You can't do everything, and so there are times when you will need to winnow a large set of ideas or options down to a smaller, more manageable set.
Voting can be a good way to do this. We're all familiar with raising our hands or using a secret ballot to vote on things, but when you have a massive amount of information that you need to cull, there are better, faster ways to use voting to do this. For example, you can give everyone 10 small, round stickers and ask them to stick them on the things that interest them most. When they are out of stickers they are out of votes.
Voting with stickers (as in the Dot Voting game in Chapter 4) is an example of a form of currency. Circular stickers are like money that players can distribute among a group of things, to help them decide what matters most to them. Imagine your grocery list again, and imagine that you have a very long list but a limited amount of money. If you had unlimited funds, you could buy everything you wanted, but the fact that your funds are limited forces you to make choices—sometimes difficult ones.
People have a natural tendency to bite off more than they can chew. We are naturally optimistic. But when people do this they easily become overwhelmed and then nothing is accomplished in the end. Voting and currencies help people make the difficult choices about what is important to them. By giving people stickers, or asking them to make marks that represent their votes, you can make the preferences of a group visible and explicit so that they can see where everybody stands and move more quickly to decisions.
Another way to boil down a set of ideas is to sort information according to priority. Forced Ranking (see Chapter 4) prioritizes a list of items by "forcing" them into a linear rank: most important to least important, first to last, and so on. For example, imagine your grocery list again. You could force-rank the list by organizing items by cost, from most expensive to least expensive. You could also force-rank the items in order of priority, from most important to least important. If you have a limited amount of money to spend you could compare both lists to determine the best way to spend your money.