Design builds relationships through the creation process.
The best design sprint I’ve run (yet) ended in what I would consider complete failure.
We had a clear business challenge, one that had existed for years, despite best efforts to tame it.
We had a diverse, engaged, talented team who also had the time (a whole week!) to work on the sprint.
We had a decider, a project manager, and a research manager behind the sprint.
What could possibly go wrong?
At exactly the half-way point in the sprint the “hidden Sith” showed up. The team had analyzed the customer challenge, had done a ton of ideating, and had come up with a novel, brave and exciting solution. At least everyone participating thought so, that is, except the decision maker. It turned out that they already had a clear picture of what they really wanted, which was a somewhat clunky and basic solution that another organization had already tried.
The team pushed back — they had tried the type of solution that the decider wanted with poor results. The decider and project manager pushed back — the solution seemed to complex for the organization who, despite its reputation as an innovator, was actually quite conservative. And thus, they exposed, in the middle of the sprint, the real innovation challenge.
So, I stepped in. “If you really believe in this and are willing to fight for it by putting some of your reputations on the line”, I said to the team, “then go for it. But be ready to stand up to senior management and to challenge them on their commitment to solving the problem. It’s okay if you don’t want to do that, no one will think less of you. If you don’t want to do that, go for the basic solution. But if you dare to stretch, stand by your ideas.”
That wasWednesday afternoon. Everyone went home to sleep on it. When they came back the team was (almost) unanimous: they wanted to go for it.
They created a kick-ass prototype that they somehow designed and programmed in PowerPoint in a day (didn’t I say this was a great team?)! The following day they tested it with six typical customers and live-streamed the test back to us in the sprint room. The results were beyond convincing — it was pretty clear that the idea the team came up with would solve the business challenge.
Implementing it would take time and IT resources, two scant commodities. When we ended the sprint, the team was both exhilarated from the whole design and creation process and a bit worried about presenting the results to senior management.
That was it for me. I checked in over the next few months to see if there was any progress. After 3–4 months, they told me that the organization had rejected the idea and was moving ahead with the decider’s original plan.
I never worked with them again. I assumed that the experience was so traumatic that they wanted just to forget the whole thing.
And then, the other day, I talked to one of the participants (at a new job) about a new innovation project. As we reminisced about the design sprint, they shared with me that despite the failure of their idea, that after the sprint the sprint team itself became the most effective, most collaborative, and most relationship-based team in the whole organization. The experience of creating, building and even fighting together created such a bond of trust and respect that it carried far beyond the actual design sprint work.
Needless to say, it warmed my heart to hear this. It’s not the first or only time I’ve seen this in my work — teams who have never worked together before gain far more than design or innovation experience by building together. The act of collaborative creation and pushing yourself so that the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts allows all sorts of magic to happen. I wrote about some of my own experiences here.
We should pay more attention to the effects of the collaborative design process and not just the end results. When we build together, we create lasting, positive relationships. And we need much, much more of that in our work.
