Lightning Decision Jam
Learn how your Team can Solve Problems Fast, Without Discussion
Creative problem solving is a cornerstone skill that separates good designers from the best designers. Clear and Critical decision-making separates Good managers, from the Best managers.
The problem with anything that requires creative & critical thinking however, is that it’s easy to get lost—lose focus and fall into the trap of having useless, open-ended, unstructured discussions. Many projects and teams stall, loose momentum, cost way over-budget - leading to many products and services being released late and full of compromises to the original vision - simply because the team is so fatigued from bashing heads together on endless, unprioritised problems.
The Solution
Here’s the most effective solution we’ve found: Replace all open, unstructured discussion with clear process.
At first this will absolutely feel weird, I’ve seen the scepticism on the faces of managers who are used to battling through passionate back-and-forths with colleagues until eventually one person gives up, or someone says “let’s get more data". Believe us: in every meeting, the problem isn't the "data", it's the mindset and acceptance in business today to postpone any decision that might cause failure - "lets decide this at next week's jour fixe when we know more". That's bullshit. Make a call with the info you have now, so that you can keep moving. Every action forward enhances the perspective your team has. The Freedom to discuss might seem conducive to creativity, or more informed decision-making, when it’s in fact the enemy. Structure and Discipline create the Freedom needed to be creative.
Okay, okay, the only way you’re going to see the results of this principle of killing discussion is to try it for yourself. Let’s have a look at a very simple, 40 minute exercise we use whenever we want to kick off a short problem-solving meeting.
What to use this exercise for:
Anything which requires a group of people to make decisions, solve problems or discuss challenges. It’s always good to frame an LDJ session with a broad topic, here are some examples:
- The conversion flow of our checkout
- Our internal design process
- How we organise events
- Keeping up with our competition
- Improving sales flow
- tactics for next sales push
Okay, let’s go!!!!!!!!!!
Your Instructor
AJ&Smart are a Product Design & Innovation Studio based in Berlin, with real-world experience from running 200+ successful Sprints for global companies. They work very closely with Jake Knapp, author of The Design Sprint, and are continually improving the process together with him, so you can be confident that with us you’re learning the most up-to-date (tried & tested!) version of The Design Sprint. AJ&Smart's complete focus with our courses is to enable you to run your own Design Sprints, or Lightning Decision Jams confidently; and equip you with everything you need to make that happen, quickly.