Fist to five decision

Main Takeaways Reading Time: 5 minutes Five-to-Fold is a method for effective, holistic group decision-making. It invites, honors, and integrates all individual perspectives. Five-to-Fold is intended as a process for genuine decision-making, rather than for gathering feedback or informing a decision to be made elsewhere. In its short version, Five-to-Fold is the well known Thumb Voting resp. In the long version, Five-to-Fold is an elaborate decision-making facilitation process. A major strength of Five-to-Fold is that it invites, honors, and integrates all individual perspectives, including intuitive "minority" perspectives, into practical decision-making in clear, effective ways grounded in individual responsibility.

Browse topics. In their role as facilitators, Scrum Masters, agile coaches, product owners, and others often need to help teams achieve consensus. This could be a product owner getting a group of stakeholders to agree on a significant objective for the coming period. Or it could be a Scrum Master wrapping up a retrospective and seeking agreement on which improvements team members to want to pursue. I want to share four consensus-building techniques for these and similar situations. Dot voting is a useful approach when a group wants to select multiple options from a larger list.

Fist to five, also called fist of five, is a technique used by agile software development teams to poll team members and help achieve consensus. Fist to five is similar to thumbs up, thumbs down or thumbs sideways. To use the technique, the team facilitator restates an action the group may make and asks the team to show their level of support.

How will you respond to the one or two finger votes? What about the Fold votes? What pros and cons do you see? Once you see those less-than-three fingers, you can ask questions to help get to the issues that might be hiding there.