Are Design Sprints just theatre?
tl/dr:Jeff Davidson’s article criticizes Design Sprints as "innovation theatre," and I have to agree. It’s a strong piece that challenges the design community and sparks debate.
Design Sprints were popularised by Google Ventures and have spread like a venereal disease, reminding me of Design Thinking hype. Both are nice terms that leadership like to band about, and importantly, both are methods that (apparently) anyone can master and make innovation look like a simple-to-follow process. For the uninitiated, a Google Design Sprint is a 5 to 10-day process of validating ideas and solving problems through research, conceptualisation, and testing with hypothetical end-users. They’re usually conducted in a cross-functional team that includes a designer, a researcher, a strategist and business stakeholder. Its innovation with a formulated instruction manual. So it is not surprising that Design Sprints have been welcomed by thousands of organisations in their quests to disrupt before being disrupted.
The context reads like this: The Big corporate leadership know they have to this digital innovation thing, they hire some wacky creative types to work with their over stretched engineers to invent something new and deliver new value. They then lock them in a room, with ping-pong, bean bags and vegan snacks, and wait for the innovation to pop out like toast in a toaster. Ideas abound. Delivery of actual product does not. But here is the sordid truth: Design Sprints were never about creating new products and services. They’re the gateway drug of choice for organisations to embrace design and become more innovative.
Embracing design as part of the strategic toolkit
Generally speaking, Design Sprints are owned by managers and senior decision makers. Or at the very least, are initiated and eventually evaluated by them. Design served a very specific purpose, and these senior decision makers considered design to be something that happens after all the strategic decisions have been made. Design Sprints have helped to elevate the value of design from helping to execute to helping create strategy.
The Design Sprint method has sent a clear message up the corporate hierarchy that designers are valuable in the strategic and decision-making processes. In the uncertain environment that most businesses now face, design can be harnessed in a strategic way to both identify and solve problems. Not that design is the only way to solve problems, rather it compliments and augments more traditional methods. The reality is Design Sprints are a rudimentary tool and generally do not deliver the miracle revolutionary output promised by Google. But they do deliver something much more magical in that they can position design as strategic enabler in the minds of decision makers.
Becoming more innovative
For all the amazing marketing promises, Design Sprints are just another workshop which packages Design Thinking, Agile and Lean in an accessible way. It may not be perfect in delivering tangible new product innovation immediately, but it gives organisations a taste of what it’s like to work without siloes. The endorphins of that first hit does help to drive further transformation for traditionally linear and siloed organisations, if they let it.
Every organisation basically wants to more agile, faster to react and more effective. They all want to deliver amazing new products and services, cut costs and build new value. And Design Sprints can give a taster of the fruits of these ambitions. This is the real magic of running a Design Sprint. Stakeholders come in with a vague idea about design, immediately apologise about how they can’t draw, argue that research will take too long and be too expensive, and wonder who that person across the table from logistics is and why they’ve never talked before. I don’t expect miraculous outputs from Design Sprint.
I do and have witnessed the miracle of a Design Sprint team waking up after seeing the value of more creative, collaborative, open and value creating ways of working. It’s a powerful workshop that shift perceptions. Yes, seasoned designers may see them as a bit superficial, but they’re missing the point. It’s not about delivering, it’s about enabling and championing design. If participants from your Design Sprint walk away with some new operating principles, it will help pave way for design and collaboration across an organisation.
Conclusion
A Design Sprint is just a method. It’s no silver bullet, despite the hype. Remember, a Design Sprint has nothing to do with design - the output will never stand up against the output of a seasoned team of designers. However, a sprint can start a change in perception, it can kick off innovation, it can help position design as a valuable strategic tool.