Should you have a decider in your sprints?

Full transcript

Intro

In these videos, I respond to questions that I've heard from other facilitators, about innovation and design thinking.

In this week's video, we're asking the question specifically about design sprints, should we have the role of a Decider in our sprints? Well let's see, I'll see you in the video and we'll talk about it.

Today's question

All right, so we're asking the question, should we have the role of a Decider in our design sprints?

So who's in a design sprint? You have a facilitator, of course. And then you have all sorts of other people that are gonna inform and be part of the conversation, because any time you're innovating or changing an experience, or creating a new product or service, you need people from all different roles and parts of the organization.

People that have different experience and insights and different touch points, with the customer problem that you're trying to solve. So that takes a lot of different ideas from different people. Now you invite this role of a Decider in your sprint, right? The textbook version of the sprint has this really authoritative, powerful role in your sprint.

The person that can change direction of the entire team. And so what I've heard from other facilitators and other teams, is that they're frustrated by this because, the team might go in one direction, and then because you have this appointed leader, appointed person that can veto and change direction, they might go in a totally different direction and sway the team, sway the ideas. And that can be really demotivating, especially if that person is just kind swooping in and hasn't really been part of the sprint, and then changes everything on the fly.

So instead of a Decider, I don't have Deciders in my sprint because I think it goes completely contrary to the whole idea of design thinking, which is all team-based. And it's all about the customer's problems. It has very little to do about, what the internal team thinks and feels. It's all based on, what the customer is telling us is important to them.

So instead of having a Decider, what you really need from that person, you do need people with authority and the, and the budget and the resources and the vision, to take the ideas that come out of a sprint and move them forward. So you do need that person, especially in larger organizations.

But you don't need someone to take the legs out from the team and completely change direction very arbitrarily, but what you do need from that person, you need them to inform the team, right? So if there's other ideas, other bigger picture things that the team is not as familiar with. So informing the team is great, constraining the team, right?

Taking the team and saying, we should focus over here, but not over there. That's not important to us as a company, as a team right now. and then otherwise this person can break ties. So instead of taking the ideas of the team and saying no, no, no, I hear you, but we're gonna go all the way over here, because that's what I wanna do. Instead, most of the time in a sprint, you have some team members thinking one solution, some team members thinking another solution. And what you can do is to either bring them together, or go in one direction or the other and be that tiebreaker. So get rid of this super powerful, dictator that can come in and completely change directions as a Decider.

I know that's hard to do in bigger organizations if you're an internal facilitator, that can be scary, because they could be your boss or your boss's boss. And in those cases, if you want take a look at video number six in this series, where I talk about the differences between internal and external facilitators, maybe there's something that you should look at there. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to our channel on YouTube, where we'll be posting these videos every couple of weeks.

And if you'd like your question submitted for an upcoming video, be sure to leave it in the comments. Otherwise I'll see you in a couple of weeks. Take care.

Join the conversation

Share your idea and expertise about this topic here

< Watch Episode 7 Watch Episode 9 >