Being non-biased

Human beings are naturally prone to biases. A whole host of factors can affect how a participant thinks and behave during your workshop — not all of them will be under your control. But what you can control is eliminating biases during your workshop:

• Be clear about goals. Be clear about the goals of the workshop and keep an open mind. This means not assuming that you know best as a facilitator and being receptive to the ideas of participants.
• Mind your language. Take measures to eliminate bias in your language. For example, asking participants to “vote for their favorite ideas” is an invitation for subjectivity to creep in. Instead, ask them to vote on an idea based on a set of criteria you have already agreed upon as a group. For example, “vote for the ideas you think will most effectively cater to our users’ pain points.”
• Use data. Replace opinions with data wherever possible. This can be an excellent way to respectfully disagree with higher-level execs and stakeholders if their biases creep in.
• Use differential voting. Usually, design workshops invite people from different teams, such as marketing and finance, in addition to the design and dev teams. Using differential voting, for example, color coding the votes of each team will ensure you understand the rationale behind each vote. This will let you select ideas that have the approval of all teams vs. ideas that simply have the most votes.^[1]