Episode Transcript
Peter: Every great team that I've been on, or worked with, or read about, they all get stuck sometimes, trying to solve really hard problems. Now, sometimes we can talk our way through to a solution pretty quickly, but other times, for whatever reason, it feels like we're never gonna figure it out.
We might even consider giving up, assuming the problem's just not solvable for us. We'll just have to deal with it. Maybe we even start figuring how to spin it a little bit so we don't feel so bad. We'll say things like, "we may need to explore a pivot here..."
Richard: And there probably are times where pivoting is the right course of action, like if you've disproved a core assumption. But if you're giving up on solving a hard problem, just because you're out of energy or new ideas, you might appropriately wonder, "what if we had just given it one more try? Would that have been the time where we figured it out?"
Peter: Richard, when a new driver gets stuck in the snow, their first instinct is to...
Richard: Hit the gas.
Peter: Hit the gas, right? Which just digs them deeper in, and all of us who facilitate meetings know what it feels like to be spinning your wheels in a meeting, with the mounting pressure to get to a good answer. When that anxiety ramps up and the team's looking to you to figure out what to do next, it's tempting to keep pushing, trying harder, going deeper.
But that's the wrong move if you need creative solutions to intractable problems. If you're facilitating, you need to ask different questions, to take the team on a left turn, or get outta the proverbial car altogether and put a piece of wood under the tire. Maybe we've stretched that metaphor as far as it'll go, but facilitators need to be in the business of jiggling the team's thinking in a different direction.
Richard: Now, Peter, when you use the word intractable, the root there is traction, well played.
Peter: That was not an error.
Richard: So in today's episode. We're going to share how to use what creativity researchers call 'wild cards.' We'll give you a few real examples, share why they work, and point you to a resource we've created with our favorite wild card techniques in seven different categories.
But before we do, a quick reminder that this episode is brought to you by the Humanizing Work Company, where we help organizations improve their leadership, product management, and collaboration. Visit humanizing work.com to learn more about our workshops, coaching and online courses, or to bring us in to support your team.
Peter: And if you get value from the show and you wanna support it, the best thing you can do if you're watching on YouTube is subscribe, like the episode, and click the bell icon to get notified of new episodes. If you're listening on the podcast, a five star review makes a huge difference in whether other people who'd benefit from the show find it or not.
Richard: The first example of a wild card that came to mind when we were talking about this topic is a famous conversation between Intel co-founders, Andy Grove and Gordon Moore. At the time, Intel's primary product was memory chips, but they were thinking about getting into processors. They couldn't afford to invest in both. Memory chips had been their cash cow, but lots of low-cost competitors had entered the market. They hadn't proven that new market or their technology and processors though, so it would be a risky shift.
After weeks in back and forth, Grove finally threw in a wild card. He asked, "if we got kicked out, and the board brought in a new CEO, what would he do?" Moore responded without hesitation, "he would get us out of memories."
Grove then suggested "then, why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back in and do it ourselves?" This led to Intel's strategic decision to exit the memory business and focus on microprocessors, a move that transformed the company into a dominant force in the tech industry.
Peter: I love that example. Thinking about the problem from someone else's perspective, got them unstuck. It immediately became clear what they should do. I kind of like the ceremonial aspect of it too. Like let's walk out the door and come back in as a new leadership team.
That situation reminds me of Sprint eight for Adobe audition. Now, when our team had adopted Scrum eight sprints earlier, we set a goal to get everything releasable by the end of a sprint. But then month after month, we failed to do that. Almost always, we'd run out of time for testing at the end of each sprint, and then we would move those testing tasks into the next sprint, and the same pattern would repeat itself.
Every retrospective, we tried something different: earlier, handoff deadlines in the sprint, different processes for submitting code, build, test, documentation, bringing QA into discussions earlier, and nothing worked. We were just spinning our wheels. At the end of Sprint eight, I was at the end of my rope as far as ideas for how to fix it.
I had put a lot of my political capital on the line advocating that we should try Scrum, feeling intuitively like it should work, but not knowing why we couldn't break through on this problem.
Around that time, I attended a coaching class where the trainer taught us a technique to help people in conflict get unstuck. And in this approach, the coach has a deck of cards each with an interesting photo on it, kind of a random set. And we learned in the class how to invite each person to pull a random card that had some photo on it. And use it as a metaphor for the relationship and see where that took the conversation.
It was kind of a cool magic trick in the training. It usually uncovered something that they hadn't been willing to talk about or that was sort of buried and they needed to talk about it, and all the time it was creative and positive. I.
So after the training, I was sitting at my desk trying to plan that next retro at the end of Sprint eight. And my new deck of cards were sort of sitting on the desk off to my left. I, I'd put that aside, that's for, that's for coaching individuals. And as I was trying to figure out what to do, I glanced down and it was like the cards finally shouted at me. Hey Peter, these aren't just for conflict resolution!
So I opened the next retro by sharing the data from Sprint eight, where we had a bunch of incomplete testing tasks. No surprise there. And I showed that burn down chart and compared that to the two previous sprints that showed basically the same pattern, despite our attempts to fix it. Then I spread out all of those cards on the conference table face up, and I invited everyone to just randomly walk around and pick one that they liked.
Once everybody had their card, I asked each person to make up a story about how their card was actually an illustration in the article we would write about how we finally got all of the testing done in Sprint nine. So there was some sort of eye rolling and people hesitantly playing along and saying, all right, we'll see where this goes.
I don't remember a lot of the details about the stories other than that. Some of them were pretty creative and some were pretty silly. But I do remember one of the QA team members holding up a card and it had a picture of a scientist in a lab, like with the beakers and the sort of neon glow behind them.
He said something like, "in this article, the audition team decided to think like scientists, for every task a developer planned in the sprint, they'd answer the question, how might we test the result of that task? This resulted in a much faster round trip between checking in code and validating that it worked. They didn't have to wait days or weeks to test work in progress, and they finished all of the testing in Sprint nine hours before the sprint review."
So we decided to adopt that technique, and try it out in Sprint nine. And it worked and it turned out to be our path into what we now know as small vertical slices.
And we indeed got, I think every task done. Maybe there were one or two left, but I'll drop the burn down chart for Sprint nine compared to sprint eight in the YouTube video and maybe in the episode page so people can see the difference. Sprint seven, sprint eight, they all end with clearly a bunch of work in progress.
Sprint nine, it just goes right down to zero.
Richard: I love doing this kind of thing in retrospectives to collaboratively generate fresh ideas. 'cause it's so easy for retros to become the equivalent of reading out ideas from a suggestion box. Introducing a wild card, like those random images turns the retro into a much more generative collaborative activity.
Oh, and by the way, for our listeners, when it comes to things like working in thin vertical slices, you no longer have to derive that from your own experiments like Peter's team did 15 years ago. Now you can learn from years of experience on thousands of agile teams, and we've captured our best approaches for this in our 80 20 product backlog refinement online course.
So if you or your team wants to get better at slicing big ideas into high impact features and features into good, thin user stories that you can complete several of in a sprint. 80 20 product backlog refinement. It's worth checking out. Um, we'll link to it in the show notes.
Okay. Aside, over, back to wild cards, why do they work? Well, psychologists call this kind of technique, lateral thinking or remote association. Basically, when we're stuck, our brains are running the same well, well-worn mental loops. We're applying the same assumptions, the same logic, the same arguments over and over.
Um, which also doesn't just happen in our brains. It happens in relationships and teams too.
Uh, this is great for conserving energy 'cause our brains are massive energy hogs, but it's terrible for creating breakthroughs. When we toss in something unexpected, a random image, a flipped question, a new constraint, we interrupt that loop. And once it's broken, our brains naturally start trying to make the new data make sense.
We look for connections, patterns, meaning. We can't help it. It's how we're wired.
Peter: And that's why the wild card doesn't have to make a lot of sense on its own. The fact that somebody pulled up a picture of a scientist has nothing to do, on the face of it, with how we're gonna split our stories in the future sprint.
In fact, if the wild card makes sense, it's probably not disruptive enough to do the job. It needs to be a left turn, something jarring enough to get us looking at the problem from a new angle. The insight comes from the shift, not the card or the question, or the prompt itself.
Richard: And this, by the way, with the images is why we almost always had people pick the image before we tell them what they're going to do with the image.
Instead of coming up with an idea and finding an image that matches. It only functions as a wild card when it's a bit jarring and unexpected. There are way more wild card techniques than we could fit in a single episode. So we've collected some of our favorites humanizingwork.com/wildcards.
You'll find different types of wild cards in several categories, why they work and links to more resources, including the Visual Explorer cards that Peter had used in his retrospective story from the Audition team.
Peter: We're also sharing a list of our top 10 Wild card questions that a facilitator might ask in the comments, and we'd love to hear yours.
What's a question or a prompt or a constraint that you've used to shake things up when your team was stuck? Drop that in the comments below, with a note about how you've used it. We'd love to expand our own toolkit and learn from you all.
Richard: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Humanizing Work Show, and we'll see you next time.
