Create a Point of View Exercise

Learn the WHY behind exercises


In this article:


In this article, you will learn how to create your first LeadFirst Point of View (POV) exercise. The LeadFirst Point of View Exercise is a brainstorming platform that ensures the best ideas win. These exercises help you to limit the effect of office politics on your decisions and have more effective and efficient meetings. They also help introverts to be heard and real expertise to prevail.

Overview of the brainstorming process

Here is an overview of the Point of View process:
  1. Question - Clearly define the problem by formulating a specific question for the group to answer. 
  2. Brainstorm - The group brainstorms ideas - no idea is critiqued or turned down; every idea is captured as close to verbatim as possible
  3. Vote - With a thorough ideas list, every participant votes on what they believe to be the best ideas
  4. Understand - With votes in and now visible to the group, each person explains why they voted the way they did.
  5. Re-vote - After each person explains their votes, everyone is given the opportunity to change their mind and re-vote.
  6. Take Action - Now the group has the best ideas identified and a lot of "buy-in" because they took the time to truly collaborate.

Set up the exercise

To create a new POV exercise, go to the main three-bar menu > Continuous Improvement > select Point of View Exercises > and click the blue plus.

In the exercise setup screen, complete the following options:

Question - Clearly define the problem by formulating a specific question for the group to answer. The question should be specific enough to get the group clear on the problem they are setting out to solve but open enough to not suggest specific solutions.

Date - Set the date of your exercise


Advanced options

Category - If you plan on creating multiple exercises, use Categories to organize them

Scale - You can decide to use the standard 100-Point Scale or create your own custom scale. Custom scales are restricted to 1-point intervals and up to a range of 10.

You can choose to show results by averages or the total points each idea scored. The standard method is to show the total points scored.

Voting Interval - If you choose to use the 100-Point Scale, you can decide if you want participants to vote in 10 or 20-point intervals. Lowering the voting interval allows participants to spread out their votes on more ideas.


Max Vote - The Max Vote is how many votes a participant is allowed to place on a single idea. Most people tend to spread out their votes among the top ideas. Some people, however, choose to "put all their eggs in one basket" and dump all their votes on one idea. We typically suggest allowing people to add multiple votes to an idea but limiting the Max Vote so that one idea can't be pushed to the top by a single voter. For a 100-point brainstorming exercise, we typically limit the max vote to 40.


Edit Ideas - You can decide to allow participants to edit ideas. To keep the brainstorming process clear and simple, this is off by default. It is often most effective to have a single person gathering ideas from the group. There are cases, though, where it may make sense to allow multiple people to add and edit ideas.


Private - You can add security to this exercise so only the facilitator and participants can view and access the exercise.

To invite participants, go to the Voting tab > open the screen's three-dot menu > select Share > copy the hyperlink your browser supplies > send the hyperlink to your participants.

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Access/Security:

  • Participants and facilitators will initially see a list all the exercises they are a part of.
  • But any user can change the filter to access all existing exercises (except those marked as "Private")
  • Exercises marked as "Private" can only be viewed and accessed by participants and facilitators
  • Only facilitators can change an exercise's settings

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