, you’re ready to move on to the voting phase.

Vote

How do you move from the chaos of a hundred ideas to prioritized, focused action?

After the discussion, everything is still in your short-term memory, but you’ve given it all significant attention. You and your team are well-primed to make effective decisions.

Remind everyone of the problem being solved or the question being answered. When voting, the facilitator should frame the question so everyone has it in mind. Here are a few examples.

• Which risk has the most significant chance of knocking us off course?
• Which client base will provide the most future revenue?
• Which part of the process should we focus our next discussion on? 

If you don’t provide this instruction, everyone will vote using their own criteria, and the exercise loses its effectiveness.

Give everyone multiple stickers to use for votes. I feel like somewhere between 4 and 8 stickers is effective. Tell them they can use them however they want and encourage double or triple voting on ideas they think are outstanding.

Note-and-Vote adds just enough structure to the conversation to allow ideas to effectively be formed, shared, evaluated and chosen.

You should see a heat map of the best ideas when the voting is done. But it’s not a democracy.

At the end, someone is the decider.

During a design sprint, you choose the decider before the week begins. If you’re using note-and-vote during a typical meeting, the decider is either the boss or the person responsible for solving the problem.

The decider should look at the board with the votes forming a heat map representing the shared understanding of both the problem and likely the solution. 

At this point, the decider chooses one. There may be many great ideas or solutions, but for the team to make effective progress, they will have to focus.

Once a solution is chosen, the exercise is over, and the team continues whatever larger process the note-and-vote was a part of. 

Learning more about facilitation.

Note-and-Vote is just one among many facilitation techniques. Facilitation is an essential skill for any leader. I’m building a facilitation guide and will add more resources throughout the year.

If you want help identifying how you can apply facilitation skills in your own leadership, I offer a handful of free 30-minute coaching sessions each month. Or feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.