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There are thousands of moving parts in any tech project. Much complexity to wrangle. Millions of decisions to make.
And every decision feels more important than it really is while it’s in focus. This is called the Focusing Illusion and Daniel Kahneman went on record to say it was the most powerful bias he ever discovered.
So without some kind of lens to help a team align on what really matters, everything feels like it matters. You already know what that looks like. Huge lists of stuff to do, all marked urgent.
Fig 01: To-do list. Names lightly edited to protect the guilty
Most prioritisation tools don’t handle the complexity of real work very well. A list is a good way to make every item look equally important.
And sure enough, I’ve found myself helping lots of clients and teams to stop trying to boil the ocean.
The most painful case I experienced was a startup who’d spent 4 years building a beautiful big piece of software. As in the last post, they were doing all the “right” things — Agile methodology, data-driven approach, shipping working software, attractive UI, great sales deck, responsive to feedback, the whole shebang — but something wasn’t working.
Customers. Weren’t. Buying.
This client brought me in to help them figure out what was missing. After just a few hours of Multiverse Mapping, we zeroed in on their problem. It turned out to be an issue that everyone was aware of, but had been putting off “till later”. They’d been putting it off till later for 4 years so far. And that whole time they’d been breaking their backs doing mountains of work that didn’t address the critical issue.
Why did they kick this can down the road? Same reason as I’ve seen on many teams (and in my own decision making if I’m not careful). It was because the issue had to do with the behaviours of people that were outside of their control. That’s always an uncomfortable area.
Like most teams I’ve seen, they absolutely planned to fix the issue. They were just waiting until they had data from real customers. Have you seen the Catch-22? They wanted to use customer data at scale to resolve the blocker that was stopping them from getting any customers at all. They wanted to use customer data at scale to solve the issue that was stopping them from getting any customers at all.
But before you point and laugh, take a look at your own initiatives. Is there anything uncomfortable that you’re putting off until you have more data?
Once we brought the difficult issue into sharp relief, the options for action became clear. One of the options was to drop everything else and experiment with different ways to resolve the critical issue. This is like during the development of the iPhone when they realised at a demo that the onscreen keyboard just didn’t work. Without a functional keyboard, the device was a pretty but useless brick. So for two weeks, everyone on the project scrambled to make different keyboard prototypes. If they hadn’t stumbled by chance onto the keyboard that seems obvious in hindsight, no iPhone.
Most projects have just a handful of 2 or 3 aspects that are truly pivotal to their success. And it almost always feels scary to prioritise those aspects, precisely because they’re also where you’re most uncertain. When you’re working on something highly uncertain, it’s hard to know where to start, hard to agree on a solution, hard to estimate how long a given solution will take, hard to know how to measure the solution’s effectiveness, and hard to justify your decisions to others.
All this makes it feel slow to get started with those issues, and makes it feel like you should put them off until you have more data, more information.
It’s a trap!
If you work on the easy parts first, all you do is increase your sunk costs while painting yourself into a horrible corner.
“If you plan to train a troop of monkeys to juggle fire while standing on pedestals in the town square, don’t build any pedestals until you’ve figured out how to get at least one monkey to juggle fire.” – Astro Teller
Instead, make a Multiverse Map and watch as the critical aspects of your project start to naturally leap out. Your map shows where you’re most uncertain … and you’ll find you start gravitating towards those aspects (instead of sweeping them under the rug in your brain).
And the other thing about uncertainty is that it’s massively generative. It’s where you’ll find all your exciting breakthroughs and brilliant new ideas.
Again and again, I’ve watched teams quickly orient towards the uncertainty and build momentum quickly by using Multiverse Mapping to tackle the bits that are outside their control first.
For example, your customers are outside your control. But for your product to be successful in the market, you need customers to do some things with your product – find it, choose it, use it and get the value from it.
So you make a Multiverse Map to tell the story of how you expect (or hope) that’s going to happen. The story of What One Person Sees, Thinks And Does. (A handy acronym for this is WOPSTAD – I’ll be shouting “WOPSTAD!” at folks in my upcoming Intro to Multiverse Mapping workshops.)
Here’s what a Multiverse Map looks like:
Woah, what's that there in the middle? Yes, that's a Multiverse Map!
You can see goals and internal stories at the top, and to-dos, tasks and details at the bottom. In between there’s a branching set of green and orange stickies. That’s the Multiverse Map.
In green, it shows the simple story of what oneperson (or squirrel) sees and does in the best universe for us. This is often called the “Happy Path” and it’s also similar to a User Story Map. But we don’t stop there ...
Branching off in orange, it shows what one personsees and does ineach of the worst universes for us. This is where we explore the multiverse of different ways that our plans can go awry.
And you’ll see a bunch of question marks on there too, starting to hint at where we’re uncertain. (We’ll look at ways to gauge where you’re most uncertain in a later piece.)
The Multiverse Map is at a magic level of granularity – one that connects Team Hawk (leaders, stakeholders, managers, strategists, ...) and Team Otter (builders, coders, designers, marketers, tacticians ...) through revealing Team Squirrel (customers, partners, third-party services ...).
For Team Hawk, the Multiverse Map ties the business goals or strategy to what you depend on a real person doing in the real world. It helps reveal the riskiest and most uncertain points in a plan before (or while) you start debating screen layouts and deadlines.
For Team Otter, the Multiverse Map is a kind of scaffolding off which you can “hang” your technical work. It guides decisions about what you need to build, how to prioritise, and which metrics to use so you support that real person in the real world doing what you need.
It’s common that Team Otter will expose situations like you can see in the image above, where making a map reveals gaps in our plans that would have been expensive to discover later.
OK back to the story from the start. Had the client I talked about made a Multiverse Map near the beginning of their 4 year odyssey, they could have experimented with ways to resolve their critical issue before they’d painted themselves into a corner by building a load of expensive software.
Even in situations that aren’t quite as extreme, I can tell you I’ve never regretted making a Multiverse Map. They always reveal something useful, bring a sense of coherence, and clarify what matters.
Want the best news?
It’s wicked fast to make Multiverse Maps. Once you’ve practised a bit, you’ll be able to knock out a map in 10-15 minutes.
You don’t need permission or special conditions to start. No arranging workshops, no persuading anyone to follow a formal process.
Simply being able to point at the map changes the conversations you’ll have. Sometimes not in the ways you might expect, but that’s all part of the fun.
Practice is key, so have a go yourself right now! Grab a whiteboard and some stickies and make a map. While you do, remember WOPSTAD: What One Person Sees, Thinks And Does.
Or if you’d prefer to practise with friends in one of the live sessions I’m running soon, check out the available dates here. I’ll walk you through a few exercises to get you making maps and answer your questions. Or all the secrets are in the full course.
Team Hawk, Team Otter and I can’t wait to see you there,
Tom x
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