We were in Vegas. It was the first time my friends visit sin city and it was almost 2300. There are so many things to do that we were paralyzed: everyone wanted to do something different. That night, I tried for the first time a process I’d use for the rest of my career.

If you ask entrepreneurs what prevents any FAANG to crush their start-up companies, one of the common answers would probably be “speed”. Quite obvious. Giant companies take a lot of time to decide on anything and they usually have very long approval process, when start-up companies, since they don’t have anything to lose, can just code, commit and go live. But as these companies grow bigger, decisions become harder: now, they have something to lose.

One of the biggest pains in a lot of start-up companies during their growth is how to decide. On paper, it looks simple: there are many canvas or frameworks existing to help to decide. But almost all of them -at least the good ones- are based on the fact you got some sort of data or metrics already. They help to decide once you already made a first decision. For instance, in a product iteration framework, you define the different hypothesis, the core assumptions, the most critical assumptions, the validation method and the validation criteria. Then, you launch the product and measure everything according to the plan. Based on the metrics collected, you decide.

But what happens when it takes longer to test? What happens when the decision is at the strategic level? And what happens if 3 product managers want to do 3 different products, which one to start first if there is only resource to do one at the time? How do you decide on your first iteration? How do you initialize?

For many years, I was looking for a good answer. I tried many different things from democracy (everyone votes) to pure tyranny (the highest title wins). None was satisfying.

Until one day, I listened to a podcast on NPR about “fair division”. This reminded me the different articles I read about Game Theory. And since I was in Vegas, it was game on.

The process is divided in 3 steps: 1) Initiation, 2) Evaluation and 3) Decision.

Let’s assume we have 3 parties {A, B, C} and they all disagree with each other.

1. During the initiation phase, every individual writes down their ideas in no specific order. Once done, they give their list to the other one without any discussion. Each should have the list of another individual
2. Reading the list, each individual puts a value on the different ideas they got in hand. For instance: from 0 to 2 (2 being the strongest, the priority). Again, there is no communication at this point
3. Once everyone is done evaluating the other’s ideas, everyone shows their work and every item is now merged into an unique meta-list. For each idea, we take the sum of the points that people distributed during phase 2 and we order all the ideas from the most points to the least

At this stage, we define a short time limit. For instance, in our case, we set 5 minutes. Reading the meta-list, whatever idea got the most point becomes the priority. The second one goes second. And the third one goes next etc.

The different parties can discuss if there is different ideas have the same score. But if there is no clear winner after the time limit, a coin toss happens and the winner gets to choose everything.

It took us 10 minutes in total to decide on our plans for the night. The funny thing is we spent almost an hour before to debate on what to do first but the outcome of the process showed that we actually all agreed on what is the most important thing to do in the first place.

Following that episode, I decided to apply it at work. Starting with my own team, one of the most experienced and largest in the company. And as you have probably guessed, when you put a lot of experienced people in the same room, this is where long debates usually happen. So it is the perfect environment to try this process and see how it goes.

The result was interesting. After few sessions, people started to game the process by taking in account what the other people may put. This rapidly becomes a “A knows that B knows that C knows that A knows that B knows etc.”. I was initially afraid this would drive my team to not cooperate well but turned out, it was the complete opposite.

There were also instances where 2 people had only one idea each so it went straight to the coin toss but they took it curiously well because they both understood it is much better to try something and maybe win than not doing anything and for sure lose.

Another funny observation is that people were more afraid of leaving “luck” to decide “everything” than to reach an agreement on specific points. In instances where there is no clear winner, the different individuals were so afraid that the one winning the coin toss will decide on everything, that they try really hard to reach an agreement before the end of the time limit.

It is still too soon to have a definite judgement on the quality of this process. My next step is to spread it to other departments and, more ambitious, to apply it at the company-level during cross-functional discussions. I expect to tweak it a bit over time but one thing is clear: if you are in Vegas with your friends and don’t know what to do first, now, you know what to do first!