Hi guys, in this post I want to demonstrate a small exercise that I learned from the book “Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making” by Sam Kaner.
As an agile coach I spend lot of time introducing new ideas to teams but a question is: ” How can I figure out if these ideas will have enough buy-in from teams to be implemented?” The exercise that I´m showing you today will solve this problem; the exercise is called “Gradient of Agreement”.
The exercise is really easy. Use a flip-chart, draw fiver different levels of agreement: “Endorse”, “Agree with reservations”, “Mixed feelings”, “Disagree but go with the majority” and “Block”. Ask team members to put a check mark on the level they feel comfortable, as presented below in the example.
Using this kind of tool allows everyone to reveal its own opinion and level of commitment to the proposed approach. Sometimes it is not possible to get buy-in from the team, therefore I propose that you start with small steps, instead of having an ambitious final solution. Why not break the solution in small pieces, for example, instead of proposing to the team that automated tests should run after every check in, split this ambitious goal into smaller ones:
- Automated tests should run automatically after every checkin
- Automated tests should run manually after every checkin
- Automated tests should run automatically every night
- Automated tests should run manually every night
And use the same technique for each different goal. After that chose the one that has the right balance between an ambition and agreement from the team.
This was the exercise that I wanted to bring up today.
