Method 35: how to prioritise with 40 people in 30 minutes

The two problems it solves at once

The first: time doesn't grow with the group. In a plenary discussion, every idea costs minutes of room time, so from 15 participants upward the process becomes impossible. Here all the pairs work simultaneously, so the same five rounds take as long with 12 people as with 300. The only variable is the number of rounds.

The second: it separates the idea from the person. The tickets have no names. Nobody scores the director's proposal knowing it is the director's. Someone who never speaks in plenary carries exactly the same weight as the one who speaks all the time, and that shows in the result: the ideas that come out on top are usually not those of the people with the most microphone.

How it runs, step by step

Setup, five minutes

Everyone gets a ticket and a pen. The question must fit on one line and ask for a short answer, one sentence. "What is the biggest obstacle to delivering on time?" works. "What do you think of our strategy?" doesn't, because the answers won't be comparable.

Everyone writes a single idea, in legible letters, with no name. Insist on the no-name part: someone will sign out of reflex anyway, and if you notice it in the third round it is too late.

The five rounds, fifteen minutes

People stand up and swap tickets among themselves, on the move, until you say stop. Then each person finds a partner. The pair reads both tickets, discusses for 30 seconds and gives each one a score from 1 to 7, written on the back. The score is folded over, the tickets are swapped again, and the process repeats.

After five rounds, each ticket has five scores. They are added up. The maximum is 35, the minimum is 5. That is where the name comes from.

Reading the results, ten minutes

You ask out loud: who has a ticket with a score above 30? They are read out. Then above 28, then above 25, until you have seven or eight tickets on the wall. You write them on the flipchart, in order. That is the agenda for the rest of the session, produced by the group, in 30 minutes, without anyone arguing with anyone.

What breaks and how to fix it on the spot

• The scores all cluster around 5 and 6. Politeness applied to tickets. Fix: after the first round, say that low scores are needed too, otherwise we can't prioritise anything. Sometimes it helps to give an example of an idea that deserves a 2, and why.
• Someone recognises their own ticket. It happens and it is not a catastrophe. Tell them to give the score the content deserves, then move on. With five rounds, one biased score doesn't change the ranking.
• The ideas are too general. The cause is always the question, not the group. If you see this in round two, you can't repair it on the spot; remember it for next time and narrow the question.
• An odd number in the group. You, as facilitator, join a pair. You don't stand aside, because the person left alone immediately feels they are surplus.

Variations

• A small group, under 15 people. Three rounds instead of five, maximum score 21. Beyond three rounds, the same pairs meet again and the diversity of evaluations drops.
• A large room, from the stage. The swapping rounds become a logistics problem. The solution: people pass the ticket along, to the left, five times, and the pair forms with the neighbour.
• Online. It works with a shared table: everyone writes on one row, then in each round scores two rows assigned automatically. The movement is lost, and that is half of the method's energy, so I only use it online when I really have no alternative.

When not to use it

When the decision has already been made and you only want validation, the method will produce exactly what you deserve: a ranking that you will then ignore in front of the entire room. When the group lacks the information needed to evaluate, you will be prioritising opinions, not importance. And when the topic is so emotionally charged that people can't score without thinking about who wrote it, you need another conversation first.

Any good prioritisation method becomes dangerous when its result isn't allowed to matter.

Otherwise, it is the best 30-minute investment I know for a large group. And if the question is what you do with the priorities once you have them, that is where strategic alignment begins.