The Force Rate Exercise

When you really have to make up your mind

If you get two or more people trying to make a decision together, it can get complicated.

Whether you’re trying to decide what to have for dinner or how much to budget for marketing for the upcoming fiscal year, it’s hard to get a group to decide anything.

One of the facilitation techniques I use is something I call the Force Rate. I write up options on a large piece of newsprint. It might be different priorities, projects to fund, or clients to pursue. Let’s imagine the list has ten items.

I then give everyone in the room three stickers. I use round, brightly colored stickers, and tell people they can assign them as they wish to the items listed. If there is a priority they feel strongly about, they can put all three stickers next to that option. Or they can put one sticker each against their three favorite projects. Each person is forced to rate the priorities. They have to choose, and then the choices are discussed by the group.

Straightforward, right?

I can’t tell you how many times people have argued and negotiated with me. They want more stickers. They want to tear the stickers in half. They want to put a sticker in between two options to show support for both.

Which is why this exercise is important.  Here are some reasons why making decisions as a group is hard and potential ways to deal.

Challenge One: Some groups resist making a choice because the team or leader is conflict averse. The team isn’t willing or able to have tough conversations. They don’t want to surface the fact that there are simply not enough resources for Ellen and Elliot to both get their projects funded and staffed. This means that the tough decisions don’t get made, and the team can run into an impasse, with all the attendant frustration and inertia.

This is why people hire facilitators. A good facilitator can surface some of these issues and help tough conversations happen as skillfully as possible.

Showing the options without judgement or extra information is a good start. I ask the group to list all the options. It’s a list, we don’t write down who wants what or who hates what. Then I do the Force Rate Exercise. Often, I’ll ask the leader or person with the most power to wait to put their stickers on the board. Only after everyone has voted will we have discussion.

We’re trying to stay neutral. With one group, I happened to have multi-colored stickers, but I had assigned no value to the stickers. The team themselves did that, deciding which person was yellow, who was red, who was green. I’m here to be helpful, and that seemed to work for them. But my note to self was to have all the stickers be the same color going forward since the information I want people to see is that option four got seven votes, while option eight got nine, not that the boss voted all three of her stickers for options two.

Challenge Two: It could be that the team, or individuals on the team, are loathe to accept the realistic limitations that exist. Budgets, staff, time, opportunities have real limitations. And often people don’t want to acknowledge that is true. Why can’t we get all the things?

This might be a case where leadership needs to step back and make sure the team and the stakeholders understand the realities. You don’t need to get into the specifics of the financial statements or anyone’s compensation, but be clear that the organization can’t afford to hire additional staff at this point, or that the business climate doesn’t support expansion. When people don’t understand how business works, they can’t make effective decisions. They may not like the reality, but they need to understand what it is.

Challenge Three: Styles differ, and some people just don’t like being pinned down. There are people, and by extension teams, who are more comfortable leaving all their options open. They feel constrained by deadlines, limitations or having to make decisions. Others really like a plan; they want order and milestones and KPIs.

If your team really struggles to make decisions, you might want to do some formal or informal assessments to understand the individual styles of each person and how they work together. Every type or decision-making style has strengths and weaknesses, but knowing what they are helps you to all work better together. Think of a sports team. Knowing who is left-handed and who is right-handed, who is the fastest, who is the strongest, allows the team and coach to put people where their abilities are leveraged, and their weakness mitigated.

Why numbers work

The simplicity of using numbers or ratings rather than words can really help reframe a narrative. This Force Rate exercise does a couple of things. One, people stop talking and pause to vote with their stickers, which is a relief for introverts. Even when people keep track of who voted, the clusters of stickers are less emotionally loaded than people raising their hands, or discussing pros and cons.

For this reason, I’ll often use ratings in other situations, especially with people who are more analytical and data oriented. “How effective is this leadership team at making decisions, on a scale from one to ten, with one being not functional at all and ten being amazingly effective?” They get one number, one vote. See how that can focus the mind more than “How good is the leadership team at making decisions together?”

It’s not about the steak

I heard this idea once on a radio program about couples, and it stuck with me. If one partner says they want chicken for dinner and the other says steak, make them put a number to how badly they want their own choice. Because we all know that sometimes a simple decision can have complicated undercurrents. The Steak Partner may be carrying a whole bunch of emotional energy about the fact that she doesn’t feel heard, or isn’t getting her point of view considered. In other words, it’s not about the steak. Whereas the Chicken Partner really just wanted chicken for dinner. In that case, the chicken vote would be a three and the steak vote might be a nine, because the Steak Partner has a lot more going on for her than just the entrée. But it’s a relatively neutral way to decide they should have steak. Which is a good start.

Work decisions are like this too, it’s often about way more than the surface issue. Ratings or other facilitation techniques are a way to gauge the potential emotional complexity of a seemingly simple decision or response, which is always useful information to have.