Inspire Your Team to Move Ideas into Action

Move an idea to planning and finally to action

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:
  1. Brainstorming Avalanche
  2. Analysis Paralysis
  3. 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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