Decision Rooms - A Playing Field

No! It has nothing to do with the Judgement day and nobody is being tried for their sins in the court or elsewhere!

It is merely a term that Mr. David Sibbet uses to elaborate on the concept of a space where thinking is made visual and key decisions of a project in an organization are taken collectively.

He puts it quite beautifully in the phrase below:

“But we humans live in spaces, and something magical happens when you begin to consider your entire meeting space as a visual environment" 
– David Sibbet on Decision rooms in Visual Leaders, Wiley India Pvt. Ltd. 2013).

Typically when one hears the word ‘meeting room’, visuals of glass partitions, wall to wall carpets, manicured plants, strategically placed furniture, general ‘grey’ness and an AC set to an inhumanly cold temperature is what can be safely seen crossing our minds. And yet, it is here that impeccably dressed men, women, and aspiring honchos are expected to make big decisions for the organization that they are working for. At some point the lights are dimmed, presentations of various lengths are made, excel sheets are seen racing up and down, slightly animated yet somber discussions happen for hours on end, ties and cuffs are seen getting loosened and finally exhausted faces come out victorious!

Now imagine this:

A room full of soft boards, a huge table with chairs all around, big sheets with headings from a chosen graphic template or framework pre-printed, a host of good looking stationery, a bunch of people and some presentations thrown in for good measure (we can’t really do away with them completely…they are nice sometimes).

Imagine every conversation being recorded as short notes and/or doodles by each participant, going up on the assigned board, visible to everyone. One moves from one board to the other as the conversation progresses and people are seldom static. Things get added, removed, replaced, questioned and then documented. As people get up to put their point across not just verbally but also on the board, they are highly animated and they are happy that they got a chance to be heard. During breaks, people may think of something and go back to the board and add their thoughts or question someone else’s, because suddenly they are accessing their spatial memory!

In this case, the ties and cuffs are loosened to be actively moving around the room, instead of in exasperation!

There are people who are seen managing the content going up, they sift, they sort, they cluster as different notes go up and they may do it again as a next level exercise to filter it down further. They may now do this post the meeting again, without the original team and still be effective.

By the end of the meeting, the content is available to everyone in a panoramic manner, almost unfolding like a narrative in a story-board. Every piece of information is in its place; based of course on the framework used by the organization and it is these that will help make decisions. The way forward is visible, the work done so far visibly quantified and everyone leaves the room being on the same page. Any further discussions can now be based on the group / collective memory of the members, that was generated as people participated in the meeting.



What then has this form of conducting a meeting done for all the parties involved?

...   The spatial and non-linear presentation format comes as a departure from the other static forms.

...   The format is clearly more interactive, allows for more engagement of the participants and breaks down the typical hierarchical manner in which meetings happen.

...   It does make mundane and intensive discussions come alive physically. Given the interactivity and level of active involvement, such meetings can be conducted over longer durations.

...   Being interactive, it provides the opportunity for all the voices to be heard, acknowledged and recorded, generating exhaustive content. It addresses the needs of a very heterogeneous kind of group, wherein people have different ways in which they communicate, all of which need not necessarily be verbal.

...   The content can be clustered and made sense of at a later time by the team, to arrive at insights and then opportunities in the form of a proposal or final decisions.

...   It validates the quantum of work already done and showcases in its entirety the upcoming scale/scope of work.

The interesting part about this decision room is that it can be replicated in any manner or scale depending on the kind of space one is operating in or the kind of organization it is and the resources available. 

To me it is like a playground, either for free-play or a sport. All it must ensure is that the players are actively engaged with whatever it is that they are doing while in the playground, that they are doing it alongside a host of others and that by the end of it something substantial comes out of it.

The other thing that crossed my mind and I later realized has crossed Mr. Sibbet’s mind as well, was the resemblance of a decision room with a stage or a space of performance!

There is a written script, yes, but each actor with their action makes a space come alive and that space is what gets etched in the minds of the co-performers first and then the audience. It can be compared to all the spots in a meeting room where the visual cues are constantly moving around as are the people and that, is what helps create the collective memory of the group. The same holds true for vernacular performances as well, where the script may be either pictorial or just embedded or embodied.

Having seen this work over at least three different kinds of formats in my own practice (in 2 different kinds of classrooms and in a design consultancy for business space) I am convinced to some extent of the elastic nature of not just the notion of a decision room but of this methodology in general.




In my humble opinion, David Sibbet’s book has not boasted of new content generation. Hence, I would prefer to look at his book as a curatorial endeavour at making design-thinking methods available to a larger audience and thereby democratizing this way of thinking that was hitherto a property of the creative practitioners.