Organize a Jury

An evaluation session with an external jury helps to check the process, cull excess ideas, and refocus the session.

To perform such a session, you should invite several experts from outside of your organization. These experts are often stakeholders in your project. Take 15-20 minutes to explain the project. They will provide you with expert advice, and the jury session helps to evaluate the process itself.

You can review the goal, the mapping, if the mapping is understood, what ideas for solutions have come forward, and/or if the roadmap is complete or missing something. You can also ask each participant to personally evaluate the process. This strengthens the understanding of each group member’s perspective to one another and provides space for focused dialogue.

Remember to write down the ideas that come up during such sessions on a sheet, to return to later, as a collection of ‘best ideas at the time’. This is helpful to keep track of the shifting perspective of the group as the session progresses.

This should be done several times during SiD sessions to effectively cycle through the process of both generating ideas and selecting and eliminating them.