Since Jake and John baked and served the concept Design Sprint out in the world of complexities, its core principles and mediums derived out of this very core have been used massively to address tricky questions. Questions that thrill the business, product, design or even science audiences. Questions that, at the same time, scare the systems and people to their bones due to dark clouds made of endless debates and bloody politics. Power of facilitation had finally been recognized all the way up in the ladders of innovation!
Although the principles introduced in Design Sprint are out there, almost standardised and widely available as a DIY (Do it yourself) set of exercises, applying it in the real world has its own versatilities. Prone to be challenged with legacy waterfall style project management approaches (as it was certainly a form of a paradigm shift!), design thinking methodologies, especially design sprint, is examined once more, but this time along with the impact of 2020 pandemics. The inevitable impact of working from home started to trim the perks of the physical setup: white boards, giant round tables, boxes of post-its and sharpies, people storming their brains heavily while eating healthy snacks together, the fun, the get-together in the same-room vibe, all had to go through a form of metamorphosis. That’s why, everyone, from the very own design sprint concept owners up to the newbies of facilitation started to experiment almost at the same time what we eventually know as “remote design sprint”. And I am one of those lucky ones.
The lucky charm of it arrived in my world in two steps. Step one, at my work and step two, at school (yes, I have a thing with academia! :) ) Since I started working in the design team, engaging with every bit of service design and all the surrounding facilitation methods, from the off-the-shelf techniques up to my own custom-made versions, explains a major part of my day-to-day activities. Running design sprints has obviously been one of them. While the Corona reality was blowing as a chilly wind of change for me and my colleagues towards a migration to a complete remote setup, my master studies were not under utter shock as the same wind has already been through the roof due to the fact that the school was already running remote. However, the twist of fate in my case was the expansion of scope concerning my remote facilitation endeavours. Me working for an airline, our sole focus area on answers we seek for through the help of design is quite obvious: passengers and all hefty operations around their travel lifecycles. At school, though, the questions were rather different. Therefore, the assignment we were given was also referring to an assorted set of different world problems. Together with our working group consisting of people from distinct backgrounds and residing in various parts of the world, we picked one and rolled up our sleeves enthusiastically. Brilliant people with distinctive ambitions and with a never-ending appetite to collaborate…Once again, I am one of those lucky ones!
The nicest thing about having a mix of several flavours, to me, still remains to be the commonality one finds in diversity. That feeling of familiarity, the pure aim we all carry towards the passion of constant experimenting with human in mind, helped us define the basics of the “how” before we start. So, we set our “unwritten” ground rules:
1 we will stick together: run the sprint as synchronous as we can
2 we will be fair to each other: never jeopardise each other’s learning opportunities
3 we will fail: never fall short of failing and always learn from it
Achieving these 3 is often hard to find in academic working groups, if you know what I mean. When I look back, I see we all somehow always found our way into those 3 principles while running our sprint spread to a whole semester (which is also a major deviation from the book, but hey, experimenting is bliss!). The old me was thinking back then on how far I could have gone and learned something fundamentally different than what I already do at work. New me was telling the old me that she failed big time! (rule #3, my favourite.) This was my biggest learning. There is always a possibility that with these 3 major humane principles in mind that puts “the group” in center, remote sprint process can be run smooth while producing promising answers to the trickiest questions.
Let me get down to the nitty gritty, take these 3 principles out of the shade, shed some light on what they might mean in practice while running remote design sprints and leave it just right there:
1 we will stick together: run the sprint as synchronous as we can
The idea of running a design sprint in remote often comes with the million-dollar question: how “together” can we be?” Decision to run the most intense days of the sprint, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday sprint days synchronously helped us to tackle with the double edge sword of the “diverging” diamond. We were in the phase of exploring our problem space and doing that in a time-boxed manner altogether while paying utmost attention to the incisive difference between being in a room vs being in front of a screen for hours was our key to success. Blocking 4–5 hours for each sprint day with healthy breaks in between genuinely paid off.
2 we will be fair to each other: never jeopardise each other’s learning opportunities
The imbalance between the level of experience we had in facilitation or design sprints seemed to be an obstacle in the beginning. The way we manoeuvred around it though was inventive: every sprint day we changed roles, which means every one of us eventually got the chance to perform every role needed in a design sprint. Believe me or not, that includes the knottiest role of a design sprint, the facilitator role and it worked. Being equal to each other while learning together is not as hard as you think.
3 we will fail: never fall short of failing and always learn from it
There were times we felt lost. Half the way we thought we had to do all over again, we thought we are not in the right problem spot. Some of us felt exhausted along the way, or reluctant to run a certain task. After all, design sprint is a fervent process, the immensity of it comes from its inclusivity. It is done by human, for human and there is no way a machine can handle it, any form of automation is against its nature. Each time we felt we are off track, one of us reminded this fact, which kept the process neat and clear. In turn, process itself took care of these concerns and reminded us that failing is okey because eventually, we would always get there.