Decision Jam
A Decision Jam is a roughly one-hour workshop that takes a group from "here's our challenge" to ranked problems, ranked solutions, and one or two small experiments (real-world tests of an idea) with named owners. Most of it happens in silence, on sticky notes, with voting dots. Nobody pitches. Nobody debates. And the room still walks out with a ranked plan and something to test on Monday.
The full name is the Lightning Decision Jam. One of my former interns, who grew into a full-time product designer, introduced me to it. He'd learned it from a company called AJ&Smart, who do a lot of really interesting work on effective meetings and product design. He showed it to me, and now I'm showing it to you.
The meeting it replaces
You know the meeting. An hour of discussion. Opinions circling, the loudest voice steering, and at the end, the only decision made is to schedule another meeting.
Most meetings are a waste of time, and almost nobody ever gets trained on how to run one. Meetings are meant to bring a collective set of people together to solve problems. If you're not doing that, send an email.
"But Brandon... people don't read all the emails I send." Then your emails are too long, or buried the ask, or shouldn't have been emails. All three are fixable. "Send an email" isn't a dodge. It's a real bar a meeting has to clear.
There's a second failure hiding inside the discussion meeting, and it has a name. The HiPPO, the Highest Paid Person's Opinion. Once the highest-paid person in the room voices their opinion, dissent usually stops, because if you fight a superior, you're going to lose every time. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant's fix is to ask everyone else to share their views before turning to the HiPPO. The Decision Jam goes one better: it builds that protection into the structure itself, so nothing depends on the boss remembering to go last. (HiPPOs get their full treatment back in Part 01.)
Here's the part most leaders miss. The best ones know they're the HiPPO, and they get out of the way on purpose.
I coached a leader once who understood this well. We were discussing a recent brainstorming exercise he was doing with his team. And partway through the exercise he told me that he stopped the work and said to his team: "I'm the hippo in the room. I've gotta go." And he left. Not because he didn't care about the outcome. Because he cared enough to know his presence would bend it. The second he weighed in, the room would stop solving the problem and start solving for him.
That's the instinct the Decision Jam protects. You don't have to be that self-aware to run one. The structure does the leaving-the-room for you.
The Decision Jam is the answer to both problems at once. A meeting where everyone gets a voice, and where decisions actually come out the other end.
Five values before a single step
The mechanics only make sense once you know what they're protecting. The Decision Jam runs on five values:
Together alone. You solve the challenge as a group, but the thinking happens individually, in silence. Everyone gets time to get their thoughts out without fighting for airtime.
Not everything needs discussion. Not all ideas are great. Instead of talking about whatever the highest-paid person wants to talk about, the group's collective votes funnel the few things worth discussing to the top.
Getting started is greater than being right. There is no 100% right answer waiting for you. Start, test, and let the data tell you whether to pivot or persevere.
We don't rely on creativity. There are no big eureka moments. You generate as many ideas as you can, narrow them with votes, and let real-world data prove which ones are good.
Everyone gets a voice. If your idea is good, it rises toward the top. If the group goes another way, you still had a voice and a vote. That's the whole point of the exercise.
How to run one
Let me walk you through the Decision Jam with an example.
Say your team keeps hearing the same complaint from B2B customers (the other businesses you sell to, not individual consumers). Invoices get paid late, the cash is unpredictable, and chasing payments eats the week. That's the kind of fuzzy, everyone-has-an-opinion problem a Decision Jam was built for. I'll carry it through the steps.
Supplies first. Sticky notes, markers, voting dots, a whiteboard, and a timer you'll actually obey. Remote team? A digital whiteboard template does the same job. The Decision Jam works fine either way.
Step 1: frame the topic as a question. Be clear and concise. Don't come in and say "late payments." Come in and say "How can we get B2B invoices paid on time without burning a week chasing them?" You can build solutions against the second one. You can't build anything against "late payments."
Step 2: hand out the supplies. Hand everything out, or drop the whiteboard link if you're remote, and tell the room the ground rules before anything goes up on a wall: you work in silence, one idea per sticky, and the votes decide what gets discussed.
Step 3: draw the sailboat. A sailboat on the whiteboard. The sail is what's pushing us forward, the anchor is what's holding us back. You start with the sail on purpose. Walk in and open with "here's everything that's broken" and you put the whole room in a negative space. Shawn Achor's research, in his book The Happiness Advantage, found that a positive brain is about 31% more productive than a negative, neutral, or stressed one. In the room, that's the difference between four minutes of "everything's broken" and four minutes of people actually generating ideas. Your creativity rises with it. So start with what's working.
Step 4: write what's going well. Four minutes, alone, in silence, against the question you framed in step 1. One idea per sticky note, and that rule carries through the entire Decision Jam. Then everyone gets about a minute to share their favorites, and all the stickies go up on the board around the sail, the stuff pushing you forward. This is the only sharing round in the whole exercise. Let the room see how much is actually going right. Maybe the product is great and customers genuinely want to pay. Maybe billing already runs clean. Good. Now you know the problem isn't everything.
Step 5: write the challenges. Four minutes, alone, in silence again. This time there's no discussion at all. Stickies go up around the anchor and you move on. For the late-payment room you'd see things like "no reminder until it's already overdue," "the pay process has too many steps," "nobody owns following up." Then everyone gets three voting dots and about three minutes to put them on the challenges that matter most. You can spread your three across three different stickies or stack all three on the one you care about most. Your call. Vote in silence. The moment someone starts narrating their dots, they're influencing the room, and you're right back to the loudest voice winning. When time's up, rearrange the board by votes.
Step 6: rewrite the top challenges as How Might We questions. A How Might We question is just the challenge flipped into a "how might we ___?" prompt, the kind you can answer with ideas instead of stare at. Take the top two or three and reframe each one so you can actually solution against it. This isn't step 1 again. That question scoped the whole Decision Jam. These target the specific challenges your team just voted to the top. How wide you frame each one matters.
Say the winning challenge is "customers don't get reminded until the invoice is already late."
Too narrow: "How might we change the subject line on the overdue-payment email?" You'd be optimizing one word in one email.
Too broad: "How might we fix our entire billing relationship with customers?" Now you're redesigning the whole account experience.
Right-sized: "How might we remind customers before an invoice goes overdue?"
How many questions you carry into the solution round depends on how closely related they are. Two questions about the same reminder flow can ride together, but if they pull in different directions, chase one and set the rest aside. You can rerun a Decision Jam on a set-aside challenge later, starting exactly where you left off.
Step 7: write solutions. Write as many answers to the How Might We questions you just carried forward as you can. Four minutes, in silence, one per sticky, quantity over quality. Hold the line on the timer. Your brain actually works better when it's constrained to time. It puts more effort into what it's doing. Four minutes, pencils down, just like a test.
Step 8: vote on solutions. Stickies up, no conversation. Six dots each this time, not three. You used three on challenges. Here you've got more solutions on the board to spread across, so a wider net keeps the vote from collapsing onto one or two cards. Four minutes, silence again. Rearrange by votes.
Step 9: effort vs. impact. Draw a grid two boxes wide and two boxes tall. Effort on one axis, impact on the other. The corner you're hunting for is low-effort, high-impact, easy wins that matter. Hold each top solution over the middle and ask the room, high effort or low? Then the same for impact, and stick the card in the box the room calls out. Keep it under 20 seconds a card. I've never had a group argue over whether something is high or low effort. Consensus comes fast. And if it doesn't, you're the tiebreaker.
Step 10: turn the winners into experiments. Anything low-effort and high-impact becomes an experiment. Scope it to one or two weeks, map out the tasks, and give it a named owner who was in the room. Say the winning solution is "send an automatic reminder three days before the due date." One person owns it. Turn on a reminder for a handful of accounts, measure whether they pay on time, report back. You're not rebuilding billing. You're testing one reminder. The owner is the one who calls it a win or a flop, against the number you set up front (do the reminded accounts pay on time more often than the ones you didn't touch?), and that result tells you whether to keep going or change course.
High-effort, high-impact items don't get to sneak in as six-month projects. Run them back through another Decision Jam, with that big item framed as the new topic question, until something two-week-sized falls out. The low-impact half of the grid you set aside, no matter how easy the card looked. Easy and pointless is still pointless. And when you're ready to actually run what you've scoped, the Lean Experiments page in this part hands you the step-by-step ways to run that test and read the result.
That's the whole method. About an hour. And notice what never happened. At no point did anyone stand at the front of the room and say "here's what we're going to do, here's where to put your dots."
"Sticky notes and dots feel like kindergarten"
I can hear it. Voting dots, a drawing of a sailboat... it feels like arts and crafts, not how serious decisions get made.
The dots and the silence aren't decoration. They're the most reliable way I know to give the quiet expert's idea the exact same weight as the VP's. Strip them out and you're back in the discussion meeting, where the best-positioned idea wins instead of the best one.
And remember the value underneath. We don't rely on creativity. The Decision Jam doesn't need anyone in the room to be brilliant on command. It needs everyone to write, everyone to vote, and the experiments to do the judging with data afterward.
It works on anything
I've had people use the Decision Jam to redesign a recruiting process. I've had people use it to figure out how to solve a particular challenge inside an app. And one of my old coworkers used it to re-plan a wedding when COVID kept pushing the dates.
If you have a problem and you need solutions, the Decision Jam will produce them. And when the loop in Part 04 (the six-step opportunity loop this whole playbook runs on) reaches the moment where it's time to ideate and decide what to test, this is the room you book.
A couple of the rounds inside the Decision Jam can stand on their own, too. The silent idea-generation on stickies and the dot-voting that decides between them are exercises you can pull out and run by themselves, outside a full Decision Jam. If that's what you're after, the Decide sequence breaks down the silent-generate-then-vote round on its own page. And if you want a richer version of the generation round, the Four-Step Sketch and Lightning Demos are the same silent-generation idea, run as sketches and borrowed solutions instead of words on a sticky.
So don't file this page away. You almost certainly have the meeting on your calendar this week, the one that will be an hour of discussion and zero decisions. Keep the meeting. Kill the format. Frame the topic as a question, buy the sticky notes and the dots, draw the sailboat, and run your first Decision Jam. Worst case, you spend an hour and walk out with a ranked list of your team's real challenges. Best case, you walk out with an experiment, an owner, and data on the way.