Sprint Day Two — Tuesday
I really liked the opening to Matt’s piece about Monday, so I’ll continue the theme. As a loud Cuban kid from Miami, I grew up in a stereotypically loud Cuban family. It was not an uncommon aspect of my childhood to be yelling at the person I’m speaking to, merely to hear our conversation over the other shouting match happening feet away — and this was in the best of times. As a result of my upbringing, I know I’m one of those people in brainstorming sessions. If you’ve ever been in a brainstorm, you know who I’m talking about.
I love brainstorming and I always have. Discussing ideas in a public forum feels like some kind of Democratic Ideal™ that our Founding Fathers would be proud of. Recognizing my propensity for talking too much and too boisterously, I realized that it’s increasingly likely that I’m destroying some ideas or voices in any brainstorming session (un)lucky enough to have me as a participant. It’s because of this specifically that I’m such a big fan of the ideation methods outlined in Sprint.
As Matt mentioned in his post, the Sprint process is incredibly rigid — but it’s in that constraint that we’re able to find true freedom. The GV process prevents against people like me blowing up brainstorming sessions because following the steps necessarily means everybody’s ideas get out. There are three main portions to Tuesday: Lightning Demos, Divide and Swarm, and the Four-Step Sketch.
Lightning Demos
Lightning Demos are a really informal way to get a good understanding of what’s already out there. Tuesday starts with everybody in the room making a list of these various products and services that can inspire your solution. The GV Team encourages Sprint participants to think outside of their field or industry when making their lists, which I think is hugely important because it keeps you out of the instinct to copy what your competitors alone are doing.
Following this, the team members stand up one at a time and presents the solution they have found. Herein lies the Lightning Demos of the Lightning Demos portion of the week. Each presentation is a quick, 3-minute spiel about what makes the product selected so neat and how it applies to the problem at hand.
As people are presenting, there’s a note taker doodling representations of the central idea of each product or service shown during the lightning demos. I don’t have any artistic abilities, so playing the role of Scribe and having to doodle in front of everybody was nerve racking.
The Lightning Demos are the final step in gathering all the raw materials you need to start sketching a solution Tuesday afternoon. Before you can get to the fun part though, you need to Divide and Swarm.
Divide and Swarm
This is the last part of Tuesday morning before lunch which makes rushing through this tempting, but this is a crucial step in a successful Sprint. Here, you decide whether the problem you’re endeavoring to solve is large enough that it requires being split into different sections. If your problem _is_ big enough, each team member picks a part on the map that they’re interested in sketching for. Our team decided to split up the problem into two parts, something I think was really helpful when we got to deciding on what we were going to prototype Wednesday. It gave us a more holistic look at the problem we were trying to solve, and I think our solution was better for it.
Tuesday’s Finale — the Four-Step Sketch — is all that remains.
Four-Step Sketch
The Four-Step Sketch is really where the “Prevent Danny from Blowing This Up” portion of the day begins. The Sprint book explicitly states, “We know that individuals working alone generate better solutions than groups brainstorming out loud.” I couldn’t agree more. As you might guess, there are indeed four steps to the Four-Step Sketch. You start with taking notes, then you’ll jot down some rough ideas, Crazy 8s (or the consensus best part of Tuesday) is next, and finally you wrap up with the Solution Sketch.
Notes
This is the step where you really gather all the data you’ll need to complete the rest of your sketches. For this step, the team was given 20 minutes to walk around the room and take notes on all of the things. This is your last chance to check out all the How Might We’s, explore the map, check out the Sprint questions, or to examine the whiteboard for ideas generated during the Lightning Demos.
Note now, or forever hold your peace.
Ideas
Now is the time to start fleshing those notes out into some actual ideas. At this point, there’s still a lot of solution designing to be done, so you’re really just synthesizing the notes that you just took. The book mentions that the Ideas stage can really take any form, and they encourage you to think of your sheet of paper here as a scratch pad — only good for giving your ideas some shape you can then carryover into Crazy 8s. Twenty minutes is all the time you have for generating ideas, so you have to think fast.
Crazy 8s
This was the most fun we had all day Tuesday, and possibly my favorite parts of the entire week. My artistry skills are ‘average 4th grader’ good, but the hurried nature of the Crazy 8s exercise made me forget all of that. As the name implies, the number 8 makes a lot of appearances in this activity. First, you fold your sheet of paper to make 8 individual squares, then, you set a minute-long timer. You have one minute to design one solution per box until all eight boxes are full. You have no idea how short 60 seconds is until you’re trying to flesh out an idea with a sketch in that time span. The nicest thing about the incredibly constrained amount of time you have, though, is that it helps you boil down your idea to the most succinct point.
Crazy 8s goes by predictably quickly, but it’s an incredibly energizing experience. But now, it’s time for the Main Event.
Solution Sketch
The Solution Sketch on Tuesday afternoon is the culmination of all the work that has gone into the Sprint until this point. The Solution Sketch is the only sketching that gets done on Tuesday that’s later scrutinized by the rest of the group, but I won’t steal Josh’s Wednesday thunder.
Though the sketches will be looked at by the entire team later, they’re kept anonymous throughout Tuesday. As a result, the sketch has to be self-explanatory since you won’t have the opportunity to explain your thinking to your teammates. The GV team reminds folks that it’s ok for their sketches to be ugly (Thankfully). Up until this point, the words on sketches didn’t matter, or put another way, we had all been drawing those squiggly lines to represent text before now. In this case, the words matter because again, you won’t be able to explain yourself when people are looking at your sketch. Finally, they tell you to come up with a catchy title for your solution (I went with the Annexation of Puerto Rico, word to Little Giants).
And just like that, Tuesday is in the books.
I’ve said it before, but I’m just not a process person. I like the adventure of stumbling my way through things because I feel like that’s the best way to learn. Having said that, I know that when I come across a process I do like it’s worth digging into further. That has definitely been the case with the Google Sprint process.
Tuesday was the first brainstorming session that I left without that nagging feeling that there were still some great ideas out there my big mouth quashed. That felt like a win. Beyond that, I’m really excited to introduce the rest of the organization to some of these brainstorming techniques. We have done a lot of traditional brainstorming at ReadyTalk (Read: The loudest, not necessarily always the best, idea wins), but I think the different sketching ideas in the Sprint book can work without the rest of the Sprint. While I could Crazy 8s myself to death with glee, I’m hoping for the opportunity to give solutions dumb names in the future.
