Collaboratively Mapping Trade-offs for Decision-Making

(This is a hands-on lab with limited capacity)

Have you ever needed to make an important decision and advocate for the best solution? What if your stakeholders all think they want something different? How do you handle unexpected changes in requirements? Why does that happen? Ideally, we'd always want all stakeholders to have a shared understanding of the problem and its circumstances. But what if stakeholders and decision owners agree on the information, but everyone still comes up with a different result? Why is that? And what can you do about that?

This is where trade-offs come in! Every solution has tradeoffs: the cost, risks, benefits and potential pitfalls of each decision. Recognizing and agreeing on those tradeoffs can help us navigate the available options, and their complexity – so that we can make an actionable decision in a timely manner.

This workshop is designed to do two things: First, introduce a framework for bringing those trade-offs to light and weighing them collaboratively. Then, guide you through utilizing it to reach actionable decisions. By understanding, discussing and outlining the trade-offs, organizations can make better decisions.

The components of the workshop are as follows:

• Working together to understand and articulate the problem statement
• How to illustrate viable options
• How to discover the tradeoffs
• How do handle unexpected changes
• How to describe the practical needs and cost behind options collaboratively
• How to present the result for executive buy-in for systemic change

Participants will be divided into groups and given a problem statement simulating a real-world scenario. They will then work together to figure out possible solutions and outline the trade-offs of each path forward. As with any realistic simulation, there will be surprises!