I’ve been thinking for some time now about the idea of how to map ‘upside’ and ‘downside’ visually.
I was originally inspired by Diana Larsen’s ‘Prospective Analysis’ whereby new teams start thinking about a their assumptions and risks and benefits. It’s mapped out like below (taken from ‘Lift Off’ by Diana Larsen and Ashley Nies).
As Larsen and Nies point out, interestingly, teams typically find it ‘difficult to think about positive possibilities’ – i.e., it’s much easier to think about threats and risks. When I’ve facilitated this in the past a number of times, I can certainly confirm this tendency.
So what about adapting this to think about upside and convexivity? Wouldn’t we want to think about that in a new project? How would we visualise it?
I considered making the scale logarithmic so that we can really stand back and look where the upside is (or could be).
And what about downside? In some cases ruin is a distinct possibility and visualising it out would certainly help to focus the mind, instead of an arbitrary number.
If you were to start a new project, this would help to visualise if you had a ‘low risk high return investment’, simply by looking at where all the post-its are.