Making these trade-offs is much easier when you can use innovative software, such as the 100-Point Exercise, which is built into the Six Disciplines software. 

The purpose of the 100-Point Exercise is to help a group of people use their individual judgment to prioritize choices, and then aggregate those individual judgments into a group perspective – and to do it quickly and effectively

The exercise is particularly useful  whenever you are trying to get consensus about “deciding what’s important”…and our clients use it regularly during strategic planning sessions, meetings, and brainstorming sessions.

The benefit of the Six Disciplines 100-Point Exercise is that it can bring order to a familiar yet sometimes frustrating process: getting consensus. It saves an incredible amount of time, often reducing day-long brainstorming sessions to an hour, and long meetings to a few short minutes.

Here’s how it works:

• Brainstorm on ideas about a given issue. (In the example below, we look at renewing the Mission Statement of the company with the company leadership team)
• Each team member has 100 points to “vote” with, and in this case, cannot vote for any item with less than 10 points.
• Tally each individual’s scores and review the distribution of points.
• Go around the room and encourage each person to articulate why they voted as they did
• To get closer consensus, repeat the process. Almost inevitably, scores with become closer in range the second time through

This process also works well manually (on paper) but comes to life when using the Six Disciplines software, as the exercise is automated and automatically updated as each person casts their votes. Results can be displayed in descending order, based on the highest-lowest scores for easy analysis.

BOTTOMLINE: The power of the Six Disciplines 100-Point Exercise is that it can (and should!) be used regularly throughout your business in such situations as:

• Brainstorming
• SWOT analyses
• Renewing mission, vision, values and strategic position

SUGGESTION: Watch our video on the innovation process,  and read the complete explanation of the 100-Point Exercise in Chapter 8, Discipline V: Innovate Purposefully, from Six Disciplines for Excellence.