BVD Experience

What is BVD?

BVD stands for Brainstorm, Vote, and Discuss. This is a process to narrow and focus on a specific solution. The idea being that there are likely to be several solutions, and trying to adequately discuss all of them is very difficult and unproductive, especially when there are time constraints.

First, the teams brainstorms on an open question, but one that hopefully can lead to direct action. Then, all the ideas are collected on a whiteboard or some central location and each team member votes for his or her top two choices. Finally, the direction for the rest of the meeting is dictated by the popular choices.

Brain-storm

Vote

Discuss

Background

After learning about this, I wanted to try it at work. I work with a team which is attempting to improve the quality of the of an engineering tool. I heard a bunch of people griping, suggesting and pleading for all sorts of ways to accomplish this. However, we weren't acting as a team with a unified direction. So, I thought this was a perfect scenario to try out BVD. I explained a little bit about this process, then gave the team the question:

"What's a singular action we can take to improve the quality of [product]?"

Disclaimer: this whole experience is about something I did at work, concerning an internal product. I highly doubt there is any sensitive information at risk here, but I'm purposely not including any concrete information about the actual thing we're working on. All you need to know is that it is "software".

Experience

Overall, I think the process went very well, and the framing of the discussion really helped keep the team on topic and also put all these things in context. The items not receiving votes were quickly forgotten about; mainly because they were far from our biggest issues. So, instead of the discussion being a cornucopia of what is bothering everyone, we got that out of the way when brainstorming and got to tackling a few of the major issues.

The process wasn't perfect. For one, I think I let the brainstorming take too long, and I have a book of sticky notes with items we didn't even get on the board (but the fact we still had a worthwhile discussion lends to the power of this model).

Only the Paranoid Survive.
Andy Grove, Intel founder and legend.

I work with some clever engineers that like to work in a world of knowns, so giving them this fairly open-ended task led to all kinds of questions right away. This led to many of them making suggestions that were really items they should have written down on a sticky note, in the guise of trying to understand what was being asked of them. I think this issue would go away on its own as the team gets used to the exercise. We're a paranoid bunch, and not having clear direction gets people on-edge (I purposefully withheld some of what we were doing to avoid having to do a huge overview of the exercise).

After reviewing all the sticky notes from the discussion (even the ones we didn't even get on the board), I noticed a couple things. One, there was more repetition than I expected. The major issues were things that a majority of the group had written down.

Second, there were some sticky notes that definitely hit on some office politics. Thankfully, I think I phrased the question to avoid these topics, but I could have easily not done this. It could have been something like "If you could change something about the team, what would it be?" In that case, I shutter to think of the ideas I would've gotten. Most likely, the discussion would have been far less productive, and I would have had to answer for getting people to just voice some personal attacks. Regardless, phrasing the question at the beginning is very important.

I hope we can repeat this exercise in a month or so and try again. If we've made progress, we'll probably get a brand new list, and certainly a change of votes.