Reflection on voting in retrospectives
with Enrico Teotti
This is a new, shorter five minutes version of the podcast where I’m simply chatting a little bit about topics that the audience wants us to discuss online, or findings that I’ve got from my erection retrospectives. And today, I’m going to talk about voting and anonymous voting dot voting. Oftentimes, we have like a lot of topics that needs to be discussed in a retrospective people feel like they they want to be heard. But in the in the limited time sometime it’s one hour, sometime it’s half an hour, we need to prioritize. And I guess when the retrospective is co located, people tend to dot vote. And that can be leading in the sense that if we have three people already adding votes on certain areas or certain clusters, the following people voting, might feel compelled to make their vote count. So they probably wouldn’t put their votes on something that nobody else has voted. Or maybe they would, regardless of that one way that I found effective to prevent this situation, which is another one another one of those situation is like people waiting until the very end, so that they can be the one that make their vote count most, I guess. So one way to easily prevent, prevent this, as well as another way to, if you have like a group of like 15 people, and having everyone go on the board and put votes can be, can be a problem in terms of logistics. So the solution I’m about to suggest can kinda fix both situations one, where there is like voting leading. And the other one where it’s more on an organization issue… just put numbers on the topics that need to be discussed. And ask the audience to write on a post it note, say that you want to give them three votes, write down the three numbers of the topics that you want to discuss. So imagine you have this board with like five, 6, 10 clusters of topics, you would proceed and write a number next to that topic. And if it’s on a whiteboard, we’ll just put it on the whiteboard. If it’s in a post it note, it might be useful to put the number assigned to the topic on the post it note itself. And now we have a whiteboard with say then post it notes or 10 clusters with a number next to it. And now you can ask the audience well take three minutes to look around the topics. And now here’s a gotcha make sure that before people vote, they know exactly what those topics are. So before you go to the voting step, I’m assuming that you’ve already clarify with your audience, about what the topics are, everyone is clear on what we are going to discuss, and what the purpose of this discussion is going to be. But I guess that purpose and get it to the purpose might be might be for another for another short podcast. So once you give them the prompt, a find the three topics that you want to discuss, give them time to look around, and then they’ll write on their post it note the three numbers of the three topics that they want to discuss. So once that’s done, the best way that I found to collect these numbers is you as the facilitator, you go to a board and you say number one who voted for number one, raise your hand. And at this point, you do a count tally next number one, number two, and so on and so forth. And I found this is an effective way to, again, manage a room full of people. I’ve used this once with, we’re in this small room there were about like 10/12 people. And we had like, I don’t know, 10… 12, 15 topics on the board and having someone suggest Okay, now we go to the board and we start voting, the opposite would have been really messy. So okay, let’s put the numbers next to the topics. Let’s write on a post it note the number that we want to vote. Now, number one who voted for number one, who would have a number two. And the other way that this kind of like helps is to prevent that person or those two persons at the end to keep their votes so that the vote can count the most. Well, I hope you enjoyed this short five minutes. And let us know on Twitter, if you want, like specific topics to discuss in this short five minutes. Thank you and let’s see you on the next podcast.