- Next-Step Thinking for Uncertain Situations
- Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity
- Working Through Uncertainty and What's Next
- What Not to Do: The Brute-Force Path
- Summary
- Workshop
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity
Thinking through less-risky and more-risky outcomes helps us expose areas of uncertainty and ambiguity, which in turn can help us make a smarter next best step. When we’re faced with uncertainty, reduce that uncertainty the best we can through exercises including Possible Futures Thinking, Aligning Strategy to Time Horizons, Backporting into the Past, and Adjacent Space Exploration. Consider running two or more of these exercises sequentially too, essentially creating a custom recipe for reducing uncertainty.
Design Thinking in Action: Possible Futures Thinking
Jerome C. Glenn created the Futures Wheel in 1971, and today a wheel analogy is still a powerful and simple tool for thinking. The wheel and its various forms helps us organize our thoughts around a central idea or event. And as a method of Visual Thinking, this visually oriented Possible Futures Thinking exercise helps us model different versions of the future based on current-day trends or events and the possible consequences of those trends or events.
A Possible Futures Thinking exercise is easily done solo or with a group of people (on a physical or virtual whiteboard or through a tool like Miro or Klaxoon, for example). Use the wheel analogy to view a situation through the lenses of six categories or sections of the wheel. The original version of the Futures Wheel aligned these categories or sections to the acronym STEEP (which is another useful taxonomy for thinking in its own right, regardless of the method or tool):
Social- Technology
- Economic
- Environmental
- Political
- <and an empty sixth section of our own choosing>
The sixth “insert yours here” section of the wheel is a custom section available to us to categorize based on another dimension, emerging change, or a pattern we wish to think through. If we see more than just one emerging change or pattern, such as an industry trend or a set of cultural realities we wish to consider, we may divide our wheel into eight sections or more. A classic six-section wheel is illustrated in Figure 13.1.
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FIGURE 13.1 Use a simple wheel analogy to identify and explore a situation through the lenses of a number of sections or categories.
Now map out the future possibilities and what-ifs related to the intersection of our central idea with each of these dimensions or sections. As we work through the wheel, we should find ourselves thinking about opportunities, identifying risks and constraints, considering how to build consensus, thinking strategically about possible changes and their effects on those possible futures, and more.
Design Thinking in Action: Aligning Strategy to Time Horizons
When the next best step is apparent, the importance of the second and third steps might become more important more quickly than we’re prepared to think through. Some say that this leap from the short-term to the mid-term horizon might be the most important too. The midterm is the bridge, after all, connecting what we know and do today (which is probably pretty comfortable for us simply because it’s known) to our long-term future that we can plan for and dream about but, frankly, cannot see.
Thus, Aligning Strategy to Time Horizons can become an important tool for thinking ahead by thinking backward (from the future to the present) organized around three steps:
- Create the overall Horizon Plan (which is necessarily high level and strategic but subject to the unknowns and therefore a bit aspirational as we look far out into the future).
- Create an initiative roadmap or project roadmap to provide more clarity near term (thus creating a mid-level and mid-strategic plan).
- Create a Release Plan with an underlying Sprint Plan, and the necessary project plan useful in navigating day-to-day tasks and near-term milestones (keeping details in our DevOps tool so we can keep our project plan as lightweight as possible, ideally focused on high-level milestones and dependencies with other work in flight).
Aligning Strategy to Time Horizons is a visual exercise, using bubbles that we place atop a time horizons template similar to the one displayed in Figure 13.2. Lay out these horizons and plans visually to help consider priorities, what might need to be executed as a prerequisite, what may be executed in parallel, and so on.
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FIGURE 13.2 Use this worked example template to Align Strategy to Time Horizons.
Draw the first bubble in the long-term horizon and label that first bubble with something that describes what needs to be achieved long term. We might label it “Reinvent Our Team” or “Complete the Company’s Business Transformation” or “Retire in Ten Years.” The time frame—1 year, 4 years, 20 years—isn’t as important as dividing the journey into the three big steps or milestones necessary to arrive at the final destination. And if it seems that the exercise highlights four or five steps, so be it! Just add a few more horizons to the template.
The second bubble reflects where we are today; now we have an end-to-end view that simply needs to be fleshed out. Do some thinking to create the third short-term bubble and fourth mid-term bubble. We might realize, for example, that we need to get a particular promotion or role or complete some education before we can pursue our mid-term goal.
If possible, lean on a colleague or friend who has successfully navigated most or all of this journey to help identify the various steps (bubbles) typically taken on this journey. As we identify those bubbles, place them in their respective short-term, mid-term, and long-term locations. Then connect the dots between the bubbles to visually depict stepwise priorities (Step 1, Step 2, Step 3) and dependencies (Step 1 and Step 2 might both need to be completed before we can arrive at Step 3, for example).
Once we finish mapping out the really large milestones on our journey, we might want to revisit those and flesh out the little stepping-stones in between the horizons. Go as deep and detailed as we need, but at some point employ a bit of Good Enough Thinking (Hour 11) and get started taking that important first step!
Combine this exercise with Possible Futures Thinking to consider three or four possible futures to get a better idea of which are the most achievable, most time-consuming, most expensive, most risky, and so on.
Design Thinking in Action: Backporting into the Past
In software development, backporting is “when a software patch or update is taken from a recent software version and applied to an older version of the same software” (CrowdStrike, 2022). We can use this approach to navigate the near term and breathe new life into how we view what’s around us and unchangeable. In the name of playing the cards we have been dealt, or putting the team we have on the field, or working with what we know and who we have been given, Backporting into the Past can be exactly the kind of approach we need to reduce uncertainty.
Consider this: Rarely does a tech team have the opportunity to build a solution greenfield, or leverage a new set of platforms and tools, or just start fresh with a clean slate. More often than not we are faced with a massive amount of technical debt, legacy systems, and processes that we need to understand, adapt to in some areas, work around in other areas, and eventually transform.
As a Design Thinking technique, Backporting into the Past is about recognizing today’s reality and limited set of choices, and then working within those choices and constraints to make something new happen. It helps us deal with uncertainty because we are not walking into a new situation to change it. Instead, we use what we have in front of us, the team we have to work with, and the skills and experience that we have in this present day—all of which is super valuable—to create options.
How? Let’s start with a list:
- Identify the situation. What’s unchangeable? What might be changed? Give this some thought and consider Snaking the Drain to clean out old ideas that just aren’t viable or waste the time of others trapped by and thinking about them.
- Identify who we are as a subject matter expert. What are we really good at? What are our superpowers? Think through this and document it as a way to further think.
- Do the same with our team. What special set of skills can we collectively claim, what industries do we span, and where are the gaps? Identify the work that we have completed over the years. These experiences do not define who we are, but they are still our basis for credibility and experience spanning people, technology, business, and more. Dig deep and document these items.
- Identify what we love. What are we as individuals and as a team passionate about? What kind of job or role wouldn’t even feel like work if we got to do it together 40 hours a week?
- Identify where we can quickly learn something new and where diminishing returns influence that kind of investment in time and energy and cost.
Finally, now comes the creative uncertainty-fighting value of this technique. Consider how we can backport ourselves and our teams into roles or projects similar to those that we have held before and (with our most recent experience and skills) give those new roles or projects fresh life. This Design Thinking technique is not just about narrowing down our choices and options, but about creatively adapting and reusing who and what we are in novel ways (Mittal, 2022). Accelerate to the future faster by injecting our current-day selves into new roles and projects that mirror old roles and projects.
Combine people and teams to create hybrid opportunities and new options. Write down these options! Think on these options solo and together. Brainstorm and Reverse Brainstorm with others to work through the unseen or unspoken. In the end, we should have a strong list of real options, crazy options, and a number of other opportunities in the middle.
Design Thinking in Action: Adjacent Space Exploration for Lower Risks
Can a neighboring future or similar-to-what-we-know option help us find a low-risk next step? Can such a next step serve as a time saver and choice maker? Yes! Instead of striking out in a brand-new direction, we might instead take a few steps down a lower-risk path that’s adjacent to what we already know. Pursuing adjacent options or exploring adjacent spaces may not transform our future, but these methods can help us make meaningful progress in the short term.
Oftentimes we apply this method in our careers, building on what we know by moving into new but adjacent spaces; doing so allows us to use what we know, learn the “new” in the adjacent space, and become experts in an even broader surface area, as we see in Figure 13.3.
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FIGURE 13.3 Consider how we might navigate Adjacent Spaces throughout our careers as a way to incrementally transform ourselves in a low-risk kind of way.
Companies and organizations do the same thing as they explore incremental markets or make minor progress on the fringe of what they already know and do. This strategy is fine for a while…but eventually what we’ve focused on and known for years becomes obsolete in some kind of way. Or we grow bored with the known or simply see more opportunity around the known than remaining inside the known.
How might we apply this same “adjacent spaces” mindset to the next release of our application platform or software drops? What can we do to keep our users relatively comfortable while we introduce new capabilities or interface changes?
Loosely based on Stuart Kauffman’s perspectives on growth in his book Investigations (2002), Adjacent Space Exploration can help us identify areas where we can incrementally grow and iterate on (at least some of) what we already know. Walking out into the unchartered waters or white space surrounding what we already know and do today helps us think and take the next steps toward a new but likely familiar future. It’s easy because of what remains the same; what we know and what surrounds what we know are more similar than they are different.