From little things, big things grow…

It’s been several weeks since Jake Knapp’s ‘Sprint’ book landed on our team’s desk and it’s generated a bit of a buzz around how to tackle problems and test ideas in a fresh and creative way [if you haven’t read this book, do yourself a favour and get onto it — it’s a simple 2–3 hour read jam packed with good stuff]. After reading the book, our team’s general reaction was ‘great, it all sounds good, but we need to try it out to really appreciate its goodness!’ So one of our teams decided to do exactly that, go BIG BANG and run their own five day sprint.

Our seed team was just starting their journey in the development of a pioneering mobile product. With a genuine hunger to introduce new ways of working, they decided to follow the format of the five day design sprint. Participants were identified, agenda developed and the team briefed in the hope that the session would result in an actual prototype coupled with customer insights. As the days progressed, momentum started to fade and the team decided to halt work and reconvene. What was happening?! The sprint started turning into a crawl…

There’s a number of learnings that we gathered from this sprint, some around organisational constraints e.g. ‘how can you expect very important me to be away from my normal job for 5 whole days? I can’t afford that and the business certainly can’t afford that!’, and some around capability uplift e.g. ‘we need to ensure our facilitator is experienced to run such a workshop’.

The biggest learning we collected was that trying to introduce big bang change can be very challenging, especially in large and traditional organisations. We realised that the business’ appetite for such a large change was not yet there and required more top-level support. So we needed to find other ways to help influence this change.

Adopting an accumulated learning philosophy usually results in greater success than a big-bang approach

Fast forward nine months and with the introduction of the Sprint book, the team has decided to tackle this again by adopt an incremental and iterative approach:

1. Incremental — teams identified opportunities where they could apply some of the activities during their discovery sessions. This is more of a vertical ‘day’ approach. For example, one of our discovery seed teams decided to apply Day 2 ideation activities to help create a broader range of solution sketches. Another team used some Day 1 activities to help them apply some rigour around understanding the problem and customers.

2. Iterative — teams also identified opportunities to run a lightweight sprint over the five days. This is more a horizontal ‘steel-thread’ approach. For example, a group of our scrum masters ran a design sprint over the 5 days to solve the problem of how to better capture teams’ happiness levels. The team spent 30 minutes each day applying the activities and finished on Friday with a prototype (a pretty cool online team happiness tool) which we are now testing with other teams. Obviously, there are gaps in squeezing a day’s worth of activities into 30 minutes but this was the best that we could do considering the constraints we have.

My message to all of our pioneering Sprinters is that whether they apply an incremental or iterative approach, either is OK — the key here is accumulated learning. Running small experiments and letting us capture them (via a learning canvas — pictured above) is going to help us on our journey in building up sufficient knowledge, achievements and stakeholder confidence so that fully-blown five day sprints will become so common that they will just be a natural part of our team’s DNA.