Presto Sketching

A book to help you think and communicate better with drawing

For meeting leaders and coaches

Get your problems all MOPT up with this problem-solving method

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In the last post, we looked at an easy way to sketch out various aspects of a problem, according to three parts:

  • Rational – What do I understand about this? (objective, facts and data)
  • Emotional – How do I feel about this? (subjective, feelings and stories); and
  • Political – Who else is affected by this? (associative, connections and systems)

These three lenses give us a more structured way to approach and better understand a problem space.

Step 1: look for clues

So where does the MOPT come in? I’ll get to that. Firstly, you get the sheet you sketched before, where you jotted down notes and pictures about the rational, emotional and political parts of your problem. Then you go back over it, looking for clues that could give rise to ideas to solve that problem.

For this example, I’m going to change my initial problem to: I’m always late filling in my timesheet. Here you’ll see I’ve circled a few clues:

You might notice from my sheet that the two things I’ve circled in the rational space are like sub-problems, or problems within the larger problem. That’s good to highlight. You might also find connections that you hadn’t seen before. Notice the arrow in mine, where I’ve connected the fact that I don’t know how to classify all the things I do in the timesheet, with Sarah the Project Manager, who certainly does. This will lend itself nicely to an idea for a solution.

If you’re lucky, you might also find the odd valuable insight. One of the things I wrote in the political part of my sheet is that it’s hard for the business to track where time is spent. Afterward it occurred to me: if the business knows what projects we have on, and who is occupied on each project, then it should already have a pretty good idea of where people’s time has been spent, rather than starting each week blank.

Understanding MOPT

At the heart of this method is the now-famous innovation question: “How might we [solve this problem]?“. ‘How might we’ as an approach was invented by Procter and Gamble, and popularised by companies like IDEO and Google. I’m a big fan, because it’s a great way to have a positive mindset about any problem, and it moves ideas in more useful directions.

The things is, the ‘we’ in ‘How might we…’ is sometimes left out of that ideas-generation mindset. In other words: ‘we’ are the ones coming up with ideas, but ‘we’ may not be in the final solution. And that’s where MOPT comes in. MOPT stands for:

M = Me

You – either you individually, or the collective ‘you’ as the team taking on this challenge – might indeed be the one to solve the problem. Often those closest to the problem itself are the best qualified to solve it. For example, Kathy Bowles was a nurse (now at University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing) who was concerned that patients were five times more likely to be readmitted to hospital than those who received proper post-acute care when needed. This drove her to spearhead RightCare Solutions, where she and her team designed an end-to-end software solution simplifying the post-acute care referral process.

O = Others

Sometimes it’s clear that you (or those you work with) are not the ones to solve a challenge, but you can alert, support, and encourage others who certainly can, with some initial thinking about your perspective on the challenge.

P = Processes

When we try to come up with solutions to challenges, sometimes we think the solution lies in something completely new, ‘blue sky’, or radical, while the solution(s) may well lie in improving the humble day-to-day processes everyone takes for granted. Toyota has always made a name for itself with its focus on process optimisation. Its Toyota Way puts great emphasis on Lean principles of minimising waste (muda) and kaizen (continuous improvement).

T = Tools, technology and systems

This is often the first ‘idea territory’ that people reach for when generating ideas. Tools! Apps! A new website! Any solution you come up with will typically sit within a system of other solutions. It’s worth zooming out a bit, and noticing other adjacent parts of whatever system the challenge is a part of. Whatever you think of McDonalds, Ray Kroc – the man responsible for turning it into the global fast-food juggernaut it is today – can be credited with tons of great system improvement ideas. By focusing on systems improvement, he was able to streamline and scale not only how the kitchens and menu processing ran, but all other parts of the business including quality control, partner relations, and real estate tactics.

Step 2: draw up a MOPT table

Now that we have our heads around the idea of different territories of solutions, we can move on to step 2. We transfer our initial challenge over to a new piece of paper (or whiteboard, or area on an online innovation space like Miro), and draw up a table, with a row for each clue.

There are four other columns, for Me, Others, Processes and Tools:

Now, either by yourself or as a team, you can tackle each cell of the table separately, and come up with a range of ‘How might…’ questions, depending on the clue, e.g. “How might I improve this so that I can recall everything I do?” or “How might I solve this so that I don’t even need to recall everything I do?”

I really like this because straight away I’m going to get more ideas than I otherwise would have, because I’m setting up all these different cells to fill. And like all good brainstorming, not all the ideas need to be practical yet; it’s always good to go for quantity first, and see if some ideas lead to other ideas.

There’s not a lot of space in those little squares, so treat each cell as a placeholder for your thinking, a springboard to another piece of paper, or another part of the whiteboard. Here’s where I got to with mine:

Note how a couple of cells in my example above just didn’t apply, and that’s fine. Mixing written notes and pictures is also fine. What this does is it arranges our thinking spatially, rather than just as a list… or with no form at all. Once you fill your MOPT table, you can go back over it and pick out the ideas that are most resonant and relevant.

How was it for you?

Go on, give it a go, you might be surprised by the insight this reveals to you. If you do give it a try, let me know how it goes, and if you think it could be improved upon.

How well does your team make decisions? The Decision Tree can help

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A good friend of mine once said that a team is running well when it’s moving at the speed of trust (which is a classic Stephen Covey line). I’ve always found that trust at work has so much to do with how a boss delegates work, and empowers team members to make decisions themselves. Liz Wiseman’s book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter is a huge help in this area.

Easy to say, but hard to do, right? If you’re a manager, how do you free up your team to make decisions without you getting in the way? Or how do you try to change the behaviour of a micro-managing boss so that they will trust you more?

Draw a Decision Tree

One way I’ve found that really helps is (surprise surprise) using drawing and visualisation. More specifically: drawing a Decision Tree*. The Decision Tree is from Susan Scott’s book Fierce Conversations, and looks a bit like this:

Go ahead and sketch a tree yourself**. Think of your project, your team, or your company as a tree that grows and bears fruit. For this tree to thrive, countless decisions are made every day, week, month and year. But there are different levels of decisions:

  • Leaf decisions – Make the decision and act on it. You don’t need to report the action you took. There’s no real risk here.
  • Branch decisions – Make the decision, act on it, and then report the action you took (daily, weekly or monthly). There might be some risk, but it can be mitigated.
  • Trunk decisions – Make the decision, but report on the decision to check before you take action. There could potentially be high risk of harm to the project, team or company.
  • Root decisions – Make the decision with input from other people. There could be great risk of harm to the project, team or company if these decisions are poorly made and/or implemented.

Example: if you yank a leaf off a tree, the tree isn’t going to die. In the same way, a ‘leaf decision’ poorly made won’t really impact the company. But if a wrong action is taken at the root level, it could really damage the tree.

How to use the Decision Tree

The Decision Tree has tons of uses:

A way to figure out autonomy – To help you and your team think about and clarify what ‘autonomy’ means in their context (this was HUGELY helpful for me in a previous job!), so that everyone knows exactly where they have authority to make decisions and take action.

A way to chart professional development – To help articulate clear paths for professional development. The more senior an employee gets, the more their decision-making power moves from leaf to branch to trunk level.

A way to free up senior management – To help senior management release control appropriately, and develop grassroots leadership within the organisation. This frees up senior management to focus on the more strategic decision-making, while providing more learning and development opportunity to employees at various levels.

A way to help a team work better together – To help a team and/or management articulate where team dynamics and leadership feel wrong (micro-management, anyone?), and where changes can be made in how decisions are made and acted on.

A way to coach junior managers – Junior managers are typically on a journey of relinquishing control and empowering people around them (I’ve been there). The Decision Tree is a great way to coach a junior manager on how to delegate more to others.

Here’s an example way to use the Decision Tree in your team

Do you manage people? Are you a project manager, change manager, or product manager? Here’s a step-by-step way you might want to try using the Decision Tree in your team:

Draw the Decision Tree on a whiteboard, and use the Root / Trunk / Branch / Leaf structure to explain the four different types of decisions to your team.

Get everyone to list the various decisions that need to be made in the team. My favourite way to do this is to capture them on sticky notes, one decision per note (you’ll see why in a second). Ask each team member to read out what they wrote, and ensure that everyone understands each one. Here are some examples:

  • Leave request approvals
  • Quarterly ad-spend changes
  • Commits and pull requests (for the developers amongst us!)
  • Stationery orders

Map the decisions on the Decision Tree. Everyone can then place their sticky notes on whichever level they think each decision belongs. You can always combine any duplicates as you go.

Discuss the map of decisions on the Tree. Are all the decisions placed where everyone expects? The interesting insightful parts of this discussion should be about any decisions where people don’t agree on the level at which they should be. Why do different people expect specific decisions to be at different levels? how can they come to a common understanding about the appropriate level? This can be particularly insightful for a team manager.

Finally, discuss what specific actions can be taken, to change the situation to be more favourable.

As always, I’m keen to hear if and how you use this visual framework, or any other techniques included in this blog.

* I should say that this Decision Tree visual framework is different to the boxes-and-arrows decision tree drawings you might have seen before, which are still great for analysing decisions and outcomes.

** I probably went a bit overboard on mine (above); a simple bunch of lines is completely fine!

Here are 4 lines to help you understand any problem

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As Albert Einstein might have said*, “Given one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes finding the solution.” It’s so important to understand the problem before jumping in to tackle it, isn’t it?

When it comes to understanding (and solving) problems, we tend to think of ourselves as rational creatures, who form opinions and make decisions based on facts and logic. But as you probably know, our emotions play a much larger role in opinion-forming and decision-making. We have all sorts of unconscious biases and emotional triggers**. What’s more, a lot of problems don’t really exist in isolation, but are connected to other problems and solutions. We might come up with a solution to a problem, that then upsets something else. A great example of this holistic thinking in action is how pet stores in San Francisco (and other cities) can now only sell rescue animals, to combat the spread of inhumane ‘puppy mill’ breeding.

So there’s actually three parts to any problem:

  • Rational – objective, facts and data
  • Emotional – subjective, feelings and stories
  • Political – associative, connections and systems

So, how do we use only 4 lines to understand a problem? I’m glad you asked. Trying to understand all parts of a problem in your head is just too hard. Let’s look at how you can do a simple sketch to help. To start with, write a succinct sentence about your problem in the middle of a page, and draw a cloud around it, like this:

Next, draw three lines radiating out, pretty much equally spaced, and write these questions:

Now, fill each of those three spaces with whatever you think is relevant, to answer each question. You can write bullet points, or draw pictures, or maybe even a mind map of connected thoughts. Go nuts.

This is a simple visual way to explore a problem space. To really do this properly, I’d take Albert’s advice and spend at least 55 minutes on it, and I guarantee that you will have a much deeper, nuanced understanding of whatever your problem is. And feel free to adapt the prompt questions to your context.

Depending on the problem, your page should start revealing some insights to you. Maybe you don’t have much in the ‘rational’ space, but a lot in the ‘political’ space? Or maybe there’s SO MUCH on the page, that you need to scope the problem down a little bit?

Try it out; I hope you find this technique useful, for you and your team.

See, don’t you feel smarter already?

* There are so many of these sorts of quotes around, citing Albert Einstein, that I’m sure he couldn’t have come up with all of them. I mean, how would he have found time to work, in amongst all that brilliant commentary? Oh, yeah that’s right, he was a genius. 😉

** My go-to books on this topic are:

(These links have a referral code)

Make your transformation happen with the Superhero Booth visual framework

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It’s well known that visualisation helps us achieve the success we want to go after. This has been documented especially in sports performance, but visualisation – imagining your intended goals and how it feels to achieve them – is a skill available to anyone. I was at a meetup the other night, and I had a great conversation about how drawing is a really effective way to visualise goals (d’uh!).

And it reminded me of this great visual framework that you can use to clarify exactly what would turn ‘Regular You’ into a ‘Super You’. And it goes a little bit like this.

Step 1: Draw ‘Regular You’

Like other visual frameworks I write about, this is all about using a 2-dimensional space to organise and connect your thoughts, to explore a challenge or solve a problem. Grab a sheet of paper and a pen, or a whiteboard and a whiteboard marker, and draw the following simple pattern:

Draw a picture of you on the left, as you are now. You can draw a simple figure like I have here, or something that looks more like you… that’s completely up to you.

Step 2: Draw ‘Super You’

Now, ask yourself: if you were a superhero, what would your super-powers be? Have fun with it, and let your imagination go wild. Here are a few that tend to come up with groups I’ve done this with. Super strength? Maybe. Flying? Being invisible? Being able to clone yourself? Now you’re talking.

On the right, draw a ‘Super’ version of you (another way to think about it is ‘Future You’):

The Super You can be showing the super-powers you’re thinking of, but if that’s too complicated, just a simple figure that looks a bit super-ish is perfectly fine. Feel free to copy my one (above). It helps to put your initials on the chest, too. Example: I remember one guy in a workshop just wanted to be super PUNCTUAL, because he was late all the time, and it frustrated him. So when he drew the Super Him, he just drew himself with a massive clock hanging around his neck!

Write your super-power(s) above the ‘Super You’ figure, and now think about why you want those powers. Why would you want to clone yourself (for example)? This can be really insightful for you, because it shows what you truly value. We can never be invisible*, but maybe if we dig into why we want to be invisible, there might be something that we could do to achieve some benefit of being invisible. But let’s get to the next step first…

These super-powers are a bit of a metaphor for how we really want to be, and you may well see how they could become goals for you to pursue.

Step 3: Draw the Superhero Booth

Now, draw a big box in between the two figures, and draw an arrow to show how ‘Regular You’ stepping into that Superhero Booth, and another arrow out the other side, showing how you come out as Super You:

Can you see how this ‘Superhero Booth’ works as a visual metaphor? It makes you think: “what goes on in this booth that turns me from Regular Me into Super Me?”

Step 4: Stop I Start | Continue

Here’s where it gets interesting. Draw 2 horizontal lines in your Superhero Booth (see mine below), and write STOP, START and CONTINUE, like this:

Now, jot down what you think you need to (you guessed it) stop, start and continue, to become that Super You. Remember how I said to think about why you would want each of those super-powers? Think about the benefits of those powers that appeal to you, and what you could stop, start, and continue in your life and work, to achieve those benefits.

Be bold and set yourself challenges, and let this Superhero Booth be your map, to remind you of what you need to do. Improving yourself is hard, and there are sure to be some challenges in your way… but never fear; there’s a visual framework to help you with that, too. 😉

Try it as a team

Discussing (and sketching) what your super-powers are as a team is really insightful, too. What needs to happen inside that Superhero Booth, to take your team to the next level?

Here are some other ideas about how to use this visual framework:

  • Are you a designer or product manager? Try envisioning the Super Version of your customers (i.e. what would make them better), and let the Superhero Booth be a catalyst for connecting their needs with your offering.
  • Are you a project manager or scrum master? Try it with your team to help everyone improve each others’ performance
  • Are you in change management? Try it with different parts of your organisation, to see where they’re at, where they want to be, and what is going to resonate with them to get them there.