Facilitators need to be aware of anchors to ensure objective decision-making in their teams. While remaining neutral as a facilitator is critical, it is not sufficient. Anchors can be introduced both intentionally and unintentionally, overtly and subtly by any participant or the environment itself.

Few examples of what may create an anchoring effect follow:

• Public, turn-based, voting on a subject. (“Peter gave 1 story point, he surely knows what he is doing. Maybe I should give a small number, too.”)

• Narrowing down acceptable options. (“We are meeting today to decide whether we use library X or write one ourselves.”)

• Use of loaded or emotional language. (“This really simple user story came from our recent customer interview. Easy, right?”)

• Use of external, general, judgments. (“Amazon says we would deliver 3x faster using X. So how do we think using X would benefit our team?”)

• Setting expectations on the variance of decision. (“As per the new process, we can't deviate from our average velocity by more than 15%. Looks like we need to pull a few more items into the sprint.”).

• Over/under-confidence (“We've been on a streak, team! We can surely pull this off.”)

• Suggestive process or environment design. (“We are here to prove that X is true. / Before estimating this critical feature, let's all look at the motivational posters HR hung around the office for us.”)