A facilitation technique for demonstrating that a hard call is a judgment made with a specific set of information, not a fixed truth. Poll the room at an early point in a decision, before much context has been laid out, then poll again after adding more facts and trade-offs, and let the audience watch its own answer move.
Biddle uses this live during talks to make a point about Product Strategy: there's no single right answer, only a reading of the room at a given moment, shaped by whatever context has been added so far. The same mechanic doubles as a stakeholder-alignment tool — polling a room of executives at multiple points in a pitch surfaces where opinions diverge before a decision is forced, in the same spirit as Skeptical-Leader Pitch Technique.
At a Lean Product Meetup talk, Biddle ran this technique live: he had the room individually rank a set of Netflix initiatives (personalization, original content, games, advertising — framed via 'Walk' vs. 'Run' Framing (Staged Bet Rollout)) and then aggregated the results. The audience's collective ranking put personalization first and original content only third, which surprised Biddle because it diverges from Netflix's own public investor narrative that games are the next big growth driver. Used this way, the technique doesn't just aggregate a room's judgment — it can also expose a gap between a company's internal story and outside, informed opinion.
"Fist of Five" is a specific live-polling technique for checking real (not performative) agreement in a room: participants hold up 0–5 fingers to signal their level of support for a proposal, from a closed fist (strong disagreement) to five fingers (full support). Because it's fast, visible, and low-stakes, it surfaces gradations of buy-in that a simple verbal "sounds good" would hide — a concrete instance of Mining for Conflict (Testing Apparent Consensus).
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust