Adapting the Design Sprint Process to Drive Personal Decisions
Behavior scientists estimate that the average adult makes more than 35,000 decisions per day. It is intrinsic to keeping our sanity and avoiding burnout that we make most decisions using well-established thought patterns. We go through life on autopilot to perform many repetitive actions. However, there is a problem in using our commonly accessed knowledge, not on day-to-day decisions like walking, but when we apply the same thinking strategies to challenges in our personal and professional lives.
When we become reliant on learned thinking patterns, it can be difficult to challenge our assumptions and make significant changes in our lives. This reliance is why so many people recommend thinking outside of the box.
Why not Brainstorm?
Thinking outside the box usually leads to a group brainstorming activity in professional settings. There are three main issues with the standard practice of a brainstorming activity.
- Brainstorming values quantity over quality and often produces watered-down solutions.
- Brainstorming is often inequitable. The ideas from those with extroverted personalities or reputations of being creative are overvalued, and a brainstorming activity can be a danger zone for falling into a groupthink mentality.
- Brainstorming produces many shallow ideas without steps to venture from idea to implementation.
When you think outside the box, you open yourself to a whole universe of ideas, but most ideas aren’t feasible or offer a reasonable solution. Thinking outside the box is a well-intended fallacy, and brainstorming is too vague and unstructured to be helpful. Using the design thinking mindset is a way to add much-needed structure into out-of-the-box thinking.
Introducing Design Thinking
Despite its name, design thinking isn’t just for artists or designers. It is for anyone who needs to find innovative solutions. Design thinking celebrates collaboration, curiosity, and having an open mind. It is a thought process that relies on observation and empathy, and it is iterative and hands-on. Using a design thinking philosophy in our personal decisions allows us to look outside our learned thinking patterns without fear.
One of the best design thinking processes I’ve found is a design sprint. The design sprint was invented at Google Ventures by Jake Knapp. This process has led large organizations like Slack, Medium, and Nest to achieve successful problem-solving. There are numerous articles and resources on performing a design sprint. Jake Knapp even wrote a book about the process titled “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.” My goal with this article isn’t to reiterate already widely available information. I want to help you alter and adopt this award-winning business process for your personal thinking strategy.
The design sprint process includes five steps: understand, ideate, decide, prototype, and test. Let’s break down each step and make it personal. At the beginning of your sprint, you need to understand the issue at hand fully, set a long-term goal, create an action list, and decide the highest value action to target the problem. We will focus on this action item for the rest of our exercise.
Understand
To fully understand the problem, you need to discover your pain points. Some great questions to ask yourself are:
“Why do I want to make this change?”
“What circumstances contributed to this problem?”
You should always approach these questions with empathy and avoid falling into blaming yourself. The goal of this exercise isn’t to get emotional about a situation but to move forward equipped with understanding.
Ideate
The next step would be to establish a long-term goal. A couple of questions to help you would be:
“What is my desired outcome?”
“How can I turn this problem into an opportunity?”
These questions aim to help you travel to the future with your mind. Once we can envision our goal, we can work backward from our desired outcome. To work backward from the goal would be to list some action steps to get there.
This step might require some additional research. For example, if your desired outcome is a new career, but your problem is a lack of skill, you might consider the requirements to land a job and create action items to obtain those qualifications.
Decide
Once you have your action list, now is the time to decide which action item would contribute the most to your solution or goal. Sometimes action lists don’t have to be done linearly, and prioritizing the highest-value actions can quickly propel you forward. It can be challenging to determine the best action on your own. During this part of your process, it can be helpful to get an outside opinion from someone who has achieved what you are working toward.
Prototype
The traditional design sprint is used by teams and usually in conjunction with product design or testing solutions for user experiences. During this part of the sprint process, the team would create low-fidelity prototypes or wireframe sketches of applications and user flows.
We can use the prototype phase of our exercise to take the first step toward your chosen action list item. If we take our example from earlier about finding a new career, this could look like taking an online course or checking out a book about a skill you need to learn. The prototype phase is a way to take action while keeping costs and time invested at a minimum.
Test
We’ve made it to the last step in our altered design sprint. Now is the time to test what you accomplished in the prototype phase. The test phase of the sprint is vital. You will gain insight into how to move forward and where you should invest more of your time. From our example earlier, you could take the knowledge you obtained from your course and test it out on a project or see if you could use that knowledge to land an interview.
Conclusion
I hope this article sparks new ideas for redesigning your decision-making process. I hope you feel empowered to use design thinking as a tool to break past established thinking patterns. I believe if we use methods similar to design sprints for our big decisions, we can work more equitably with our professional teams and more confidently on our own.
