I enjoy your podcasts. I always listen to and appreciate them, especially the synthwave music breaks. Regardless of what you say, somehow you end up giving us insights into business experiments and learnings, you demo a person who acts when inspired, and there’s always a b-story (maybe it’s the a-story) of how you’re trying to be a better person than you were yesterday. Your podcasts are pretty valuable and unique. Keep going, please.

Hi Jewell, Agree with others and will focus on adapting the design sprint for your needs. Instead of designing a product, think of service/support design. Some non-product examples might include how to address declining membership or, conversely, how to support a growing congregation with limited staff and resources (these can be reframed as “How Might We” questions). Some aspects of a design sprint may not seem adaptable to nonproduct/service design, but I think they are. Lightning demos, for example, could be used to see how other churches address similar issues to your key/priority problem. You may need to include interviews in this exercise, as quick online research may not reveal what you need to know. For example, you might ask how they kept expenses down or flat while growing the congregation (if that was your challenge). Sketching can storyboard a new experience with either the congregation or staff, whichever you’re addressing in the sprint. Testing can be done too. Depending on the size of the church, you could try new services/procedures at one location versus others to see which works better. Or, if you’re a single-location church, you could try new processes some weeks and not others. I have worked with non-profits, and since many are volunteers, we use a workshop recipe that still delivers a lot of bang but can be done in a half day; the Lightning Decision Jam. That’s a nice workshop recipe to identify and prioritize top problems and the priority solution, put an action plan together, and get alignment with everyone involved/impacted. Also, this is out of the scope of your ask, but thinking again of your participants, some of whom may be volunteers or only available for short periods of time, when you do put together your plan of action, and you call on folks to take on execution of parts of the plan, consider using Kanban and its work-in-process limits. It’s a nice way to ensure no one gets too much work and has the space to finish things before getting more work. It would be important to preserve the momentum after a sprint or workshop, and giving people small increments of work that are easy to complete will give everyone a sense of accomplishment regularly–and that will make the overall effort more successful.