Okay, let me walk you through how I ended up putting together this thing I call the Garin Score. It wasn’t like some grand plan, you know? It really started because we were drowning in ideas.
Getting Started: The Problem
We had brainstorm sessions, suggestion boxes, hallway chats – ideas were coming from everywhere. Which is great, right? Except it wasn’t. It was chaos. We had this massive list, and picking what to actually do felt like throwing darts blindfolded. Some folks pushed for their pet projects, others yelled about the ‘most urgent’ stuff, but there was no real system. It was just messy and honestly, pretty frustrating. We’d spend meetings arguing instead of deciding.
Figuring Stuff Out: Making the Score
So, I started thinking we needed some kind of filter. Something simple, not another complicated process. I just wanted a quick way to compare apples and oranges, or at least get them in the same fruit bowl. I sat down one afternoon, just me and a notepad first, then a spreadsheet.
I thought about what really mattered for us. It boiled down to a few key things:
- Impact: Like, how much difference would this actually make? Big splash or tiny ripple?
- Effort: How much work is this gonna be? A weekend thing or a months-long slog?
- Confidence: How sure are we that we can actually pull this off with what we have?
- Alignment: Does this even fit with our main goals right now?
I didn’t get fancy. I just assigned some rough points. Maybe Impact was out of 10, Effort was scored inversely (lower effort = higher score), Confidence out of 5, Alignment a simple yes/no multiplier. I literally just made up the weighting based on gut feeling at first. That’s how the first version of the Garin Score was born – nothing scientific, just a practical attempt.
Trying It Out: The Practice Run
The next step was actually using it. I introduced it to the team, not as some rigid law, but as a tool to help our discussions. I put all our current ideas into that simple spreadsheet. We walked through scoring a few together in a meeting.
It was awkward at first. People weren’t used to putting numbers on vague ideas. Some argued about the points, which was kinda the point – it forced us to talk specifics instead of just general feelings. Is the ‘Impact’ really an 8 or more like a 6? Why? What does ‘Effort level 3’ actually mean in terms of time?
Hitting Snags and Fixing Things
Of course, it wasn’t smooth sailing. We ran into problems. The initial weighting felt off after a few rounds. Some scores seemed too high for ideas we intuitively knew weren’t right. People also started figuring out how to “game” the score a bit, maybe exaggerating the impact or downplaying the effort.
So, we tweaked it. This wasn’t a one-time thing. We adjusted the weights based on feedback. We added clearer definitions for what each score point meant under ‘Effort’. We made ‘Alignment’ a harder gate – if it didn’t align, the score didn’t matter much. It became less my score and more our team’s tool through this refinement process. It was messy, iterative. We updated the spreadsheet template a few times.
Where We Landed: The Result
So, did the Garin Score magically solve all our problems? Nope. Not even close. But did it help? Yeah, definitely. It gave us a common language and a starting point for prioritization. It forced us to be a bit more objective, or at least to articulate why we thought something was important or easy.
It reduced the purely emotional arguments and helped us focus the discussion. It’s not perfect, sometimes the scores still feel a bit off, and we still have debates. But the debates are better now. We’re arguing about the inputs to the score, which is way more productive. It just provides a structure that was missing before. We still use a version of it today, though it keeps evolving slowly. It’s just a simple, practical thing that grew out of a real need.
