Step 2 - Criteria

What

It's criteria brainstorming time. To be able to evaluate the different options, you need to know what factors you'll be basing your decision on. These criteria are generally either subjective values or hard figures. Here you should not think about structures nor relevancy too much - we'll consider that later on.

The task is rather iterative:

1. You'll want to get as many things in here as you can think of. We really can't stress this enough: If something comes to mind, just throw it in right away.
2. You can refine your wording and remove redundant entries as needed.
3. Touch grass (think about something else to gain a bit of distance)
4. Repeat - and come back at any time, even later in the process

It is worth remembering that this is not just about having criteria, but to explore to the problem and your relationship with it as well. A few questions that might be helpful:

• What criteria might other people related or affected by the decision have?
• What would I look for if you wanted to exclude an option, or get it to “win”?
• Are there things you do not (want to) care about?
• Ask others for input!

It's definitely not a bad thing to have too many criteria ( we've seen decisions with over a hundred ), but it's not worth stressing out about, as they must fit your situation.

Note on research and external criteria : Keep in mind that just using others' input or criteria verbatim, is very prone to missing factors important to you, and understanding the problem only at a superficial level. To keep this issue in check, we recommend to use “external” input to extend your criteria, not the other way around. There is also plenty of research on this elsewhere which might be worth independently - particularly when working with blueprints or tools that only have static criteria.