(Diesen Blogpost gibt es auch auf 🇩🇪 deutsch 🇩🇪)
Today, I am fulfilling a long-standing promise from my Advanced Professional Scrum Master trainings. In these sessions, we use a creative technique to harness the group's intelligence to find the best metric for successful Scrum. The creative technique we use is called 25/10 Crowdsourcing.
This technique is energizing, fun, suitable for large groups, and generates great ideas based on the group's collective knowledge.
And it's not just for Scrum metrics.
25/10 Crowdsourcing is the Swiss Army knife for workshops, retrospectives, strategic planning, vision and user story workshops; for finding and evaluating desired outcomes, product goals, process optimizations – and these are just some of the scenarios where 25/10 Crowdsourcing is applicable.
The technique is well described at liberatingstructures.org for idea generation and evaluation in an in-person setup. The evaluation of ideas is unbiased and independent of the participants' hierarchical level, social relationships, or political agendas.
Participants in my workshops (including myself) are consistently impressed by the results.
A question often asked during in-person training after the exercise is:
How do I do this online?
To which I have responded for years:
It's difficult. I have a few ideas. I will write a blog about it soon.
Well, here it is—the promised blog post. Good things come to those who wait...
What is 25/10 Crowdsourcing, and how does it work?
25/10 is a Liberating Structure that enables the group to generate bold ideas in less than 20 minutes. In the in-person version, each individual silently writes down an idea, which is then lightly evaluated over five rounds. Ideas are quickly exchanged among participants (“mingling”), randomly selected, and then individually evaluated.
In-person, it looks like this with Christiaan Verwijs and Johannes Schartau:
After five rounds, the top ten ideas are selected and discussed within the group.
What does this structure enable?
- Broad Participation: All participants have the opportunity to contribute their ideas and democratically select the best ones. Whether extroverted or introverted, everyone contributes ideas equally.
- Efficiency: The method allows for a large number of ideas to be collected and prioritized in a short amount of time. The quick pace generates energy and, especially in person, is fun due to the unusual and extraordinary format.
- Creativity and Innovation: The diversity of the ideas promotes creativity and makes innovative solutions more likely.
- Collective Intelligence: The structure leverages the collective knowledge and experiences of all participants to find the best solutions, regardless of the hierarchy level or reputation of the original idea giver.
- Transparency: The evaluation process is simple, open, and understandable, which strengthens the participants' trust.
OK. So how do I do this in a remote setup?
It depends on what tools you have available. Sacha Storz has already put good thought into this for Miro. David Heath even built a Heroku app for it.
Since I conduct my online workshops with Mural.co and want to keep the use of additional tools (and thereby additional complexity for the participants) to a minimum, here is a simple implementation with Mural:
Switch to Private Mode so that participants can only see their own input (and not that of others).
Invite the participants to formulate their idea on a sticky note.
Disable Private Mode and arrange all the sticky notes in a circle.
Ask the participants to find their sticky note. This is their starting point.
Switch back to Mural Private Mode so that the evaluation can be done anonymously.
Now, the virtual mingling and evaluation take place.
1️⃣ Ask the participants to move one sticky note clockwise.
2️⃣ Invite the participants to rate the idea. They should rate the idea by assigning points using icons dragged onto the sticky note. Participants can use the Mural icon library or write their own sticky note for this. A score of one (1) means the idea is "okay," while a score of five (5) means the idea is so good it could have been their own 🙂
3️⃣ Once the evaluation is done, ask the participants to turn off their cameras. This way, you can see who has finished and who still needs time.
4️⃣ When all participants have completed their evaluations, ask them to turn their cameras back on.
Next round! Go back to step 1️⃣: evaluate the next idea. Camera off, camera on. Continue!
After five rounds: Disable Private Mode, have the participants add up the scores of the last evaluated sticky note and write the total on it.
Move the top ten rated ideas to a separate area. Voilà.
And what now?
Well, try it out!
Read the detailed facilitation instructions for 25/10 on liberatingstructures.com.
Head over to the Heroku app.
Check out Sacha’s Miro template.
Let me know how it works (in comments 👇) – and how it could be improved.
Check out my online trainings for more tips and tricks in remote setups.
More on tips and tricks? 👉🏻 Go and see great facilitation, workshop moderation, team development, and leadership (all these tips and tricks are in German 🇩🇪)