Good ideas are everywhere, and you should contribute.
Yesterday I finished reading the book from Sam Walton — Made in America. It’s a great story about how WalMart came to be. Amazing story, I recommend it.
One of the recurring themes in the book was trust and responsibility.
Give your associates the freedom and responsibility to do their jobs and you will be amazed on what they can accomplish.
This re-sparked an idea that I had with a friend and colleague Pedro Gameiro.
Create a forum for any colleague of ours to share an idea to improve our work or business.
Allow other to vote on that idea.
Assess the top one according to feasibility, business value and customer engagement.
This article is an explanation of the framework we envisioned.
Idea backlog
Anyone can contribute to this backlog.
Any entry to this backlog will be visible to everyone and everyone can vote up if they like, or not vote at all.
Entries will show as anonymous during the voting time, its not about the person, is about the idea.
Categorization on the idea to split ideas in groups. i.e employee experience, facilities, organization dashboards, improvement to the website, etc.
Voting system
Voting will be available for a determined amount of time. i.e 1 month.
Top 3 ideas voted by everyone enter a final round. The leadership team will vote for business value, innovation and priority.
The winning idea will be the one chosen by the voting of the leadership team.
The voting will be available for everyone to see. Transparency is crucial for engagement to keep happening. It will allow future ideas to understand the priorities.
Development Sprint
To develop the idea, a multi functional team is assemble and work as an Hackathon.
One day per week the team will assemble and work on bringing the idea to light.
The team must be autonomous and contains all members needed to construct the idea.
The development occurs in a time boxed sprint.
By the end of the sprint the team must have a working prototype with real customer feedback.
Assessment
After the development sprint is over, the team will present the idea to the leadership team.
The leadership team will analyze and provide their feedback. This feedback will be essential to understand if this is an idea worth pursuing or not.
All feedback gather so far must be available for everyone to see and learn from it.
The result of the development sprint is available for the all organization.
Retrospective
After all feedback, the development team and the author of the idea will reflect on the project.
This final step is crucial to find points of improvement for further iterations.
Retrospective outcome will also be available to share with the all organization.
This is still a working in progress. Part of the motivation to write this is article is to share with you, the community. I want to hear you feedback and ways we can improve on, share a comment or respond to a piece of the text.
Together we can create something amazing.
Here is the mandatory image of our first draft, inspired by the Design Sprint from Google Ventures.
