Keeping your Team in Charge
You've learned from experience: immediately calling in the design firm will not avert the challenges. After all, what is the first thing those experts will do: ask questions! They'll need time, and lots of it, with you and your team. There's a good reason for that: your team works hard at knowing your customers, your competition, and your operations. Sometimes the whole process seems like rehash upon rehash. There is no way to avoid that entirely, but there is a method to capture more of that effort as value to your operations.
Facilitated Discovery: A method for eliciting and amplifying team brilliance.
Your Team, Working Together
Facilitated Discovery is straightforward. It is like brainstorming, but more effective at engaging your team, producing stronger results of more types. When you do bring in your designers, you'll be ready for a much richer and productive discussion at the point where the designers have the most energetic and independent outlook, and your team is best prepared to benefit.
In managing Facilitated Discovery, it helps to have training and experience at conducting loosely-structured meetings across several groups in multiple sessions, as they energetically pursue divergent paths, struggle to tame the chaos, learn to tolerate uncertainty, and strive for the patience for delayed resolution. If you don't have that training and experience, use the enclosed materials and you'll do just fine.
The Team Discovers, Facilitators Assist: Understand that the discovery part of Facilitated Discovery arises from the active engagement of your team in multiple activities calling on many different perspectives and a variety of experience, information and opinion, even from outside of their usual team roles. The facilitator helps generate and sustain that, even through the team's wrong turns, confusion and frustration: the team does the discovery, the facilitators merely assist.
Origination
The Facilitated Discovery method was the founding innovation of Interfacility, a Palo Alto, CA, design consultancy formed, in 1999, by Nick Ragouzis and Marijke Rijsberman. With the aim of raising the value delivered from design activities, we taught the method to design firms and we used it with clients. Marijke Rijsberman continues to lead Interfacility, with a focus on experience design and research.
