World Kinect Energy

Global & Cross-Disciplinary Participation

The team included members—based in Japan, the UK, France, and Norway—with a diverse set of skills and backgrounds including sales, marketing, finance, strategy, and product development.This team of energetic, talented managers were very clear about one thing: they were ready to collaborate and innovate despite the fact that Covid was turning industries and markets upside down.

Building Psychological Safety

With the solid support of Kinect’s top management, the team met on Zoom for the first time and had some initial laughs. We danced in front of our laptops, feeling quite awkward. Why the heck are we being so silly, someone asked? The goal, of course, was to start to build some kind of psychological safety amongst each other—the feeling that it’s okay to be weird and act outside the norms of day-to-day corporate life. We shared personal stories, gave each other virtual tours of our home offices, talked about why we thought our work mattered, and let our hair down.

Making the Sprint Happen

Then we got down to business. This involved scheduling twelve online sessions where we would use remote tools to go from vague product idea to functional prototype. We discussed individual priorities, shared initial market contexts, and landed on a solid strategic plan for our Sprint. The sessions flowed smoothly. We began by setting a clear long-term goal and mapping out the problem space. From there, we leveraged the power of cross-pollination by “stealing” ideas from radically different industries. We considered—and laughed about—potential connections between the energy sector and many other seemingly random industries. This served as inspiration for multiple rounds of brainstorming and ideation.

Rapid Digital Prototyping & Testing

Once we voted on the highest-potential ideas, we immediately moved to the rapid prototyping phase. The more technically oriented members of the team thrived here, coming up with various digital solutions on Figma, our go-to prototyping tool. This laid out the start of the arduous testing phase. The team realized quickly that letting go of their ideas and testing them on real users was an initially painful process. Releasing their “babies” into the world was hard—and instructing. The more the team exposed their prototypes to the world, the more they realized how far off their idea was to the deep needs of their users.  Slowly but surely, though, they began to gain traction and gravitated towards a solution that addressed real client pain points.

Landing On a Solution

After several weeks of iteration and pivoting, the team landed on a solution that resonated with the core client and fit the strategy of the organization. Kinect is currently live testing the innovative solution in order to land on a sustainable product. Through the process, the Sprint team learned how to trust the process, have a strong bias towards action, build on teammates’ ideas, remain open to the unknown unknowns, and take initial fuzzy ideas to prototypes, which can enable the correct decisions to me made.