1. if a minority of the participants or (worse still) people not attending the sprint try and create a ToC you will end up confusing the sprint participants. Creating a Table of Contents is a process of ‘getting your head into the content’ if a team does this and then hands it onto the sprint team then this later group must go into the content ‘cold’ and try and work out what the ToC creators had in their head. This is a really bad situation and will just confuse the sprint team and damage the end result. If you don’t trust your sprint team to write the Table of Contents then either you are the wrong person to Shepard the process or your team is wrong – you should think about which one it is very carefully.
2. only the people in the sprint (remote or real space participants) can write the book – no one else. So they must write the book they can write. There is no point in giving them a Table of Contents and then find out that actually x% of the book cannot be written by anyone at the sprint. If you think you would not fall prey to this mistake and you know the people better and know exactly what they can and can’t write then you are wrong.
3. if you try and create a Table of Contents before the sprint then probably you are doing this without the blessing of an experienced sprint facilitator. That also means that you are probably going to have no idea of how much content can actually be created in a sprint. In my experience this leads to people creating a ToC for an extended library – covering every possible subject connected to the book -  not a single book.
4. creating a ToC without the sprint team means you remove a lot of the fun and challenge of the event for the sprint participants. Fun and challenge are the essential ingredients for sprinting a good book.
5. who said you could create a ToC better than the one that the sprint participants will create. Don’t you trust them? Are you really better? Isn’t that just a little arogant+ sad?

However despite innumerable warnings many people, particularly those used to management roles, will try and ‘prepare’ for the sprint. If you are like this and succumb to ‘pre-sprint fear’ – a anxiety that I have seen a lot and whose symptoms are more or less the same as those for ‘fear of failure’ – and you prepare a Table of Contents as a placebo then you need to stop. You are only damaging the sprint – your anxieties have no place being articulated in a Table of Contents for a book that others will write.

If on the other hand you are a sprint facilitator then you have to prepare for the fact that before the sprint you might be confronted by this kind of behaviour. In my opinion you do not have any other option but to express confidence, articulate the process, and be direct. Anxieties being what they are, can get out of hand – the earlier you take control of the process and dictate the process before the sprint the better shape you will be in to guide the group to a successful finish line. If (and I have found myself in this position a few times) someone ignores your advice and does a lot of useless pre-production (in the form of ToC generation) then you must simultaneously ignore their product but make them feel like they haven’t completely wasted their time. Tricky. One possible way to manage this is to thank them infront of the group for this work, explain the group process of creating a ToC, and state that once the ToC is generated it would be great to come back to the ‘pre-produced ToC’ and see if there is anything ‘we have missed’.

Actually Sprint Fear is relatively common and you should expect to encounter it. Its pretty much the normal way of reacting given we have come to learn that book production is a long expert process that we can’t access, understand, or contribute to. Given this cultural context its understandable that producing a book in a week with no pre-production sounds scary. However don’t let that understandable fear get in the way of committing to the sprint process and producing a great book.