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Monday, May 07, 2007

The Power of The Six Disciplines 100-Point Exercise

The essence of strategy formulation is making difficult trade-off decisions - saying "yes" to a few things (choices of what to do), and saying "no" to other things (choices of what not to do).



Our Six Disciplines Leadership Centers teach our clients how to use an innovative exercise called the "100 Point Exercise."



The purpose of the 100-Point exercise is to help a group of people use their individual judgment to prioritize choices, and then aggregate those individual judgments into a group perspective.



The exercise is particularly useful whenever you are trying to get consensus about "deciding what's important."



The benefit of the Six Disciplines 100-Point Exercise is that it can bring order to a familiar process (getting consensus) - and it saves an incredible amount of time.



Here's how it works:



  • Brainstorm on ideas on a given issue. (In the example below, we look at renewing the Mission Statement of the company with the company leadership team)
  • Each team member has 100 points to "vote" with, and in this case, cannot vote for any item with less than 10 points.
  • Tally each individual's scores and review the distribution of points.
  • Encourage each person to articulate why they voted as they did
  • To get closer consensus, repeat the process. Almost inevitably, scores with become closer in range the second time through

This process works well on paper, but comes to life within the Six Disciplines System, as the exercise is automated and automatically updated as each person casts their votes, and results can be displayed in descending order, based on the highest-lowest scores for easy analysis.

BOTTOMLINE: The power of the Six Disciplines 100-Point Exercise is that it can (and should!) be used regularly throughout your business in such situations as:

  • Brainstorming
  • SWOT analyses
  • Renewing mission, vision, values and strategic position
Read the complete explanation of the Six Disciplines 100-Point Exercise in Chapter 8, Discipline V: Innovate Purposefully, in the top-rated book "Six Disciplines for Excellence."

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