When to create a process

Have you ever had a teammate say this? “I’m not sure what to do in this situation.”

Me too! Here’s a process we use to create more autonomy in our team. 

5on2

Our team uses a principle called 5on2 – before you start a 2+ hour task, spend 5 minutes consulting a teammate to make sure your approach is the best one. 5on2s have drastically reduced time spent moving in the wrong direction while also sharing knowledge across our team. 

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The typical 5on2 looks something like this. 

1. We discuss the problem.
2. I’ll recommend a few steps of how I believe it should be solved. 
3. We discuss and iterate. 
4. Then they execute that plan. 

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While this process is often effective, I find myself reducing the autonomy of my team and spending much longer than 5 minutes to do it. So, we have decided to experiment with something new. 

Our experiment

First, pause and consider if a process could be created to solve the “I’m not sure what I should do in this situation” problem. Here is how that process might go, 

1. Write out the problem
2. Reframe the problem into a How Might We
3. Find examples of how others have solved this problem (Lightning demo research)
4. Based on what you find from research, list the best 3 solutions you propose
5. Share those 3 potential solutions with a decider (5on2)
6. The decider chooses
7. Implement that solution

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It’s a simple experiment to try with very little risk. So this teammate is going to try running through this process the next few times they are “not sure what to do”. If it’s successful, then we’ll share it with the rest of the team.

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We’ll let you know how it goes in a future post.

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