Dot voting
What
Dot voting is a fast way of reaching consensus about the most interesting ideas in a large collection of ideas.
Why
Generating ideas often leads to so many ideas at an early stage while assessment criteria are still vague that it makes no sense to evaluate each idea thoroughly. Dot voting makes use of gut feelings and the wisdom of crowds to make a quick initial selection of ideas.
How
- Collect a group of people to participate in the dot vote. This could be your team or a group of stakeholders involved with the issue.
- Inventory all of your ideas for solutions and explain them briefly to the group.
- Ask the participants to select their top-3 of ideas: three dots for the best idea, two dots for the second-best idea and one dot for third place.
- Sort the ideas from most dots to fewest.
- Reflect on the top-5 of ideas that have emerged from the dot vote. What makes the ideas good? How could they be made even better? Has any idea not made it that is worth discussing nonetheless?
- Draw up a definitive top-5 of ideas.