Technique

Dot voting is a participatory decision-making process where participants use dots to vote for their preferred options. It’s widely used in workshops, brainstorming sessions, and collaborative meetings to quickly identify the most popular or important ideas.

Benefits:

• Quick and Easy: Dot voting is a fast way to gauge the group’s preferences without lengthy discussions.
• Visual and Transparent: The results are immediately visible, making the decision-making process transparent and easy to understand.
• Inclusive: It allows all participants to have a voice and contribute to the prioritization process.
• Encourages Engagement: The tactile nature of placing dots can be more engaging than verbal discussions alone.

Facilitation

1. Distribute Dots: Give each participant a set number of dots (stickers or markers). The number of dots per person can vary, but a common approach is to provide 3-5 dots each.
2. Vote: participants place their dots on the ideas they find most valuable, promising, or important. They can distribute their dots across multiple ideas or place all dots on one idea if they feel strongly about it.
3. Count the Votes: After everyone has voted, count the number of dots on each idea. The ideas with the most dots are considered the highest priority or most popular.
4. Discuss Results and confirm agreement: Review the results with the group. Discuss why certain ideas received more votes and explore any insights or patterns that emerge from the voting.

Variations

Money voting

Tell the participants that they will be the CEO (or some other decider role) of their company. They will make the decision where to spend the money but they have to decide wisely:

• Think about the value they create for users
• as well as for the business.

(Depending on the context of the exercise, you can allow participants to shortly discuss with other participants their strategy before they make their investment.)

As a facilitator you prepare some fake paper money the participants can distribute. If you hand out money staggered such as 100,000 / 50,000 / 10,000 EUR participants have to plan their investments even more carefully.