AJ&Smart

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Introduction
It doesn’t matter where you work and what your job role is, if you

work with other people together as a team, you will always

encounter the same challenges:

● Unclear goals and miscommunication that cause busy work

and overtime

● Unstructured meetings that leave attendants tired, confused

and without clear outcomes

● Frustration builds up because internal challenges to

productivity are not addressed

● Sudden changes in priorities lead to a loss of focus and

momentum

● Muddled compromise takes the place of clear decision-

making, leaving everybody to come up with their own

interpretation.

In short, a lack of structure leads to a waste of time and effort,

projects that drag on for too long and frustrated, burnt out teams.

AJ&Smart has worked with some of the most innovative,

productive companies in the world. What sets their teams apart

from others is not better tools, bigger talent or more beautiful

offices. The secret sauce to becoming a more productive, more

creative and happier team is simple:

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Replace all open discussion or brainstorming with a

structured process that leads to more ideas, clearer decisions

and better outcomes.

When a good process provides guardrails and a clear path to

follow, it becomes easier to come up with ideas, make decisions

and solve problems.

This is why AJ&Smart created Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ). It’s a

simple and short, but powerful group exercise that can be run

either in-person, in the same room, or remotely with distributed

teams.

It’s based on the same simple, but powerful principles as the

Design Sprint:

1. Getting started is more important than being right

Rather than having endless, circular discussions about what

the one, “perfect” solution could be, we embrace an action-

oriented and experimental mindset and aim to make

progress fast, even if it’s based on assumptions.

2. We work together, alone

Instead of working in an open forum where the loudest,

most extroverted person can push their ideas on the group

until they get exhausted and give in, we create an

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 environment where every individual can contribute ideas,

without any group discussion or debate. All participants

work alone, but aligned on a common goal with the rest of

the team.

3. Don’t rely on creativity

Good ideas can come from anywhere. It doesn’t matter if

you consider yourself to be a creative person or not, our

process will help you to contribute ideas.

4. Tangible beats abstract

If you describe an idea to your team, everybody will have a

completely different interpretation of what you were trying

to communicate. This leads to a lot of unnecessary

confusion. Instead, when presenting our ideas, we make

them as tangible as possible, whether through sketching

them out, or showing comparable examples.

Since we introduced Lightning Decision Jam in 2017, it has

become immensely popular and it is now used by companies and

teams all over the world to give structure to meetings, retros and

brainstorming sessions. We are pleased to offer this revised and

improved edition of the LDJ facilitator guide that will tell you, step

by step, how to run your own LDJ session easily, whether it’s in-

person or remotely.

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In addition to this guide, we also offer videos demonstrating how

to use LDJs on our YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/ajsmart).

Overview: www.youtu.be/33hBnZzoFAg

1-Hour Guided Workshop: https://youtu.be/w9MvYDaA1Bk

Remote LDJ: https://youtu.be/0iVQYHHCTf0

The most important thing is: Get started! Wherever you are, LDJ

gives you a perfect tool to uncover challenges, leverage the

power of creative collaboration and find solutions.

So keep this guide handy and start looking for opportunities to

run LDJ!

Let's dive in!

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Overview

When should you use LDJ?

Use LDJ whenever a group of people needs to identify

challenges, solve problems and make decisions. It’s helpful to

frame LDJ with a broad topic, for example:

● Our checkout flow

● Our design management process

● Our office environment

● How we organise events

● Keeping up with our competition

● Improving the sales process

● Increasing growth

Who should participate?

The ideal group size strikes a balance between getting a wide

range of input and ideas and keeping the session short (it’s called

“Lightning” for a reason). The more people take part, the longer

LDJ will take.

The minimum group size to use in LDJ is 3, the sweet spot is 4 to 6

people. We usually recommend a maximum number of 8

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participants. More than that can make it challenging to keep the

group focused on the session.

If you want to run a session with a lot of people, it’s possible to

break them up into smaller groups. This is a great way to

popularise LDJs in the entire company and also a fun team

building exercise, but we recommend you do this only when you

are really comfortable running the exercise and you have co-

facilitators that can jump between groups to help you.

Who should facilitate the session?

It’s important that somebody takes the responsibility of facilitating

the session and driving the process. This can be either you, or any

other team member that is familiar with LDJs. As a facilitator, you

can take part in the process and contribute ideas, but you also

need to make sure that the entire group stays focused and

doesn’t get distracted or tangled up in discussions.

If you notice that a discussion is starting, you should (politely) shut

it down.

Here are a few phrases that can help you:

● “I don’t think we can come to a satisfying conclusion on this

right now, let’s come back to the exercise and revisit your

point afterwards.”

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 ● “I think this discussion might not be relevant for other
people in the group right now, can we move on?”

● “If you feel strongly about this, take note of this on a sticky
note and let the group have a chance to think about

solutions together.”

● “We don’t have much time left for the exercise, I’d rather
have us move on and discuss this later, if it’s okay.”

● “I know it feels strange doing this in silence, but it’s

important to let everybody get their ideas out without

influencing each other.”

How much time do you need?

Depending on the size of the group and the amount of problems

you are tackling, LDJ can take as little as 30 mins and as long as

1.5 hours.

The durations for each part of LDJ are guidelines. We suggest that

you stick to them if this is the first time you are facilitating LDJ, but

you might want to adapt them to suit your situation better.

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How is Lightning Decision Jam structured?

1. Start on a positive note

2. Capture problems

3. Prioritise problems

4. Reframe the problems as standardised challenges

5. Ideate a mass of solutions

6. Prioritise solutions

7. Decide what to execute on

8. Make solutions actionable

What materials do you need?

If you want to run LDJ in-person, with the entire team in one

location, you’ll need this:

● Rectangular sticky notes in yellow

● Square sticky notes in two different colours. We like pink and

blue.

● Dot stickers in two different colours, we like red and green.

● A big whiteboard or sufficient wall space. A window can

work in a pinch, too.

● Sharpies or another type of felt tip pen (preferably with

broad tips to keep notes brief and easily readable)

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 ● A timer, ideally one that’s visible to the entire group, for
example a Time Timer. But using a smartphone alarm is okay

as well.

● A nice playlist of focus music, this is the one we use at

AJ&Smart, feel free use it! (AJ&Smart Workshops on Spotify).

How do you run a remote LDJ?

Since we first introduced Lightning Decision Jam, remote work

has gone mainstream. Today it’s normal to work in a distributed

team that’s spread all over the world, and it has a lot of

advantages. However, working as a remote team also increases

the potential for miscommunication, losing track of who is

working on what, and what challenges everybody encounters.

The good news is that LDJ is perfect for aligning teams, and it’s

easy – and fun – to run remotely, even if you have never facilitated

a remote workshop before. In fact, remote LDJs might be the

easiest way to gain experience as a facilitator because setting

them up is very simple, and all the outcomes are already in a

digital format and can be easily put into kanban boards, project

trackers or digital roadmaps.

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If you want to run LDJ remotely with your distributed team, this is

what you need:

● A virtual whiteboard with real-time collaboration, for

example Miro or Mural.

Miro and Mural are currently the most popular virtual

whiteboards and they offer you everything you need to run

the entire LDJ: Endless virtual sticky notes, infinite

workspace, timer and voting features. But there’s no

shortage of amazing tools, so just try which suits your

situation and environment best.

If you don’t want to introduce a new tool just yet, you can

also get creative and use other tools that allow real-time

collaboration, for example Google Slides or Figma.

If you want to give Miro or Mural a shot, you can use

workspace templates that are already perfectly set up to run

a remote LDJ. You can find the templates here:

For Miro: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kt1PIic=/

For Mural: https://mural.co/templates/ldj

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 ● A video conferencing tool like Zoom, Webex, Skype or
Google Meet.

We like Zoom because it handles large groups of

participants really well without any performance problems,

but just use whatever your team is most comfortable with. If

you use Miro, you can also use the built-in video

conferencing feature.

That’s it! The instructions for running LDJ are exactly the same, whether

you do it remotely or in-person.

Now, let’s get started!

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Step 1

Start on a positive note

Time: 10 min

Materials

● Square sticky notes (pick a consistent colour)

● Sharpies or another type of felt tip pen (preferably with
broad tips to keep notes brief and easily readable)

Preparation

If you are running an in-person session, start by creating a

sailboard canvas on the whiteboard: draw a big square and split it

horizontally in the middle by a wavy line. Make sure there’s

enough space for a good number of sticky notes in each half of

the square, depending on the group size.

The wavy line represents an ocean’s waterline. On top of it, draw a

sailboat with billowing sail in the top half of the square, and an

anchor that hangs down below the water in the bottom half of the

square.

The top half of the square (with the wind in the sail) represents

things that are working well, and the bottom half (the anchor)

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represents problems, challenges and things that are holding us

back.

If you are running LDJ remotely, just use our Miro template,

where we have already set up the perfect workspace!

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Running the exercise

Before we focus on challenges and problems, we want to have a

nice and easy start by collecting everything that works well. This

helps set a positive mood and gives the team room to share and

celebrate successes, and also serves as a warm-up.

Start by framing the topic of the session briefly.

Now, everybody in the team works on their own and in silence,

without discussion.

For the next 4 minutes, each participant writes down and collects

everything that works well, in regards to the topic of the session,

each item on a new sticky note.

Encourage the team to try and write as many items as possible.

These can be anything from “the team gets along well” to “the

quality of our designs lately has been really high” – really anything

that people are happy about and want to continue.

Once the 4 minutes are up, each participant will have a pile of

sticky notes in front of them, and the group will take turns to

present their positives back to the group.

To get started, the facilitator picks one participant to start

presenting their positives and sticking them to the top half of the

sailboat canvas, while briefly reading out each sticky note. Each

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participant has about 1-2 minutes to go through their sticky notes

and place them on the sailboat.

While each participant presents, nobody else in the group is

allowed to speak or interrupt, unless they don’t understand

something and need to ask a clarifying question. Make sure this

doesn’t spark any discussions.

Going forward, the positive sticky notes won’t be used anymore,

as they have served their purpose well - to set up the stage for the

rest of LDJ in a positive way and to warm up the group.

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Step 2

Capture problems
Time: 5 min

Materials

● Square sticky notes (same colour as in the last step)

● Sharpies or another type of felt tip pen (preferably with
broad tips to keep notes brief and easily readable)

Running the exercise

Now, everybody spends 4 minutes to collect all problems,

frustrations, mistakes or concerns that come to mind in regards to

the topic. Use one sticky note per item.

Like in the first step, we do this together, alone - everybody works

on their own and in silence. Encourage the team to try and write

as many negatives as possible.

These can be anything from “I don’t feel like we’re making

progress” to “I feel like project X is getting more attention than my

project”, really anything that bothers us.

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This time, the team does not read out their sticky notes. This way,

we avoid anyone feeling attacked or put on the spot. We let the

sticky notes speak for themselves.

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Instead, when the 4 minutes is up, the facilitator tells everyone to

place all their sticky notes in the bottom half of the sailboat, at the

same time.

This should take about 1 minute.

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Step 3

Prioritise problems
Time: 3 min

Materials

● Dot stickers (pick the colour you have most stickers of)

Running the exercise

Now, everybody votes on the negatives they consider to be most

important and relevant to solve, individually and without

discussion.

Everybody gets 3 votes as dot stickers. Don’t vote on positives,

only on negatives. They can vote on their own sticky notes and

can also put more than one sticker on a negative, if they feel

strongly about it.

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Once the 3 minutes is up, the moderator quickly takes the voted

problems and arranges them in order of priority. Usually this takes

the approximate shape of a Christmas tree or triangle:

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Step 4

Reframe the problems as standardised

challenges
Time: 3 min

Materials

● Rectangular sticky notes (yellow)

● Sharpies or another type of felt tip pen (preferably with

broad tips to keep notes brief and easily readable)

Running the exercise

Now, the moderator reframes the top-voted problem as

standardised challenge that helps the group to come up with a

mass of solutions.

We will phrase the challenge as “How Might We” (HMW)

questions.

The phrasing might sound weird, but it’s a very useful technique

to frame challenges that is used by P&G, IDEO, Google and

Facebook. Here is what it means:

● HOW assumes we can take action and fi nd solutions.

● MIGHT suggests there is more than one possible solution.

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 ● WE suggests that we work together and build on each
other’s ideas.

Let’s look at an example. The top voted sticky note here says “I

have no idea what’s happening on project x”. Because many

people have voted on it, we can see it’s clearly an issue many

people are having.

Rephrasing the sticky note as “How Might We” allows us to turn it

into a question that people can find answers to, without already

prescribing a solution. Here is how that problem might be

rewritten into a more general challenge:

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Optional:

If you’d like to find solutions to more than one challenge, repeat

this step for all prioritised negatives. Work your way down from

the problem with the highest number of votes, turning each of

them into a separate HMW.

Be aware that the more challenges the group works on, the more

you dilute the group’s focus on the highest-voted negative. This is

why we recommend ignoring all negatives with just one vote, and

having a maximum of 4-5 challenges.

Any problems you decide not to solve now can go into a problem

backlog and can be looked at on another day.

Once you have rephrased all negatives as HMWs, continue with

step 5.

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Step 5

Ideate a mass of solutions

Time: 6 min

Materials

● Square sticky notes (the colour you didn’t use yet)

● Sharpies or another type of felt tip pen (preferably with

broad tips to keep notes brief and easily readable)

Running the exercise

Place the HMW sticky note where everybody can see it.

Now, each team member is given 5 minutes to write as many

potential solutions to the HMW as possible. This is done in silence,

without discussion, to ensure that we get a broad range of

individual viewpoints. Use one sticky note per idea.

The facilitator should tell the team that we are aiming for quantity

over quality – we can curate later. It’s better to have a mass of half-

baked ideas, with one or two good ones, than just a handful of

mediocre ones.

Solutions don’t have to be written in any particular format, but

people must be able to understand them from reading them

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alone, as they will not be presented. This ensures that each idea is

judged on its own merit, not by who the best presenter in the

group is.

Once the 5 minutes are up, everybody places their sticky notes to

the working area (whether it’s a wall, a whiteboard, a window, or a

digital canvas), without any discussion. Do this quickly, there’s no

need to be neat or sort them. Just make sure they don’t cover

each other and remain readable.

This should only require 1 minute.

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Step 6

Prioritise solutions
Time: 5 min

Materials

● Dot stickers (the colour you didn’t use yet)

Running the exercise

Here we do another round of voting.

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Each participant has 6 dot stickers and 4 minutes to vote on the

solutions they think would best solve the HMW.

Once time is up and everybody has had a chance to use all of

their stickers, the facilitator sorts and reorganises solutions by

their number of votes. You can ignore anything that only got one

vote.

You will now have something that looks like this:

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Step 7

Decide what to execute on

Time: 10 min

Materials

● A big whiteboard or magic paper (in-person)

● Whiteboard marker (in-person)

Preparation

For this part of the exercise we need to create an Effort/ Impact

Scale. This is a square box that is bound by two axes at the left

and bottom edge.

The horizontal “Effort” axis that runs along the square’s bottom

edge estimates how much time and work we need to implement

the idea (from “very little” to “a lot”).

The vertical “Impact” axis along the left edge is the magnitude to

which we think the solution would fix our problem (from “not at

all” to “completely”).

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Then, draw two lines through the middle and centre of the square

to slice it into four quadrants:

Running the exercise

Now it’s time to decide which solutions offer the biggest

“return on investment” with the least amount of time and

effort.

To ensure that you utilise your time efficiently, use the Effort/

Impact scale to determine which solutions you should implement

right away, which should be turned into a bigger project, and

which you should shelve for now.

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As a facilitator, you need to be ready to step in and manage the

group at this point, as this is the moment when discussion tends

to open up.

The facilitator now takes each solution, starting with the highest

voted one, and adds them to the Effort/ Impact Scale.

Here’s how it works:

1. Start with “Impact”:

a. Take the sticky note with the top-voted solution…

b. …hover it over the centre of the Effort/ Impact Scale…

c. … and simply ask “is the impact higher or lower?”

2. The facilitator then moves the sticky note up or down the

“Impact” axis until the team members are happy with the

placement. Often some small discussions break out here, so

the moderator has to be diligent in finding a consensus and

stopping any conversations extending past 20 seconds. The

placement on the axis doesn’t have to be perfect, an

approximation is fine. The important thing is what quadrant

the sticky note is in!

3. Once the impact has been determined, use the same

method for “Effort”, asking “Is the effort higher or lower?”

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 Move the sticky note left or right, until the group is happy

with the placement.

4. Repeat the process for the other top-voted solutions

Once the top voted sticky-notes have been added to the scale,

you’ll have something that looks like this:

When you look at the yellow “sweet spot” on the top left, you have

a clear view on which high impact solutions can be executed on

and tested very quickly.

On the top right quadrant, you can see high impact solutions that

will take more time and effort.

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You can now mark all sticky notes in the top left quadrant with a

contrasting dot so we can identify them later.

Here’s a simple way to categorise and define each of the four

quadrants to help you decide how and when to action all the top

solutions:

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Step 8

Make solutions actionable

Time: 5 min

Materials

● Rectangular sticky notes (yellow)

● Sharpies or another type of felt tip pen (preferably with

broad tips to keep notes brief and easily readable)

Running the exercise

The facilitator now takes the solutions in the Effort/ Impact Scale’s

“sweet-spot” quadrant and asks the team to come up with three

action steps for testing the solution.

The person who wrote the solution can start with a suggestion.

Alternatively, each participant can write their three action steps on

individual sticky notes and have the group decide on the key

steps through voting.

Don’t overthink it. The action steps shouldn’t outline the entire

solution. A small version to test and validate the idea is sufficient

at this stage!

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The first step should be something easy and frictionless,

something which can be done right after LDJ is over. This also

utilises the momentum of LDJ and motivates people to get the

ball rolling.

A good guiding principle is that the action steps should take no

longer than one to two weeks until completion.

Here’s an example: When we ran LDJ on how we might

evangelise Design Sprints and make them more popular, we

came up with the idea of a free meet-up event where we

introduce the process to people who work in tech companies.

The first step was incredibly simple - we sent an invite to all our

contacts in the Berlin tech scene, including a time, date and rough

agenda.

This took very little time and effort. It was just an email! But even

without having done any real event planning yet, or renting a

venue, or buying drinks and snacks, we had generated a huge

amount of interest and created a deadline for ourselves.

At the end of the week, we held our first event with 30 people at

our own office. Eventually, this small MVP of the initial idea turned

into a very successful series of events that we ran for two years,

and that eventually became the core of our Design Sprint training.

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Once the group is committed to action steps for a solution,

capture them on rectangular sticky notes and place them next to

the solution idea:

At the end, document the results of LDJ, either by taking photos

or digitising them, and assign each solution to one team member

who will be responsible for executing the action steps, either

alone or with the help of their teammates.

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After LDJ
Once the team runs off to execute on each solution, you should

schedule short, individual check-ins with each responsible team

member so they can give you quick status updates.

These check-ins should not take longer than 10 minutes and really

just consist of each responsible person describing what action

steps they have completed, what they are working on now and if

they have encountered any blockers they might need help with.

You should be careful to give the team the space to do their work

undistracted, so schedule these meetings accordingly, either in

the morning or at the end of the day, or give them the option to

email or slack you a few bullet points as a summary.

After one or two weeks, bring the group back together and run

another LDJ as a retrospective on the progress and results. You

can run it exactly like the first one, you just need to specify the

topic. For example, you could ask “What happened with the

results of the last LDJ?” and let the group collect positive results

and successes, negatives and obstacles. This way, you keep up the

momentum and build a routine of running LDJs with your team.

Don’t get discouraged if some solutions end up not having the

impact everybody hoped for after a few weeks. Not every solution

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will fix the problem, but that’s the nature of experiments - you

learn through failure, and that’s a good outcome! It’s better to

fail fast and change direction than to not get started at all. You

have invested very little time compared to what you would have

lost due to inertia.

The important thing is to build momentum and get the team used
to having a bias towards action, instead of overthinking and
endlessly discussing everything.

If the problem still persists, revisit alternative solutions or run a

new LDJ on it.

As for the solutions that didn’t make it into the “sweet-spot”, you
can put all high impact, high effort solutions from the top-right
quadrant of the Effort/ Impact Scale into your backlog, so they
don’t get forgotten. What you might see happening is that the
sweet-spot actions actually end up solving problems in a way that
the higher effort solutions become obsolete!

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Conclusion
That’s it!

In a short amount of time, your team defined important

challenges, identified potential solutions and prioritised what to
execute on – almost entirely without discussions!

We use the same principles LDJ is based on for everything we do

at AJ&Smart – from planning events, improving our office space,
to designing new workshops.

Cutting out ineffective, circular discussions and replacing them

with structured progress is a powerful way to boost a team’s
productivity and happiness, and we want as many people as
possible to experience a better way of solving problems.

So try out Lightning Decision Jam yourself and spread the word!

If you have any questions, or if you just want to tell us how you use
LDJs, contact us on YouTube (www.youtube.com/ajsmart),
Instagram (@ajsmartdesign) or write us an email
(hello@ajsmart.com)!

Happy Workshopping!

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If you enjoyed our Lightning Decision Jam booklet, feel free
to share it with anybody who might find it helpful!

For more information about Design Sprints, strategy and

innovation, follow us on our social media channels:

In case you are reading this as a printout, here are the full
links to our social media channels:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aj&smart/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/ajsmart

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ajsmartdesign/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ajandsmart/

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Notes

Use this section to include any notes, comments or ideas you

have about running Lightning Decision Jam successfully.

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