Dot Voting

Dot voting is very useful to gain a majority decision and involves each member of a group or team to cast their votes onto a selection of ideas, usually written on post-it notes.

Tasks

• Ask the team to look at each of the ideas or post-it notes and understand them. (Sometimes it may be appropriate for the author of the idea to provide a brief description of the idea and its context.)
• Next ask the team to cast their votes on the items that are most important to them. This is done by simply drawing up to 3 dots on the post-it notes that are most valuable to them.
• Next order the items by the number of votes (dots) each has received

A downside of this technique is that it can encourage “herding” as more votes are cast on a particular item, then this may encourage more team members to also cast their vote with the majority on this item. This can be useful when you need to form a majority decision or need a clear distinction between higher and lower, but may not cater for the outlier.