The quiet spin of a fair decision

We were stuck on the final sprint assignment, the one nobody was particularly excited about. The usual back-and-forth was starting to feel like a waste of time, and I could see the energy draining from the room. I just wanted a way forward that felt fair to everyone.

When the debate just circles back

It was one of those tasks that wasn't technically difficult, but it was tedious and would eat up a chunk of someone's week. Every suggestion of who should take it was met with a perfectly reasonable counterpoint. We were all being professional, but the tension was just sitting there, unspoken.I remember thinking that the decision itself was less important than the team believing it was impartial. The goal wasn't to offload work, but to protect the team's dynamic. We needed a clean break from the discussion.

The wheel as a neutral third party

I pulled up a simple spinner tool and typed in everyone's name. There was a brief, almost amused silence as I explained the plan. No one argued, which was the first sign it might work.I clicked spin, and we all watched the cursor whirl. For a few seconds, the outcome was completely out of our hands. When it landed, there was a collective, quiet exhale—not of relief, exactly, but of resolution.The person it selected just nodded and said, "Alright, I've got it." And that was it. The meeting moved on to the next agenda item without a single lingering comment or side-eye. The fairness of the process had done the heavy lifting.

A tool for the moments that don't matter enough

It wasn't about shirking leadership. Some decisions genuinely don't need a deep debate; they just need to be made so you can focus on the work that does. The wheel handled the procedural fairness, which let me focus on the substantive parts of the plan.That small moment of chance created a shared reference point. Later, if anyone felt the grind of that task, the source of the assignment was the impartial spin, not my favoritism or their bad luck. It externalized the burden.I've found it works best for the low-stakes, high-annoyance choices. It takes the emotion out and lets the team conserve their energy for the real problems. Everyone accepted the outcome without debate, and we got an hour of our afternoon back.