Most teams plan a Sprint with one question in mind:
"What can we deliver this Sprint?"
But here's a different take.
What if, within every Sprint, we planned across all three horizons of innovation?
A client once told me, "Our team is great at execution, but we’re always late to the next big wave." This sparked a question in my mind:
Are we too focused on the now to prepare for the next and the new?
Here’s a simple structure I’ve seen work (though the percentages can shift depending on where your product is in its lifecycle):
- 60% - Horizon 1: Business as Usual
- Core delivery, commitments, stakeholder expectations
- 30% - Horizon 2: Sustaining Innovation
- Improvements, automation, better ways of working
- 10% - Horizon 3: Disruptive Innovation
- Experiments, explorations, wild ideas worth testing
This isn’t just time allocation. It’s mindshare allocation. It’s giving ourselves permission to think beyond today.
Here’s how it showed up for a team I coached:
- They dedicated Fridays to Horizon 3 explorations.
- Retrospectives often unearthed Horizon 2 opportunities.
- Their Sprint Backlog clearly labeled work items by horizon.
The result? It kept the past, the present, and the future relevant. They became more vision-aligned, future-conscious, and resilient.
What helped me was realizing:
- If we don’t intentionally plan for Horizons 2 and 3, we unintentionally plan not to.
- Innovation isn't a separate track. It can be a rhythm within the Sprint.
What horizon do your Sprints lean towards today?
Let’s design for the future, not just deliver for the present.