A Two-Decades-Long Romance

Our industry owes sticky notes a tribute.

Sticky notes have become a prized item in the product leader toolbox. We use them to brainstorm, sort, prioritize, vote, organize, group and rearrange everything from thoughts, domains, and problems to ideas, concepts and user stories. It is fair to say we would be lost without them in the product development world today.

We have learned a lot about how to use them and how not to use them along the way. Stick-note sorceresses, whiteboard wizards & flip-chart fortune tellers might improve their craft by learning from our misfortunes and innovations over the last couple of decades, so I am sharing them here.

At their best, sticky notes help us to create alignment for our visions, gain confidence in our planning and drive commitment from our teams. My team thrives or dies by their ability to elicit magic and wonder from teams of passionate business leaders with nothing more than sharpies, sticky notes, and the occasional flip-chart – which is, after all, nothing more than an oversized sticky note.

They have a storied history. When Dr. Spencer Silver discovered the low tack, reusable adhesive, he had no idea how it would impact the world. He was searching for a stronger and more powerful adhesive and it did not solve the problem. But he knew he had discovered something of value. It took the better part of a decade, persistence and another man’s mind to unveil a problem Dr. Spencer’s discovery might solve. Art Fry, another engineer at 3M had an issue organizing hymns at his local church when he had his “Eureka Moment” which allowed the modern sticky note to find its way into the modern business landscape.

The story of these two men embodies the power of the sticky note. They allow groups of divers’ minds, inspired by a shared goal, to better communicate, visualize, organize and prioritize their collective thoughts in real-time. Groups of people with shared goals can use sticky notes to get ideas out of our brains and into a visual format which is shareable in a way. This was difficult and time consuming to do before the invention of the sticky note. In essence:

Sticky notes allow a group of smart people to operate on ideas together.

“Open Awareness” occurs when a group of people have a shared challenge, with shared goals and the motivation to solve it. The story of Dr. Silver and Art working together to derive the sticky note is a great example of what makes them such an impactful tool. Dr. Silver created awareness by sharing his discovery with his fellow engineers at 3M and serendipitously, one of them (soon afterward) had a problem the adhesive could solve and boom — they had the spark which became the sticky note. The hard problems of today will rarely be solved by a single person on demand. Solving them requires many diverse skillsets and such a broad knowledge base, teams of people are required to analyze, theorize and experiment their way into a successful solution. We need to engage smart groups of people, with open awareness, to find those sparks (both small and large) of innovation if we want to see impactful changes.

In “On Dialog,” David Bohm discusses the power of participatory thought and the need for healthy dialog. We form teams because we know the potential of a team which is aligned, confident and committed to a shared result is much greater than the potential of its individual parts working independently.

Thus, with an environment which fosters open awareness and participative thought, a motivated group of people with some sticky notes can help teams tap into their joint creativity, improve alignment and improve clarity through open and joint refinement and prioritization. Sticky notes can help you to extract and visualize not just the big ideas, but also the micro-thoughts and micro-innovations from people — in real time. Even more powerfully, in workshop environments, they help to tap into the diverse minds in the room when used properly, to assist in extracting the best ideas from everyone, even the most introverted of leaders. I have seen the best ideas in a workshop extracted from the most introverted people because we used sticky notes as a forcing function to extract ideas from the individuals in a workshop. They are a brilliant tool for this.

Over the last two decades ago, sometimes randomly, my team and I have stumbled on some tricks with sticky notes to improve the alignment, confidence and commitment of teams in a workshop environment even more. We regularly gather diverse groups of highly intelligent business people, each with a unique perspective and all with broad differences in opinion about what to do next. Achieving alignment can be the hardest part of leading these workshops, but it is also their most valuable result.

The late 1990’s and early 2000’s were an amazing time to be in the software development space — everything on the Internet was basically green-field. While invigorating, we had so many ideas and so many things to experiment on, it was also overwhelming and often frustrating. We had limited resources on all fronts, and it seemed as though time was our biggest enemy. Competitors would sometimes swoop in out of nowhere and do it faster and better. It was essential for us to derive a way to better steward our resources and prioritize our investments. We had to do it quickly.

After a couple of years of struggling through leadership driven prioritization schemes and many failed attempts to make prioritization more objective, we were all frustrated.

In one workshop, we tried writing all of our ideas on individual sticky notes so we could see them all in one place. We had previously determined a prioritization scheme for ideas by using a prioritized list of customer “concerns,” so we sorted them into categories based on those concerns. Seeing them in this way caused us to recognize the importance of “sizing” each initiative so we could effectively prioritize. This had us randomly assigning sizes to each idea and using what was effectively an Eisenhower matrix. Approximate size as a proxy for cost and risk is a necessary component for people to properly prioritize. The value side of the equation is where intuition plays a key role. Once sized, we serendipitously used the three conveniently separated panes of glass in the room to stick the idea laden sticky notes into boxes we then labelled “phases.”

It allowed us to share all of our various concerns in real-time discussions around priorities and to give-and-take. The result was still imperfect, but it was the manifestation of our group intuition, it was powerful and it was, hands-down, better than anything we had done prior.

It was an experience which caused us to unanimously agree to use this process for all future prioritization in our workshops. It rapidly became one of the foundations of our roadmap generation process for all of the software products the firm went on to build for the next two decades and is still in use today.

Continuous Innovation

Since our first experiment, we have been privileged to have run hundreds of workshops in lots of diverse industries. Our team has a philosophy and a tradition of experimenting with different tools and tactics in every single workshop, so it should come as no surprise we have iterated on our use of sticky notes many times.

Here is a brief list of many of our practical learnings when using sticky for sizing and prioritization:

1. Use a doubling scale. As products and features get more complex, as you know if you have been in this industry long enough, they often get exponentially more complex. We recognized this early and started by using the following sequence: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 & 64 for sizes. The exponential scale has been easy to understand and implement and gives us a good separation of risk between ideas.

2. Separate actual effort and real timelines from the immediate discussion of priority. When teams get bogged down in actual timelines in the workshop environment, we have found it stifles the creative process and undermines our ability to achieve alignment. We need a green-field mindset to maximize creativity. We figured out, through experimentation, it is important to use relative sizing for your ideas or initiatives. At the beginning of the sizing exercise set the smallest item in the list to the smallest number in your scale and the largest item to the largest number in your scale and be clear this scale is intended to help create “relative” sizes where each feature is only sized relative to each other. This helps us to reduce the possibility the attendees will create expectations about sizes and timelines in their relation to real-world effort and keep us all focused on the problems at hand. We also recommend steering away from terms which refer to time and effort like “Time-boxing” or “Phases” as they inherently result in false expectations.

3. Use easy math. For prioritization, we add up the total number of points from all of the sticky notes and divide by the number of “buckets” we want to prioritize into. Adding up the 2’s and 64’s makes the math unnecessarily complex. In a very recent experiment, one of our innovation leads (Thank you Paul Gebel) came up with the idea of using a base of 5 for sizing and after a couple of experiments in live workshops, we all agreed this is another brilliant innovation which reduces the cognitive load, saves time and keeps the energy high at the end of our workshops. We initially tried using 5, 10, 15 & 20 to make the math simpler for those in the workshop. It was not, however, exponential and thus did not allow for enough of a spread between the smallest and the largest. The effect of this simple change, however, was the powerful reduction in the cognitive load on the attendees when having to separate priorities for initiatives. We have since decided to adopt 5, 10, 25 & 50 to stick with the exponential (approximately) nature of the scale to support the previous arguments. Unfortunately, it took us decades to figure this lesson out.

4. Use a completely different scale than your delivery teams. We discovered, for similar reasons as above, it was important to separate the sizing scale used with business people in a workshop environment from the scales used by the actual delivery teams. At some point in

the history of agile, the industry began using the Fibonacci scale (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 13, 21, 34) for sizing of user stories. I think this is fine, as it has a similar effect and the story behind it is super cool and interesting. We did experiment with using the Fibonacci scale in the workshop environment, but quickly abandoned it because of the cognitive load problem when prioritizing. Using a separate scale allows the technology people to operate without fear of false expectations being set on the work they will have to accomplish. It also keeps the team focused on achieving alignment and commitment.

5. Use sticky notes with enough space to complete an idea, but not too much space. One of the key value propositions of the sticky notes is their small size. They force you to be concise and thoughtful with your words. They help you to consider breaking bigger things down into smaller and more digestible things. Keeping them small also helps you to go faster.

The traditional three inch square version is simply too small for our workshop purposes. We have experimented with various sizes and found 5 inches x 3 inches to be optimal for our teams and workshops.

6. Allow for categorization. We also found it useful to keep a standard part of the sticky clear so you can categorize them if you need to. We did this by leaving a space in the bottom right hand corner of the sticky available and called out. It can be a powerful tactic when you have lots and lots of ideas to work with to go through a rapid categorization process to help your group filter and refine. Having this space available is a powerful tool to enable this on the fly.

7. Use color for size. Color can help you categorize and prioritize faster. We started with the traditional canary yellow sticky, but using different colors to represent different sizes reduces cognitive load and improves your ability to better take advantage of the room geography.

The color allows larger groups to see what is going on even across the room in a more powerful way. While we experimented with using color for categorization, we determined color works better when you assign a different color to each size. It allows you to more quickly find ideas to fill gaps in your priority “buckets” and creates clarity around what is big and what is small. We started by just using different colored standard sticky notes. Through experimentation, we discovered it would save us some time to have the notes with pre-assigned colors and hand wrote the sizes on them.

About a decade ago, we had them pre-printed with our exponential scale on them using our brand colors.

8. Use stickers for the sizes. For years we struggled whenever we had to change a size on a sticky note. We would scribble it out our rewrite it to a new sticky note. It was time consuming. One of our Innovation leads at the time came up with the idea to use size based stickers. So we could quickly adjust the sizes without rewriting the entire sticky note. This turned out to be a huge innovation for us which saved time in the workshop by allowing us to quickly adjust the idea sizes. You just pop a new size sticker over the top of the old one!

Beyond prioritization, there are lots of other ways to effectively leveraging sticky notes in workshops, idea days, design thinking or brainstorming sessions. Here are a few other ways in which we have found them to be useful:

• Silent ideation: Ask a question and have everyone in the room answer it on sticky notes in silence. This will ensure everyone’s ideas, especially those quiet introverts are heard. There is a reason you brought a diverse group into the room. You can use this tool to make sure everyone’s opinions are heard, put on display and operated on.
• Categorization: It might seem obvious, but sticky notes allow for rapid and simple organization. They allow for fluid and robust organization. It is important to make sure whomever is responsible for adjusting and moving the notes in a workshop does not “lead the witness” and allows everyone’s opinions about categorization to be heard.
• Facilitating Open Awareness: When you start with the goals at the top of everyone’s minds during a workshop and frequently reference them, ideas will pop up in your leadership team’s mindset unexpected times often while we are solving somewhat. Sometimes those ideas will be good ideas and other times they may be distractions. Either way, they are often disruptive to whatever problems you are trying to solve. Have everyone keep a pad of notes handy and encourage them to carefully capture any ideas which arise on sticky notes for future sharing.
• Empower participatory thought: More minds, focused on the same goal is generally better than less. In the acting and improv realm, rule number 1 is to use “Yes, and” because it allows you to acknowledge what came prior without dismissing it and add to it.
• Managing a Parking Lot: To keep everyone focused, when any distractions come up, capture them on sticky notes in a simple parking lot for later discussion. This allows participants to release these ideas for later and focus on the task at hand without losing them.
• Managing Group Dynamics: When there are team members who appear to be over influencing others or causing others to suppress ideas or thoughts, a good facilitator will leverage sticky notes to quiet the room and refocus on the goals at hand. This is especially useful if the facilitator feels as though some of the folks in the room are not participating enough. There is usually a reason they were selected to be in the room. It is the facilitator’s responsibility to know when to leverage silent ideation with the use of these tools.

We have been executing parts of our workshops remotely using tools like Miro for online white-boarding for years and had naturally migrated all of these ideas into the online environment with ease. This has become even more important recently with the recent outbreak of the corona virus and our “shelter-in-place” work environment. If you do, however, actually have to use real sticky notes again in the future, you will find this bonus helpful.

Bonus: How to improve their stickiness: If you peel a sticky note from the bottom corner (bad) or from the bottom up (the worst), as your intuition might direct, you will peel them so they curl up on the end and they will not stick well. If you gently start at the top on either side of the pad and peel them across as to ensure they don’t curl, you significantly enhance the contact surface area of Dr. Spencer Silver’s magic adhesive and your notes will stick much better on all surfaces.

If you like this article, check out this article to give you a unique little tweak for your flip-charts.

I hope this was helpful. If you have anything to add, I would be honored if you would share. If you experiment with any of these ideas, please let me know what worked and what didn’t. We are eager to learn more.

References:

Eisenhower Matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method.

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.” — Daniel Goleman.

Daniel Goleman’s book, Focus, discusses open awareness: https://www.amazon.com/Focus-Hidden-Excellence-Daniel-Goleman/dp/1408829118

The story of Post-It Notes from 3M: https://www.post-it.com/3M/en_US/post-it/contact-us/about-us/.

Making your sticky notes stick: I was shown this technique by a few consultants in my travels. The earliest reference I can find online to the technique in our industry is here: http://blog.whitehorses.nl/2013/05/17/how-to-stick-a-sticky-note/ There are also several

YouTube videos showing how to do it properly. Here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkWV-MAxsLE.

There are many prioritization schemes out there which attempt to provide more rigor to the process. Here are a few:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirement_prioritization.
• https://www.processimpact.com/articles/prioritizing.pdf.
• https://www.agilebusiness.org/page/ProjectFramework_10_MoSCoWPrioritisation.
• Fibonacci Scale (Sequence): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number.
• Avians Kaushik first referenced The HiPPO in his book on Web Analytics: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470130652/.
• Bohm, David, “On Dialog” | Bohm’s On Dialog is a masterwork on group problem solving and participatory thought.