Inspire Your Team to Move Ideas into Action
Over the years, one of the most exciting aspects of working
with technology has been working with teams to take ideas and bring them to reality. As leaders, it is important to rally an
organization forward and recognizing when stalling might be occurring. Becoming stuck in the ideation phase or
planning phase can drastically impact your ability to roll out that exciting
idea or miss the time to market completely.
Therefore, here are some quick tips on some common areas I have found
where teams need inspiration to move forward:
- Brainstorming Avalanche
- Analysis Paralysis
- The Perfect Plan Syndrome
Brainstorming
Avalanche
Brainstorming to come up with innovative ideas is a
fantastic way to bring those creative ideas forward from all team members. I have been in situations where we have an
entire whiteboard filled up with so much potential but there is always limited
time for implementation. If we proceeded
to talk about each idea, there is risk you would never make it out of the
brainstorming / idea phase.
Depending on
what you might see from a high level, here are a couple strategies to tame the
avalanche.
Categorize - Try
to find a trend of ideas where you can create categories. This will focus the discussions on the bigger
picture and raise the conversation out of the details. Details are great, but not always when you
are so early in the process. This is a
great way to keep the momentum of the brainstorm moving forward.
Vote – Make sure
you bring those sticky notes to the meeting!
I call this a lightning session. Have
a timer ready and give everyone 15-30 seconds to quickly explain their
idea. This focuses each person to
discuss the major points of their idea and for the rest of the team to get the
general gist. Having the timer going is
crucial for keeping the pace. At the
end, give each team member 5-10 sticky notes to vote for their favorite idea to
move forward. I even open it up so that
they can use all 10 sticky notes on a single idea if they are that passionate
about it. You will quickly see the team
members rally around 10% of the ideas and you will have a prioritized list from
the number of votes. After the vote,
focus the discussion around the top 10% and decide the path forward.
Analysis Paralysis
So many engineers joke about Analysis Paralysis but you
would be surprised when you are knee deep in the moment how a leader needs to
gently bring them to the realization that it is occurring. Think about the scenario. You think you have a multi-million dollar
idea and you want to think about all possible scenarios. The team needs more data and they begin
digging up logs/marketing reports etc.
Magically 15 scenarios have been created for the idea and then the 15
scenarios have about 3 sub-paths that could be used to take it forward. Wow!
Rule of 3 –
Quickly eliminate scenarios that have high risk or low probability of occurring. As a leader, bring that strategic thought on
how the various scenarios might align to the larger strategy of your
company/organization. Stop the analysis
across all scenarios and choose the 3 most likely cases with the team you would
like to see more analysis.
Time Bound – If you
have not noticed, humans will use all available time that is given. Once the 3 scenarios are selected, time bound
when you need the information. This will
force the team to focus in on the most important data, think about the solution
at the right level, move on when needed, and create a summarization and
recommendation.
By limiting the paths and time bounding the exercise, you
are helping your team move forward with the best possible chance of success.
The Perfect Plan
Syndrome
The team has spent months planning by adding user stories,
building milestones, and scheduling releases.
I have seen teams think they were agile but ultimately commit entire
organizations to marketable features and release date. With all these plans in place, is it all an
illusion? Scrum-fall come to mind? What about
friendly customer feedback?
Allow Pivots – I
can understand having a backlog of a few sprints properly groomed and it is a
significant culture change for some organizations to not have planned releases
with concreate features committed. I
have found it to be a great experience when you take your lightweight idea that
was created to bring it in front of the friendly customers for the first
time. They then begin taking what you created
in a slightly different direction on features that you never knew they had
value to use.
What a gift! If you
were locked into a plan, you would have never received this feedback and kept
implementing along missing a potential opportunity. I think one of the last reports I saw was 80%
of applications features are rarely/not used.
Therefore, even though your perfect plan was just blown up, embrace it
because you are now creating a more marketable product that will sell to the
market. Maybe even on the next round of
planning, don not plan so deep and allow agility.
Think about it, is it not our goal to sell and delight our
customers?
Wrapping it up
Taking ideas through planning and execution is no easy
task. I hope these brief ideas and experiences
help you at least recognize when some common pitfalls are occurring and you
quickly move the team forward. Best of
luck on your journey and I encourage you to share your experiences if you use
these techniques in the comments section.
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