 Hello everybody, Jonathan from AJ & Smart here. I'm sitting in one of our product design spaces. Rob just being creepy in the background there. And I'm going to be cutting to a clip in a second which is a Q&A that myself and Jake Knapp, Jake Knapp, the author of Sprint. It's taken straight from our online masterclass and the questions we're answering are questions that we got sent from our masterclass students on our Facebook group. And it's a super, super, super common question. It's a super common problem that people have when they're running sprints. What happens when someone gets protective of their ideas and starts to cause trouble about that? So let's have a look at the question. Let's have a look at the answer and I'll catch you at the end. Hey, welcome back to the Q&A section of the course. Hey, welcome. Whoa. All right. So I've got a really great question here from Oshin Boles. Oshin? Oshin. It's actually an Irish name I should be able to say it properly. Really, really great. Too much time in Berlin. Yeah, too much time in Berlin. This is a great question though. Jake, how do you deal with people who are very protective of their ideas and they feel like their idea hasn't been given the attention it deserves? For example, when they don't agree with the voting and feels that others aren't taking their ideas seriously. Okay. Yeah, that's a tough situation. Yeah, so you've gone through, you've done the decision-making process, you've done the critique, you've done the review, people voted and they didn't. Yeah. So, yeah, this someone is like, yeah. So I mean, there's I guess a couple approaches. One, and you kind of got to gauge the person and what is going to be helpful to them. So for some people, like you could think of kind of the tough love approach, which is like, look, like your solution didn't get attention. It may be because it just wasn't clear. Sometimes an idea that in the abstract sounds really good. When you put it down on paper is just not so compelling. And if that's what you think happened, if you think that the idea that people aren't paying attention to it because it just isn't worth the attention, and that person is really visibly upset or talks to you, you may have to just be blunt with them and say, look, the idea may have just not come through because it's just not as strong as the other people aren't feeling it. There's other situations, there's other sort of versions of this. I mean, sometimes a team is really dead set, a decider is really dead set on one approach. And maybe an idea that seems really strong and they're right, like doesn't get the attention that it ought to have. The other kind of like way to be blunt to a person like that, maybe to take them aside and say, or even in front of the group, if they're raising it as an issue and within the whole team, is that part of what happens in the design sprint is that decision making becomes transparent. You can see what your decider is choosing to go for and not. And that I think is sometimes hard. It's hard to see those things happen up front, but they're happening anyway. Right, it's not likely that that solution would have made it through if you weren't doing the sprint, but now you just saw it happen really fast. And sometimes that is hard to see. But if it's reality, like I don't think we're going to suddenly like sort of overwhelm the process. Okay, all that aside, though, I would say that if you're facilitating and you see that there's a solution that I've seen this happen where like a solution, I can see that there's merit to it, but the person's writing wasn't clear or like, you know, there's some kind of biasing that's going on that that actually is going to negatively affect their solution. Before the final voting goes in, if I like can do a job in the speed critique of making sure that I make it clear to people what's what's there, you know, drawing out my own solutions, as a facilitator, you have the ability to, you know, in the heat map and in the speed critique, and even maybe giving a quick presentation of the solutions before people do the straw pool, you can make sure that you give a solution every chance of being heard and recognized. So that's one other possibility is as a facilitator, if you see that since that coming on, can you help in some way? Can you steer a decider towards choosing two solutions that are very different from one another? I mean, you can do you can easily do that in the moment. You can say, I think we ought to go for two competing solutions here because you know they're dead set. So that's there's some little tweaks you can make. But for the most part, those kinds of frustrations come through because people maybe are experiencing their idea, which wasn't as good when it was made detailed as it was when they thought of it in their head and happens, happens to me for sure. Yeah, there's a few things that we do. So number one, and you'll see this over and over in the course, we try to set expectations as much as possible. So we try to remind people before anything happens that, you know, your idea may not get through. And it doesn't matter if it doesn't get through because we're going to be testing on Thursday. And it could be that some parts of your idea may be come back in the iteration or something like that just to calm them down. But one thing that we've started to do that's been super successful, you'll also see this later in the course, is that we have them give the facilitator their concept before they stick it up on the wall. So the so on the Monday, so that the facilitator can have a look and say, Oh, your handwriting, if you changed your handwriting, you'd have a much better chance of this idea getting through. So we try to remove the those barriers already before the voting happens. And that really, really helps. Yeah. In that case, you're not doing the filter live and trying to course correct live. You have a chance to help out. Yeah. That also might make someone feel like they had a better chance of having your idea heard. Exactly. Because you've given them every chance in advance to do it. Yeah. And I think that that framing, that idea of saying, look, when we get to the end of this sprint, what we're trying to do is learn more about our product market fit. We're trying to figure out if our customers understand the value proposition of our product. That's a bigger goal, I think, almost always than the specific solution that we're going for. What you get at the end of the sprint, if you fast forward to the end, it's going to be this understanding of your customer and your product and kind of the whole of it. And hopefully, you can convey some of that to the people in the room so that they don't get too fixated on the details of the solution. Because the reality is, most solutions, whichever one they are, will have a lot go wrong with them in that test, for sure. I think that's already a good enough answer to the question. Okay, cool. Should we do a really bad high five and leave the frame? Yeah. Thanks everybody. Goodbye. See you later. You're still in the frame. All right, welcome back. So I hope you enjoyed that video. If you're interested in learning more about how to run and sell your own design sprints, there's a one hour 20 minute live recording. So it's a replay of a live recording down below. You can click that, you can have a look at it, and it's pretty chunky detail, something that we didn't upload to YouTube yet. So yeah, have a look at it if you're interested in the design sprint. If you like this video, give it a like, subscribe, leave a comment, have some fun. Why did I say have some fun?