Dot Voting
What is it?
Dot voting is a technique you can use to help prioritise and make decisions when there are a number of options. It is also known as ‘democracy by dots’.
Why use it?
Dot voting has many benefits, particularly in QI. Dot voting helps:
To engage your team and build will and conditions for change
To make the decision-making process more transparent, which is likely to improve engagement. This also helps when someone is very eager to try an idea that other people aren’t. If the votes aren’t in their favour this may help them to let go of the idea
To reduce hierarchy and reduce influence of others
To ensure voices are heard equally
Teams to make decisions quickly
How to use it?
This works best when a group of people are working together on decision making. In QI, this has many uses including prioritising which change ideas to try first, which parts of the process in a process map are most troublesome or which causes in a fishbone to target first.
Start by placing your options somewhere people can see. This often works best when people can do this together (e.g., a meeting), but can also be left in a shared space (e.g., the tearoom) for people to interact with in their own time.
With options laid out, people are given a number of sticky dots (often 5) to use. A substitute for this may be to tell staff they can make five marks with a pen if completing live.
People are then able to allocate their dots to the different options, depending on the question asked. People can split their dots however represents their priorities or opinions; be it one dot on five options; five dots on one option or a mixture across options. It’s also possible to rank votes by marking dots ‘1’, ’2’, ‘3’ etc. to calculate a weighted voting.
Once all dots or marks have been allocated, the team can see which options have been prioritised. This can happen for a number of rounds if needing to narrow down options or if there is an even spread between multiple options. The results should be discussed, and the next steps should be agreed on. The project lead can use this information to prioritise options and share this information with the team.
Example:
A practice team wants to reduce the number of acute prescriptions being reviewed by GPs. They have created a driver diagram and have 4 different change ideas they would like to try. As they know they should implement one change at a time, they decide to use dot voting to help prioritise the order of the changes.
Practice staff attend the meeting. The project lead puts all change ideas on individual post-it notes around the room. The team are given five sticky dots each, and 5 minutes to allocate their dots based on the question “what change would you like to test first?”. After five minutes, the dots on each post it note are counted. The team agree to test the idea with the most sticky dots, followed by the second and third preference.
Practice staff attend the meeting. The project lead puts all change ideas on individual post-it notes around the room. The team are given five sticky dots each, and 5 minutes to allocate their dots based on the question “what change would you like to test first?”. After five minutes, three change idea post-it notes are found to have the most sticky dots. The team agree to test the idea with the most sticky dots, followed by the second and third preference.
