This is a workshop exercise that you can use for almost anything. Created by the amazing team at AJ&Smart, the Lightning Decision Jam involves getting a few people in a room to define and solve challenges. It is a handful of practices you run with a group to identify pain points or problems to solve, to prioritize those problems, to ideate solutions to the most important problems, and to prioritize those solutions. Finally, you assign next steps for the team to take in order to run a solution experiment.

The Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) is an insanely flexible combination of exercises, taking the best of the world’s problem-solving processes (Design Thinking/Gamestorming/Design Sprints/Agile to name a few) and crushing them down to their absolute essence. It is great to use if you feel like your team either is not currently focused on constant improvement OR you find the meetings you have about improving or problem solving never have any follow-through. Oh, or you are in a group where a small group of people tend to dominate the conversation! This helps to ensure everyone's ideas are considered 👏👏👏

The LDJ is awesome for helping the team find areas of improvement. It helps drive the conversation toward a clear experiment to discover a solution within a very short period of time. So if you want to have fast follow-through for your team, this is a great workshop to try out!

Overview of Steps

1. Identify the things that are working

2. Capture all the problems or things holding the group back

3. Prioritize those problems

4. Reframe the problems as standardized challenges

5. Ideate solutions to the problems as individuals

6. Prioritize solutions as a team

7. Decide what solution to execute on

8. Make solutions actionable (S.M.A.R.T)

Check out the step-by-step video from the creator of the Lightning Decision Jam (AJ&Smart) in the gallery below on how to facilitate this jazz.