Between birth and 3 years old, a child’s brain makes 1 million new neural connections a second.
It sounds a lot like your high-growth company. Things are moving a million miles a minute, and you’re rapidly developing and moving onto the next thing. When a bug comes up, you fix it and move on.
You are moving so fast and making so many new connections that your team often doesn't know which way is up and what you are feeling or experiencing from one moment to the next.
Trying to approach things logically is met with disaster. Your brain isn’t wired for logic, and neither is your company. It’s wired to build connections: do, react, build, do, react.
There’s nothing logical about that. And the more you try to apply logic, the more you and your team are frustrated.
On the other hand, this intuitive creative cycle isn’t always scalable as your company grows. While it works well for a completely in-sync team of five or six, larger teams can’t collaborate as closely, and the context of your impulsive decision-making process gets lost. New team members won’t understand how you got from point A to point B, and your developers will waste countless hours explaining the process to them.
What’s the compromise?
Don’t discourage intuitive decision-making—but build a thoughtful and consistent process around it. When working on a project, let your team members react off the cuff, and give them space and time to process the reaction. But from there, you can review feedback with them and jointly decide the next move.
Using a Q&A-based knowledge sharing solution can help your team members bring structure to their collaboration process. After the initial rush of creation, a new engineer can honestly ask why a certain feature was built a certain way, and colleagues can provide insight and reasoning behind each decision that’s been made to date. Even when your team is deep in the creative process, developers can use the space to play devil’s advocate and ask questions about how certain decisions might impact the product positively or negatively. Team members from other departments can cross-pollinate the discussion and provide their own valuable insights to help guide the product development process.
By providing a framework where your team can review and regroup on their ideation process, you won’t slow down their agile creative process—but you’ll give them the tools to think practically about what they’re doing, and provide them with access to historical data to inform their choices going forward. So keep those neural connections flowing—and know that with better collaboration, your team can keep the spontaneous creative process that helped you grow so quickly no matter how large your company gets.
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