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Strategy Skills > Structuring the Thinking

Issue trees

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Issue trees help to identify the key issue or question that the project should address, and break it down into its smaller component parts. They can be used:

• at the beginning of a piece of strategy work to identify key workstreams
• to plan individual workstreams
• to analyse specific key questions
• to communicate the shape and direction of the work.

The trees are a useful reference point throughout a project providing context and showing how each piece of work fits into the whole. A well thought out tree should also inform how to structure communications about the project, including the final report.

Issue trees

Before embarking on the detailed thinking, some time should be spent thinking through the overarching question that the project is attempting to answer. One way of creating this statement of the problem is to note down some of the areas of enquiry and, crucially, those areas that lie outside the scope of the project. The opening question must be wide enough to encompass the full overview of the strategy if it is to be used to plan the project. Defining the starting point can be the most difficult part of building an issue tree.

The next layer should set out a series of questions that together answer the question above them in the tree. For example, if the starting question is "How can we most effectively increase employment rates through improving access to childcare?" the next layer in the tree might comprise two further questions:

• What are the most effective forms of childcare to help parents into work?
• How can government best support parents in accessing these forms of childcare?

The answers to these two questions should provide the answer to the original, higher level question. These two questions will then be further broken down, and so on, until a level of questions is reached that address the fundamental root causes of the original issue. Specific analysis can then be designed to address each one.

Each time a question is broken out into lower level questions, these lower-level questions should together give the answer to the higher level question. Moreover, these lower level questions should together cover all the issues needing to be resolved, but should not overlap each other. Questions to be resolved should fall into one of the buckets, not both. In more technical parlance, this is known as Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive.

Although it may seem cumbersome, writing out the questions in full is very helpful as it forces clarity of thinking.

This issue tree template may be helpful.

For any problem, there will be a number of ways of drawing out the issue tree, frequently resting on the way in which the first set of branches is constructed. It is worth having a number of attempts at the tree (perhaps done by different members of the team), using different structures. The trees can then be evaluated on the basis of how well they seem to be working best in terms of breaking down the issues into smaller, answerable questions; in terms of breaking the project out into workstreams; and in terms of structuring future communications (reports or other documents). Techniques that can be helpful during the question-development process include brainstorming and other creativity tools. They will help you approach the issue from a fresh perspective.

Hypothesis Tree

A variant of an issue tree is a hypothesis tree. While issue trees are likely to be most useful early on in the project when developing the project plan, hypothesis trees tend to be more useful later on in the project in structuring the conclusions and subsequent communications.

If an issue tree starts with one question; a hypothesis tree starts with one statement. Each level of the hypothesis tree is linked with the questions "why?" or "how?". This ensures that the lower level hypotheses together answer the higher level hypothesis. An example of this might be: higher level hypothesis: "Government can best support parents moving into work by ensuring availability of out-of-school childcare in the local area through pump-priming of provision of this type". The next layer of the tree will answer "Why?":

• Out-of-school care will have the greatest effects in getting parents into work.
• The price of out-of-school care is reasonable, it is the availability that is the problem, caused by difficulties amongst out-of-school clubs in meeting start-up costs.

Note that to some extent, using a hypothesis tree relies on having some knowledge of the content of the likely solutions.

Work planning

Issue or hypothesis trees can feed directly into detailed work planning. A work plan could have sub-issues on the left hand side, with activities to answer the question, sources and outputs on the right. For example:

Strengths

• A powerful tool providing the opening question is right - wide enough but not so wide that issues outside the scope of the study are included - to find the most effective initial breakdown.
• Can be used to structure the development of the project and define the workstreams.

Weaknesses

• Interdependent issues may be divided across branches of the tree. It is worth keeping this in mind.
• Does not give any sense of priorities. The team should focus on those areas of the tree that are likely to have the most impact on the eventual conclusions and impact of the project.

Resources

"The Pyramid Principle" by Barbara Minto gives an explanation of the type of logic involved in thinking in tree structures.

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