A6: ISSUE RAISING***

...once a DECISION WORKSHOP has kicked off, STAKEHOLDERS have been identified, a DECISION PROCESS CHARTER has specified the process journey, and possibly the frame of the decision is clarified with a DECISION HIERARCHY, start by understanding the perceptions of the stakeholders.

* * *

People will not be ready to engage in a decision that has been declared unless their concerns receive space for airing. Without hearing the voices of relevant stakeholders, the decision process can be subverted by hidden agendas.

Issue raising has two primary purposes. First, it aims to get all the essential issues on the table. With multiple stakeholders, it is vital to get all the different perspectives to achieve a proper frame. Getting all the issues on the table might be hard, and therefore, in the beginning, you would like to have conflicts that would make the issues people care about explicit.

Issue raising also aims to find a shared purpose by getting everyone’s voice heard. In other words, it creates an opportunity for the stakeholders to get involved. Only then the analyst will be able to get buy-in from all the participants.

Therefore:

With the right people in the room, go around and collect issues that are on people's minds about the Decision Process Charter. Issue raising is a brainstorming session where the initial goal is quantity rather than quality, and that is why judgments should be deferred.

To Facilitate:

• Use a neutral facilitator (meaning that the facilitator will not introduce bias to the situation) to run the process and use a note-taker to record and display the issues in real time. Furthermore, before beginning the session, communicate the format of the session to the participants.
• With the purpose displayed in the form of a charter, ask participants to write down as many issues related to the decision situation as possible (you can use post-it notes for workshops).
  • Issues should be stated as complete sentences (i.e., instead of "market share" use "market share is falling").
• You can use "round robin" method to elicit the issues from the participants.
  • In this method, each participant provides one issue at a time until all the members' issues are stated.
  • As each member state their issues, record it in a document that is visually visible to everyone in the room.
  • Dialog or debate on the issue is strictly forbidden, and only short clarifying questions by the facilitator are allowed in order to record the issue clearly.
  • You may want to sort the issues by function (i.e., marketing, engineering) for clarity.
• If there is a single decision maker (DM) as the only stakeholder, the DM might put more emphasis on what he/she knows rather than what is relevant. Therefore, try to expand the perspective by asking what issues other stakeholders, if they were involved, would have brought up.
• Whatever method you use to elicit the issues from the participants, you would want to make sure that all the issues are on the table, and the conversation is kept as wide as possible before filtering out the issues.

Failure Modes:

• People might not speak up. In that case, you can try using backcasting.
• People joining in the middle of the process will disrupt the conversation.

* * *

Sometimes issues might sound like whining and what you hear initially might not be the actual issue, and you might want to dig deeper to find the STRATEGIC ISSUES.

Once the issues are listed, organize the issues into decisions, UNCERTAINTIES and VALUES. Refine the DECISION HIERARCHY based on the decisions discovered from the issue raising session in case you built one beforehand.