The Decide Sequence

You've got a wall full of ideas and a decision to make. Most teams make it the worst possible way. They open the floor.

Someone talks. Usually the most senior person, because that's how rooms work. The nodding starts. Every idea after that bends toward the first one said out loud, and forty-five minutes later the room has "decided" the thing the boss leaned toward in the first two minutes. Nobody planned it that way. It just happens, every time, because humans carry a strong authority bias. We weight the opinion of the person we read as the expert, or the person who signs the checks, and we do it without noticing.

There's a name for the idea that wins this way. The HiPPO: the Highest Paid Person's Opinion. And the HiPPO is not, reliably, the best idea in the room. It's just the loudest one with the most rank behind it.

This page is a sequence built to make that impossible.

It comes from Jake Knapp's Sprint (Knapp with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz, the team at GV, Google's venture arm), where it's the Wednesday of the five-day design sprint, the day you narrow a stack of solution sketches down to the one or two you'll actually prototype. A solution sketch is just each person's idea drawn out on a single page. Five steps, run in order, most of them silent: Art Museum, Heat Map, Speed Critique, Straw Poll, Supervote. You can run the whole thing in about an hour.

The spine of all five is one idea, and it's worth saying plainly before you run a single step.

Decide in silence, then talk

Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist, puts it simply: ask everyone to share their views before you turn to the HiPPO. Get the quiet expert's read on the table before the senior voice anchors the room, because once it anchors, you can't un-anchor it.

This sequence is that idea turned into a recipe. The whole first half happens with nobody talking. You look at the ideas alone. You mark what's strong alone. Only after everyone has formed their own read, on the wall, in silence, does the room open its mouth.

Discussion-first rewards whoever speaks first and loudest. Silence-first means an idea has to earn its support on what's actually on the paper, not on who's standing next to it. The dots are the only reliable way to give the junior engineer's idea the same weight as the VP's.

One more piece does the same job. The ideas go up anonymous. No names on the sketches. If you're running this off the back of the Four-Step Sketch, the sketching method that produces those single-page ideas, that rule's already baked in (it's one of the five solution-sketch rules). If you're deciding among ideas that came in some other way, strip the names before they hit the wall. A name is an anchor. The point is to judge the idea, not the person.

Now, the five steps.

1. Art Museum

Timebox: a few minutes to hang it all, then let the room walk.

Tape every idea up where the whole room can see it. Knapp calls it the Art Museum because that's exactly the feeling you want. A gallery wall, every piece up at once, people moving down the line and taking it in.

If the ideas came out of a sprint or a brainstorm, hang the solution sketches gallery-style. Tape them to a long wall, or pin them to a shared board if you're remote. One nice move is to order them along the customer's journey, so the wall reads left to right the way a customer would actually move through the problem.

No talking yet. No pitching. The author does not stand next to their sketch and narrate it. The whole point of the next steps is that a good idea explains itself, so this is the first test of that. Everyone just walks the gallery and reads. Forming a first read, nothing on paper yet.

2. Heat Map

Timebox: silent, roughly five to ten minutes depending on how many ideas are up.

Still no talking. Everyone reviews every idea on their own and marks the parts they find compelling with small dots, right on the sketch, next to the specific piece they like. No limit here. Use as many dots as you have reactions. Not a vote for the whole sketch. A dot on each element that's working.

Where the dots cluster, that's heat. That's the room telling you, without a single word spoken, which parts of which ideas are pulling. Got a concern or a question instead of a "I like this"? Write it on a sticky and post it under the sketch. Those go into the next step too.

By the end you have a wall that's already half-read itself. The strong ideas are visibly hot. The weak ones are bare. And you got there before anyone could talk a mediocre idea into looking good, or talk a strong one down because of who drew it.

3. Speed Critique

Timebox: about three minutes per idea. Hard cap.

Now you talk, but in a structure, on a clock, in a fixed order. The structure is the whole point. Drop it and you're back in the open-mic meeting you came here to avoid.

The facilitator (you, if you called the meeting) narrates each idea out loud and calls out its standout parts. You don't have to hunt for them. The Heat Map's dot clusters point right at them. The team adds anything the facilitator missed. The stickied concerns and questions get read and addressed. Have someone capture the standout ideas as you go, so nothing good evaporates. That can be you if you're running this solo, or a second person if you've got one to spare.

And the creator speaks last. Always last. They get the final word to cover anything the room didn't catch on its own. If a sketch needed its author to explain it before anyone understood it, that's data. An idea that only works when the person who made it is in the room to defend it is an idea that won't survive contact with a real customer.

Three minutes an idea. When the timer goes, you move. The clock is what keeps the loudest voice from filibustering the wall.

4. Straw Poll

Timebox: three votes each, five-minute timer.

Give everyone a set number of votes. The book runs three. Set a five-minute timer, and everyone votes silently, at the same time, by putting their dots on the idea, or the specific piece of an idea, they'd want to test for real.

Then, one at a time, each person says out loud why they voted the way they did. Quick. A sentence.

Two things to be clear about. This is silent voting, same as the Heat Map, so nobody watches the room and drifts their dots toward where the senior people are voting. Remote, this is the part you have to protect on purpose. A lot of online tools show live vote counts, which is exactly the anchoring you're trying to kill, so use a setting that hides votes until everyone has cast, or have people drop their dots and reveal together. And it's a straw poll, which means it's advisory. It's the room's collective read, loud and clear, but it is not the final call. Most dots tells you where the energy is. It doesn't pull the trigger.

That's the next step's job.

5. Supervote

Timebox: one minute. One person.

There's one person in the room who owns this decision. Knapp calls them the Decider, whoever actually has the authority and the accountability for what gets built. Often that's the senior person, and that's fine. That was never the problem.

The problem was the senior person deciding first, before anyone else's read was on the table. So the Decider gets the supervotes, a small set of bigger dots in their own color (the book runs three, with the Decider's initials on them) that stand out from everyone else's. Those are the votes that carry the call, and the Decider casts them last. After the gallery. After the silent heat map. After the critique. After the straw poll has shown them exactly where the room landed and why.

What gets supervoted wins. Those are the one or two ideas you carry forward, into a storyboard (the step-by-step plan for the prototype) if you're inside a design sprint, into experiments if you're not.

Look at what just happened to the HiPPO. You didn't pretend the senior person has no more authority than anyone else. They have more, and they used it. You just made them use it dead last, with the whole room's honest read already in front of them. Same person, same authority. The only thing that changed is the order, and the order is everything.

When to reach for it

This is the deciding half of two bigger things in this part, and it slots into both.

Inside a Decision Jam, a one-meeting way to go from problem to experiments, this is how you narrow the pile of solutions the room generated down to the one or two experiments you walk out with. Inside a Design Sprint, the five-day version, it is the Wednesday. The bridge from a wall of solution sketches to the single idea you'll prototype the next day.

You can also just lift it out and run it on its own, any time a group has to choose among a pile of options and the pile is bigger than a quick conversation can handle. A stack of campaign concepts. Six approaches to a redesign. Eight names. The rough floor is about six candidates. Below that, two or three real options, just talk it through. The machinery here earns its keep when the pile is big enough that an open discussion would default to noise, or to the HiPPO. Anything where you've got a room of people with opinions and you want the decision to belong to the room instead of to whoever talks first.

One requirement it does carry. You need the relevant people together at the same time, in a room or on a shared board, for the hour it takes. If your decision-makers are never available at once, this isn't the tool for that decision. The method runs on a live, shared read of the wall.

What good looks like

You spent about an hour. You walked in with a wall of ideas and walked out with one or two, picked.

And here's the tell that it worked. The whole room owns the decision. Not because everybody got their way. They didn't, the Decider still decided. The room owns it because every person got their actual read onto the wall before anyone could anchor them, saw their dots counted next to everyone else's, and watched the call get made out in the open with all of that in view. People back a decision they helped shape, even when it isn't the one they'd have made alone.

Compare that to the thing you replaced. A debate that ran long, rewarded the loudest voice, ended where the HiPPO leaned at minute two, and left half the room quietly unconvinced and uncommitted. Same hour. Wildly different output.

That's the trade. An hour of structure, in exchange for a decision the team will actually carry, instead of a decision the team will quietly let fail.

The deeper why behind all of this, the authority bias, the HiPPO, how a leader keeps from being the anchor in the first place, is the leadership work in Part 01. This page is the mechanics. Run them in order, keep the first half silent, and the loudest voice stops winning by default.