6 Simple diagrams to help understand complexity in problem solving
The next time someone says ‘I’m a visual person’ tell them, ‘we all are… and some are more visual than others’. We were painting in caves long before we were creating excel formulas.
Visualisations are critical. One good chart will eliminate 100 meetings and drive decisions quickly.
Become a visualisation pro and you will be able to cut through noise and uncertainty really quickly, here are 6 of my favourites that require nothing more than a sharpie and post-its.
- Affinity Cluster
- Importance/Difficulty Matrix
- MECE Diagram/Decision Tree
- Mindmap
- Story Map
- Journey Map
Affinity Cluster
Purpose: Make knowledge manageable through finding and describing themes.
When to use: Early on, making sense of a new area when you don’t know when to start.
Source: lumaworkplace.com
This is a way of making sense of a ton of unstructured data. You break down any info into the smallest chunk possible, it has to fit on a post-it note. Then go through each item one by one and see how items relate. Themes will emerge and finally you describe each theme with a headline, not a word.
Bonus tips — don’t find themes too early, do it on post-its, take your time with coming up with a descriptive label, do it in a small group.
Importance/Difficulty Matrix
Purpose: Understand what you should focus on first, be it a new phase, or a piece of feedback
When to use: When making decisions on where to put your effort
Source: lumaworkplace.com
“What should we do first”. It seems like an obvious question, but it isn’t asked often, and when it is there’s no structure to answering it. We have unlimited wants but limited means, so we need a quick way of managing this. This isn’t around business cases and long term roadmaps (although absolutely you could and should use this method), this is how to quickly decide on what you should do first, and even more importantly, what you shouldn’t do at all.
Create each issue/opportunity/idea as a post-it, force rank them on the horizontal access. Put one post-it down, then show another and ask if it’s more or less important than the previous one, and continue until you have all post-its ranked in importance from least important to most important, less important on the left, more important on the right Pretend you have all the resources in the world. So you now have your importance locked down. Now move to the difficulty axis on the vertical. Now for each post-it move it up and down to show if it’s more or less difficult.
Now split the chart into quadrants. High ROI, Strategic, Luxury, Targeted.
Voila! Now to cap it all off, draw some ‘Waves’ to see the groups of what you want to do first. You don’t only want to quick wins, you want the strategic high importance items too.
Bonus tips — only draw what you need to for that time. Only show the importance axis, then once completed draw the difficulty axis, then once the difficulty step is done move to the quadrants, then the waves.
This is a crowd pleasing method.
MECE Diagram/Decision Tree
Purpose: Create a logical framework to make decisions and understand the impacts
When to use: On-going, always be building this out and updating it
Source: Business School, McKinsey, “Bulletproof Problem Solving” by Charles Conn and Robert McLean
The Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive diagram plots the levers and impacts in decision making.
As you uncover information you add branches to the diagram which represent different components and levers in decision making, with the core question as the first node. A simple starting point could be “How to make my car go faster?”, which is then broken into 2 nodes, Energy and Resistance. Energy is broken into Engine capacity, Fuel Type. Resistance is broken into Weight, Aerodynamics and so on. Now add some colour to it, highlight the nodes you can influence and the level of effect these might have. For instance, fuel type is much easier to influence than engine capacity and could have a greater effect, than weight, where we may only shave off some weight by removing the back seats.
I absolutely love this diagram, and it’s a core consulting method.
Bonus tips — Mutually Exclusive means the branches don’t overlap or interlink, you should be able to look at one decision and know all the impacts of it, and collectively exhaustive means you’ve now captured all the known effects.
Concept Map
Purpose: Understand how items are related to each other and how they are connected
When to use: Early on, to understand how items are connected and to uncover potential unknown effects
Concept maps are taught from early on in school. I don’t think these are good artefacts, but they are good discovery tools. It’s challenging to read another’s mind map. I find concept maps have huge value in the building of it. If you are interviewing a subject matter expert, drawing a mind map and all the relationships helps you understand these in depth. Concept maps are easier when you start with generating the data points first and then finding the relationships, this is known as ‘bottom up’ instead of ‘top down’.
Bonus tips — use verbs in your lines in the connections in the map. Don’t worry about too much formal structure whilst you are doing it, do this in the MECE. Treat this as a discovery tool.
Story Map
Purpose: Understand where features are in a journey, how important they are, and when they’ll be delivered.
When to use: When allocating features for delivery
Story maps show where a user story/feature sits in an end to end journey, and how relatively important it is, should it be delivered in the first release or later? User stories by themselves are impossible to understand what should come after that story, is the story step 3 in a 5 step process, when they finish the process will they be able to move onto the next. Use this whenever you are doing a software delivery.
Bonus tips — do this early and low-fi, first on index cards for a rough version, then into Jira and then create stories with tidy labels and criteria.
Journey Map
Purpose: Understand the emotions, touchpoint, systems and steps in user journey
When to use: When researching how people use a system
Journey maps visualise how a person feels moving through a process. This could be using a new system, travelling on a plane, waiting for a promotion outcome. Use a real person, and a real scenario to plot this. Speak to your colleague about their trip into work this morning, first plot the key steps in the journey, then get them to rank their emotion from unhappy to happy on the map, and the reasons for the changes. Also colour this with the different systems and touchpoints along the way. Next focus in on the low points, is there something we can do to make it better, could we get rid of that touchpoint altogether? If you think of Uber, they eliminated the payment step completely, which was a source of pain when using a taxi.
Bonus tip — Use a real person, and a real scenario. It’s simple, just sit with them and ask them to walk you through the experience step by step.
Closing
Do some googling/pinterest searches on each of these and you’ll find photos and digital versions of how these look when they’re translated to a nice artefact.
Finally, the method matters. Do each of these methods one step at a time, for instance, don’t do the importance and difficulty at the same time, only do importance first, then difficulty. The same with the journey map, only do the steps of the journey first, then the emotion.
These are fun, collaborative and really valuable. In fact, it’s hard to find more impactful insight.
