So, Where’s The Agile Innovation?

Going Agile is not a promise of increased innovation, you need to update your thinking style as well. This article introduces a new innovation framework for simplifying some of the new, modern design thinking tools to those corporations who - like many others - are on a journey towards Agile product development.

By Michael McKay, Founder of Five-Mindsets.com

(Copenhagen, September 14, 2018) Companies today are going agile. The agile software paradigm has truly become a given today, not only for traditional IT companies but for most product or service companies today, who realise that SW is now a key component in almost any new business. Harvard Business Review recently released a survey that stated that a massive amount of businesses today have gone agile or are about to. 44% of companies says that Agile is widely used within development, and 41% says it is used within IT operations. For truly digital companies the numbers are even higher.

However going agile is not the key to securing a sustainable innovation stream from the company. In many instances the opposite. For many companies it actually accounts a loss of innovation. Why so? Because agile processes drive up efficiencies and allow developers and engineers alike to become very productive. However the systematic and heavily scheduled worklife of a modern, agile product developer does not leave much room or space for the classic, under-the-radar innovation work. Modern developers’ schedules are so fully laid out that not much time falls through the cracks to allow for organic innovation to happen, unless they start using innovation tools and methods that would allow them to do meaningful innovationwork within their 2 week agile sprint cycles.

So where’s the innovation?

In our pursuit of driving efficiency, we risk loosing our ability to innovate. The Agile manifesto helps us streamline and speed up our learning cycles, but if we don’t bring in new innovative fertilisers to our process, we risk just accelerating the sausage factory and producing more of the same - faster and more predictable.

This is where the design sprints come in to the picture. What is a design sprint? Many managers and business leaders have heard of design sprints and seen the documentaries - the now-famous IDEO redesign of the shopping cart (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6EgoiPxNDs) is approaching it’s 10 year anniversary, but in the actual corporate teams around the world, design sprints and design thinking are still somewhat exotic and controversial. What does a design sprint really offer? It offers a chance to build momentum and flow, to temporarily build a dream team and to reflect and experiment, even in a corporate, operationally efficient context, where these behaviours can be difficult to even think about performing..

One broadly accepted format is what is commonly known as the “Google Sprint” - named after the influential book “Sprint” by Jake Knapp**, who tested out a simple framework to rapidly iterate over a single idea in a week. In our practice we meet many clients who now have established a somewhat stable practice, doing “Google Sprints” as part of their project kick off activities.

However using the Google Sprint format as your only innovation tool is not enough to effectively drive a sustainable innovation practice in a corporation. We need to add much more, and we need to engage a larger part of the organisation than the typical narrow circle of scattered design thinking geeks around the organisation.

Finding space and methods for innovation.

The Agile framework actually enables and encourages innovation - in the Scaled Agile Framework*** - the SAFe room is left for the “Big Room I&A”. Because Agile itself is recognised as a framework for implementing an existing strategy, it has been promoted that the teams take time - every 5-6 sprint, to look up, look ahead and adjust the course. Here, new inputs are welcomed, and an innovative agenda has a place to play out. However where the rest of Agile is relatively easy to transition into for a typical engineering or business driven product organisation, the design thinking and other tools necessary for success in this area are hard to achieve. Why are they so hard? Because they require a whole other type of thinking style than the engineering rational/logic that our employees are schooled to use. It therefore seems that mastering corporate innovation in the future requires an ability to reach significant results on a regular, systematic basis, preferably fitted into 2 week time slots.

Mastering corporate innovation in an agile future requires an ability to reach significant results on a regular, systematic basis, preferably fitted into 2 week time slots.

Five Mindsets for mastering corporate innovation

What we found is a need to rethink the actual mindset brought in when attempting to foster the modern innovation tools. Through our work, we discovered that instead of spending lengthy time training teams in innovation methods, significant gains were achieved if we focus on the mindset through which we approach the problem. Imagine the problem as an area in the middle of a large room. You can approach the problem area from different sides. Every time you approach it, you understand it from a slightly different perspective. By consciously exchanging these mindsets as if they were filters on a camera, you slowly uncover the true nature of the problem and start creating novel, innovative solutions for it. At first, this circular, organic way of working seems at ods with the given, but through time, innovators using this approach realise that it becomes a full approach to innovation and a sustainable culture for experimentation, curiosity, prototyping and storytelling grows up and illuminates the entire front-end of the organisation.

The five mindsets shown in this video are used in design sprints but are also key to bringing in design thinking in the daily work of the team and organisation. We have utilised the format primarily for User Experience innovation sprints and software product specification within agile teams, but the mindsets are useful within all product and service development contexts.

Then, what are the critical mindsets for success?

We discovered five mindsets that are important to switch between to make innovation work in practice. There is no demands to the sequence of application, these are rather ways of thinking about the problem that design thinking practitioners swap between in their work. Each of the mindsets require a particular way to think and approach the problem, and with training, practitioners acquire the necessary tools from very different fields such as ethnography, engineering, business development, film making, UI and UX design.

The EMPATHY mindset. This mindset is about acknowledging that we are not the experts - the real experts are the users and stakeholders out there in the real world. This is the ethnographers mindset. Using the EMPATHY mindset means that we will not at all think about solutions, revenue models or other elements, we will solely focus on understanding the minds, values and contexts of the people we aim our business for. The EMPATHY mindset is agnostic to B2C, C2C, B2B or any other business context; EMPATHY is about really understanding what drives our users, what they dream about, how their world view is composed, how the systems they see themselves operate within function. Once we fully embrace this mindset, we can truly focus, and we have often seen that product makers with years of experience suddenly get epiphanies of insight once they learn to look, listen and feel in this way. 

With the empathy mindset, ordinary people and places becomes magical. We build our curiosity until we can’t stop spending time with our customers to learn from them. (Photo: Timon Studler)

The IDEATION mindset is about activating the creativity. The mindset of artists, designers and invetors. Divergent thinking can be really hard, if you are schooled to convergent, close-and-finish thinking. If you are bottom-line focussed, looking divergently at the world, finding alternatives, going beyond the status quo is hard. It is breathtaking to suddenly understand what “they sky is the limit” means for thinking. Bringing convergent problem solvers into the divergent world of ideation is often hard and taxing for the individual. And we have noticed that using this mindset is surprisingly the toughest of the five mindsets for most product developers. The irrationality, going beyond logic and established beliefs feels like deserting our engineering religion. But when fully embroiled in a raving ideation session, people can find a passion and a level of professional engagement that they have never tried before.

The ANALYTIC mindset. Here, we are encouraged to distance ourselves from our ideas and see them from a distance. A sobering distance that enables us to understand where the true values and challenges lie within our world of ideas and opportunities - we need to use this approach to be able to clearly understand the value of the ideas we have catalogued. It is human nature to become attached to the ideas you have made yourself, so special methods have to be applied for the team to effectively filter and analyse their own ideas, which is often the task in projects. Which ideas have strategic value? Which ideas look promising but are shallow and full of hidden flaws? By introducing visual, collaborative analytic methods and tools, we enable analysis and strategic definition into the design sprint, and we are able to define product roadmaps, tech roadmaps and other important areas at a much higher speed and with more insight than most other strategy processes available today. The analysis done during our design sprints are not the most accurate nor deeply calculated ones. What they lack in accuracy, they gain in innovation height! The key benefit from brigning in strategy into the design sprint is the holistic element - the fact that the participants in the strategy session are the same who also interviewed and studied the customer problem statements, and the same who participated in developing radical new ideas. By bringing these people into the strategy session, we are able to represent and work with vast amounts of tacit, non-documented insights, and the result we see is that these strategy sessions are more likely to pick up on truly radical yet feasible ideas compared to the more traditional, isolated sessions, where strategists study and read through documentation from the other team members and do their analysis in isolation. 

Mixing the visual cues of design thinking with the solidity of engineering analysis, teams can dramatically simplify and speed up strategic decision cycles. Photo: Rawpixel

The ITERATIVE mindset. This is perhaps the easiest mindset for most engineers and business developers to apply. What we have seen is that in order to maximise the innovation outcome, people need to allow for higher speed by lowering the concept fidelity and resolution expectations. Lowering these expectations allows for new, fast and very effective rapid prototyping to take place. But lowering the expectations can be difficult for professionals and experts who were brought up with a need for precision and accuracy. Exchanging multi decimal excel sheets to draw pictures and scribbles for paper prototypes or enacting value chains as role plays can be mind boggling for specialists who normally write long slide decks about this. These new prototypes all drive a couple of core values: Co-creation and visualisation. By building the mindset that allows us to truly use these new tools, we get access to a level of speed and effective experimentation that is unheard in classic development environments - this is where the sprint speed is truly visible! 

The STORYTELLING mindset. This is one of the most important areas of the modern innovation work. Why? Because the modern product and service concepts are utterly complex in nature - often involving multiple channels, bits and pieces of hardware, has a software core and multiuser. And customer experience excellence is of highest importance, no matter if you are in B2B, B2C or even C2C environments. How do you ensure your innovation enters the market as a smash hit? By crafting strong and compelling stories about your vision, the value proposition and the uniqueness. Not only for marketing purposes but for creating a strong lighthouse for your product development tribe to orient around. Your product development process may be scattered across multiple companies and individuals, spanning multiple timezones and even continents. With a strong story and a continuous effort in telling and re-telling “the story of our vision”, excellent end-to-end customer experience innovation is suddenly possible for teams and organisations.

With the storytelling mindset, we focus on crafting and telling stories about magic user experiences, product craftsmanship and other mainstay storypoints that drive modern product management. (Photo: StockSnap)

To succeed with design design thinking, focus on gnarly problems

Getting back to the innovation. We know that design thinking and other strategic innovation frameworks are key to success - all the large companies talk about it nowadays. But talking is not enough, you have to use it.

Getting design thinking to actually work for you is the issue. It is difficult. The big leap is to get the practice under the organisational skin, to fully embrace the practice in daily work.

In our work we have taken the approach of always pairing productivity with the learning process. The best way of getting momentum for Design Thinking is to solve actual, gnarly innovation problems the organisation currently deals with, especially those that the organisation has not been able to solve by themselves so far. Solving these problems will convince and orient senior managers towards the work. Co-creation and establishing an in-house practice as part of pilot projects builds a success narrative within the organisation: “Design Thinking and Innovation is something valuable, that we can master”, which is the kind of fuel needed to drive a cultural transformation from within.

Michael McKay is the founder of www.five-mindsets.com, a tested framework for simplifying design thinking to make it approachable and actionable for teams and organisations without prior knowledge or experience within the design thinking or user experience space.

Sources:

* https://hbr.org/sponsored/2018/03/survey-data-shows-that-many-companies-are-still-not-truly-agile

** https://www.thesprintbook.com/

*** https://www.scaledagileframework.com/train-teams-and-launch-the-art/