# The joy of books: Sprint

Sprint - BookWyrm

From three partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at more than a hundred companies. Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint. Designer Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X. He joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, and together they have completed more than a hundred sprints with companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more. A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.

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Sprint is a book where I have mixed feelings. To be honest it is not for me. I am happy anyway that it is being useful for a lot of people. Its reviews are amazing so I am fine saying it is a good book.

Anyway, unfortunately I find extremely surprising people are finding it so useful.

For some reason we need a book for someone to come and tell us: "For Christ sake, you need to focus your full attention in the most important thing until the problem becomes a matter of execution" or "structured approaches are better than just throwing people at a problem" or "if no one here can take a decision... what the hell are we doing here?".

It offers a decent taxonomy and framework for working in complex problems but I find it too shallow.

I find far more appealing Cynefin taxonomy of problems and an executive mindset. The rest is "just" organizational problems and we have better frameworks for those.

I understand the way the book creates a framework that can be used for consulting purposes. Also, I am pretty sure those consulting services are super useful. Based on the reviews on the book a lot of people need it and I am super super happy someone is solving those. Anyway, as a society, why are we there still?

Why are we still questioning:

• Focus on solving the most important things
• Focus is mandatory
• Have input from all needed parts
• Consider what is happening as part of a system. Use mental models to approach those systems
• All models are wrong. Some are useful.
• Prototype early, fast and cheap

If you think of it the book is a huge exercise of moving from the proverbial Complex to Complicated

Maybe this is one of those cases where I find the book could have been a long blogpost but looks like I am alone there still so it is good someone took the time to do that.

In the book there are awesome examples of teams finding the solutions to great problems with thinking out of the box... and whilst the framework it is proposed is reasonable and necessary I don't think it is the most important part on getting to those ideas.

This kind of processes "just" (again with quotes) removes obstacles but I think they fall short on reproducing how those great ideas are created and that is the part I am interested the most. There are some small tips here and there on that but I'd love to see far more of that. If we assume we have a healthy organization that knows where they are going but they face a complex challenge you are already doing most of the things here.

Also another critique is that the things that are hard to solve are left unsolved. I have the feeling that it is focusing in organizations that are just close to solving the problem but for internal stupidity they don't do it.

I must assume most organizations are a mess. Bummer.

Anyway, again it is not that there is no bad advice there at all. Please, follow most of the things in the book. Maybe I am looking for solutions to stuff that no one can offer in a book.