The Team. Representation from many different skillsets is essential for problem solving. Make sure that you have everyone you need, but no excess. Teams are typically best kept small: 5-8 people.

In this class we will balance total number of teams with the number of members per team, and area of expertise will be the driving factor. In a company or large organization, you should seek experts from many functional areas. For example, a team tackling hospital acquired infections might include a surgeon, infection control personnel, a nurse, a business administrator, and even the night shift custodian.

The Decider. In Jake Knapp’s book Sprint, he emphasizes the importance of including the Decider in the sprint. The Decider is the person with decision-making authority within your company or organization, and often they also have the power to clear the team’s schedules to focus on a sprint. They also have the power (and funds) to give a green light for potential solutions, and they represent the company values and trajectory. If they aren’t looped into your sprint, they could quash solutions and prevent forward progress.

It’s often true that Deciders have busy schedules and might not understand the value of fast-paced design sprints. If the design sprint team wants to innovate and produce a solution to present to upper leaders, pick 1-2 Deciders to attend parts of the design thinking process to get their input at key points throughout. For example, early in the design thinking process, during the empathy phase, involve the Decider in understanding the problem and get input about choosing what part of the problem to focus on.

Keep in mind that new perspectives spark new ideas. You may want to include design thinking team members outside your organization (definitely outside your department!)

• Diversity of organizational tenure and functional backgrounds influences innovation and ultimately boosts business outcomes (de Vaan et al, 2015).

• Gender diversity leads to better science. (Nielsen et al, 2017).

• Historically underrepresented groups often draw relations between ideas and concepts that have been traditionally missed or ignored. (Hofstra et al, 2020)

Bias. With the valuable perspective that we each bring, we also inevitably bring along our own bias. Become more aware of what implicit bias is- it’s unintentional yet automatic. The National Institutes of Health explains more here on their webpage, including ways to reduce implicit bias and a short free online training course if you want to dig deeper.