Thread by @ammonite

yesterday the @SensibleObject team ran a beta version of @doteveryone’s #consequencescanning - an Agile event to help design teams consider the consequences of a new product or feature. TL:DR it’s *great* and you need it in your process. Read on for more reckons! 1/n

@SensibleObject @doteveryone The event is intended to be run multiple times throughout a product development cycle, answering 3 questions:

- What are the intended and unintended consequences?
- What are the positive aspects we want to focus on?
- What are the not-so-positive aspects we want to mitigate?

@SensibleObject @doteveryone We ran it on a product we’re considering putting into development. It’s a new voice game with a novel play pattern. The event was easy to grasp from the materials @doteveryone shared: 1st we posted up all the intended and unintended consequences of the product (3/n)

@SensibleObject @doteveryone then we prioritised them according to whether we felt we could ACT on them (features core team can work on), INFLUENCE them (need to be handled at an other level / with other stakeholders) or MONITOR (out of our control entirely, but still need to be thought about). 4/n

@SensibleObject @doteveryone Here’s my summary of the value we got from it. It really helped close the gap between (and I’m crassly paraphrasing here) ‘ethical mumblings on the product team’ and ‘cynical realpolitik of the CEO’. This is a super-false binary but the move fast and break things ethos.. (5/n)

@SensibleObject @doteveryone … has a tendency to reinforce it (often despite the best intentions of all parties). The ACT / INFLUENCE / MONITOR framework is *incredibly* constructive, yielding an open, positive dialogue from all members of the team. I found that as CEO / product owner I could engage… (6/n)

@SensibleObject @doteveryone with my whole self, bringing the view I have that cuts across what the product team does and feels, and how that intersects with strategy / partnerships / OKRs / fundraising etc. AND we could generate realistic, appropriate actions at different levels. (7/n)

I don’t want to speak too much for other members of the team but at the end of the session, participants reported that they felt heard and that issues they typically raised privately / ineffectively had a real chance of becoming features / policy. (8/n)

I’m pretty sure this will help us make better products, with a clearer value proposition to our players / users. If we’ve demonstrably thought through consequences in this way, it helps with player trust, and avoiding moral panics around games & play. (9/n)

And… it’s free! You can access the materials for NO POUNDS. It takes an hour. @SamCatBrown is leading on the development and looking for new beta testers. You can read more detail here: medium.com/doteveryone/an…

So go do this now please. No-one’s coming, it’s up to us. (10/10)