Bounded Innovation and Your Problem-solving Journey

Five ways to jump-start your problem-solving journey using Scrum.

As an Agile Leader, have you and your teams decided to embrace a problem-solving culture? Are predictive, command-and-control methods not producing the results you desire? Do you need to bring to bear the power of the team to self-organize and solve problems without relying on management to decide? Are you ready to move to a model of trust and team ownership?

If you answered, “Yes,” to any of the questions above, keep reading. This post is for you.

You Can’t Do It All At Once

Building a problem-solving culture, like any culture change, takes time. You must apply deliberate, daily practice to form new habits. Learning new behaviors can be a shock to the system. So it is best to take significant behavior changes one step at a time.

Many of us are in a predictive, command-and-control culture. Figure A illustrates a series of stages for moving to a problem-solving culture.

Figure A - Rubric for Building a Problem-Solving Habit — Figure A – Rubric for Building a Problem-Solving Habit

Each stage builds on the prior stage. By progressing through these stages, you will realize measurable progress and value along the journey. Each stage will reinforce and reward the behavior change. The progressive change process builds a strong foundation. A strong foundation helps to make the new behavior stick. Seeing value along the way also tends to accelerate the change.

Once you desire to move from predictive control to a problem-solving habit, Bounded Innovation is a nice entry point. I have seen many teams experience fast results by first trying Bounded Innovation. Let’s talk about why this is a good place to start.

Bounded Innovation is a Good Place to Start

Bounded Innovation puts a time box or boundary around innovation. Also, the Bounded Innovation occurs on a periodic basis rather than it being a one-time event. I have coached many groups to jump-start their problem-solving culture using this technique. It works.

There are three reasons why Bounded Innovation is an effective place to start for Agile Leaders and their teams:

It Is Safe: Constraining innovation to set time periods is safe for beginning the journey. Agile Leaders and teams get the opportunity to try out self-organized, team-level problem-solving. This is safer as an entry point than going all-in.
It Allows Agile Leadership to Emerge: Bounded innovation allows management to practice being an Agile Leader. Letting go and allowing the team to take ownership is not easy. A time-boxed, set time for innovation allows managers to practice their new behavior in a sand-box. It also provides a set time for Agile coaches to work with managers to observe and shape this new behavior pattern in the moment.
It Builds Courage: When teams get a chance to innovate under the support of Agile Leaders, it builds the team’s courage. As a result, the team will be more likely to try out their ideas in the future. It also takes courage for managers to let go and trust the teams. When a manager starts a behavior that differs from the status quo, their peers might notice. It takes courage to stand strong and be different. Courage is critical for Agile Leadership to emerge.

“It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting.”
—Jerry Sternin¹

I could try to sell you all day on Bounded Innovation. But action will serve you better. You should try it yourself. I have five ideas for you to consider as you start.

Five Methods to Get Started with Bounded Innovation

I have seen each of the five methods below spark the problem-solving fire in Agile Leaders and their teams.

Method 1: Scrum-the-Scrum

If you are already on the Scrum journey, this method will be familiar. To Scrum-the-Scrum, you apply Scrum to improve the way you implement Scrum. It elevates your problem solving and improvement. When you Scrum-the-Scrum, you put improvement on par with product delivery.

To apply the Scrum-the-Scrum method, consider the following activities:

Treat improvements from your Retrospective like any Story you pull off the backlog.
You can pull improvements into Sprint Planning and plan your experiment to realize the improvement.
Like Stories, your improvements can become part of your forecasted Sprint Backlog and Sprint Goal.
In the Daily Scrum, you can discuss your improvements along with any feature Stories in progress.
Along with your Sprint stories, track your improvements and make them visible on your big, visual boards and in your backlog tracking tool.
In Backlog Refinement, you can discuss upcoming improvements you would like to pursue.
In your Sprint Review, present your improvement achievement along with your feature achievement.

As a bounded activity, Scrum the Scrum puts problem-solving front and center. It allows the team to own problem-solving. And it provides a focus for coaching problem-solving techniques.

Method 2: Invest in an Innovation Sprint, Day, or Story

In this method, your Product Owner will choose to invest in innovation. The Product Owner can adjust the level of investment. You can focus the innovation on product feature ideas. Or you can focus the innovation on ideas for improving the way the team delivers product features.

You can bound team innovation using this method in several ways:

Apply innovation to every Story of one entire sprint, repeated on a periodic basis
Innovate for one day of one Sprint or one day of every Sprint
Choose innovation for one Story of one Sprint or one Story of every Sprint

During the chosen innovation boundary, the team is free to innovate to solve a problem. The Product Owner evaluates the ideas with the team. And the Scrum team collectively selects the best ideas to move forward.

Method 3: Open Space for Learning and Problem Solving

There are few structures as liberating as an Open Space event. Allowing attendees to drive the discussion topics and conversation flow puts the control in their hands. It is the perfect structure for enabling grassroots problem solving and cross-group sharing.

Thematic ideas for open space sessions include but are not limited to:

A cross-team retrospective for a multi-team product, teams within a portfolio, or teams across portfolios and the enterprise
A fresh format for an employee town hall event to move away from one-way information sharing
A periodic mini-conference event focused on a theme of learning or problem solving

These events should require minimal preparation. Informality is critical.

Method 4: Science Fair Sprint Review

Who does not love a science fair? You get to create a cool booth, present to a varied audience, meet new people, and learn from those who visit. Applying this as a format for a Sprint Review can help spread the word about your product. It can also help you get new ideas for meeting your product outcomes. The booth format limits the number of people at your booth. A smaller group enables intimate connection and communication with your Sprint Review audience.

Think about using the science fair format in your Sprint Review for these scenarios:

Demo to Other Teams: Show your completed Sprint items to other teams. These could be teams in your multi-team product, teams of other products, or teams in other portfolios.
Stakeholder Engagement: Invite stakeholders of your product and from other products and portfolios. The small format discussion will help them learn about your product. Stakeholders can also provide ideas for solving customer needs or meeting the desired business impact.
Customer Engagement: Invite customers to perform hands-on testing of your Sprint output. This will provide a feedback loop for driving positive customer outcomes

This fresh format to the Sprint Review will move you away from a one-way demo into an interactive format. It will re-energize your Sprint Review. And it will allow others to take part in solving your product needs. And it is fun.

Method 5: Help a Team for a Sprint

Helping another team is rewarding. Applying your expertise to solve another team’s needs helps build your problem-solving capability. And it enriches the solutions of the target team. Plus, it feels good to help others.

Helping another team can take several forms, including but not limited to:

Cross-team pairing to build skill across teams
Implementing a buddy system for another team or team members
Helping a team in trouble

Getting Started

Pick one or more of the above five methods that intrigue you. Then commit to trying it out in your next sprint. Before you get started, there are a few keys to having a successful Bounded Innovation experiment.

Keys to Successful Bounded Problem Solving

First, you should keep the Bounded Innovation fun and informal. The more formality you add, the more life you will suck out of it. You must minimize direction to maximize freedom. Where possible, allow teams to self organize in creating the structure and rules of the Bounded Innovation.

Minimize direction to maximize freedom.

When faced with evaluating ideas generated from the Bounded Innovation period, resist the urge to have a panel of judges. A panel of managers or senior folks tends to minimize or devalue those who generated the ideas. You will generate an inclusive, safe environment if you promote a collective assessment of ideas. Have everyone weigh in on the merit of an idea and vote. This will ensure the best chance of buy-in to the selected ideas.

The value in Bounded Innovation is the development of problem-solving capability. Criticism of any idea will act against this value. Celebrate the pure act of innovating regardless of experiment outcome. Cultivating a safe environment will accelerate your path to a problem-solving culture.

What to Expect

You are ready to develop a problem-solving culture. You are ready to try one of the five starter methods or an innovative method of your own. As you embark on your journey, look out for these benefits:

Better Ideas: More heads focused on problem-solving will generate more ideas. And the ideas will be better.
Increased Courage and Confidence: As you start practicing problem-solving, your courage to try out your ideas will increase. With each step on your journey, your confidence will build.
Teamwork Amplification: As you begin to help others and share your knowledge to solve problems, something magical takes place. You will find you stop saying, “That is not my job.” Instead, you will feel compelled to say, “How can I help?”
Trust Will Build: As you reap the benefits of Bounded Innovation, you will see trust emerge. Teams will trust that management supports their problem-solving efforts. Managers will build trust in the teams as they coach the teams in the problem-solving journey.

There is no valid reason I can think of not to try this. I have seen it succeed time and time again.

In this post, I have shared many of my experiences with you. Let me know how they turn out for your context. And share your new methods with me. Good luck embarking on your problem-solving journey.

References

The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems, Jerry Sternin, 2010

Coach Lankford

Todd Lankford unlocks Lean Leverage in organizations to cultivate powerful, engaged product teams who maximize outcomes and impact.

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