We’ve talked about empowering the team as part of working in an agile way, and how to make collective decisions as part of that. But what if you need to dig into a problem as a group before you make a decision? Here are three of my favourite tools to do just that.

Lean coffee

Lean coffee is a super simple, low-effort technique. It’s great when you have something you want to unpick but you don’t know where to start. It also works well as a way for attendees to build their own agenda in regular team meetings. And it requires very little prep!

All you need to do is introduce a topic and get people to tell you what they want to talk about. I usually give people three minutes to write down questions or ideas to discuss relating to your topic. Then we share and theme answers, before each using three votes to prioritise between them. We discuss the areas with the most votes, capturing notes and actions, continuing until we run out of time.

It’s easy, flexible, and makes sure you are actually talking about what people most care about.

Innovator’s compass

My next format is based on asking powerful questions. There’s more about how to do this here, but again it’s very simple. All you need to do is ask in turn about:

1. Observations: what’s happening and why?
2. Principles: what’s most important here?
3. Ideas: what could you try?
4. Experiments: what’s one thing you will do?

I suggest giving people 3-5 minutes to make notes on the first three areas individually, before sharing and discussing as a group. Then use dot voting to prioritise your ideas and flesh those out in the experiments stage.

Starting with observations and principles gets people thinking and leads to rich ideas for the third question. And ending with experiments helps you turn your ideas into practical actions.

Silent meetings

This works well when you want to discuss an existing idea in principle – perhaps someone has a proposal or a straw man that you want to get input on. The Silent Meeting Manifesto has lots of great tips for writing a good proposal for this.

Once you’ve got something concrete in writing, you meet to discuss, but you spend the first half of your meeting in silence. Everyone reads the document individually, adding comments and responding to others in writing. You only talk after everyone has finished reading and commenting, discussing any questions highlighted in comments that still need resolving.

I love this format. It’s much more efficient because everyone reading and writing at once is much faster than talking one by one. You end up having richer discussions, as the process of commenting means everyone has to really engage with the material so you start with a much clearer shared understanding of the issue. (No more endless recapping for people who didn’t do the pre-reading or who lost the thread during a boring presentation).

It’s also a good way to ensure more people participate, firstly because inputting in writing is more efficient, and secondly because lots of people find it easier to contribute that way than speaking up verbally in a potentially contentious discussion.

Those are three of my favourite group problem solving techniques. Do you have any others you would add?