Draft:Ideal outcome

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Your Ideal Outcome is a wish list – everything you’d have in an ideal world without specifying (yet) how you’d achieve the outcomes. This ideal thinking has a practical purpose: while you never expect to achieve everything on your wish list, identifying all the things you want ensures that you work towards the things that you really, really want, rather than just the things that you think are possible. The Ideal Outcome is independent of any system – and many ways of delivering it will exist.

How to define your Ideal Outcome as a team (see the next section for an example):

1. Ask everyone to think about what he wants in an ideal world, concerning the project or task. Write one wish per sticky note (big pens are helpful, as they encourage people to be concise). Encourage free thinking, without categorisation or ranking, just all the benefits they’d have in an ideal world, as many as they like.
2. Get everyone to stick their notes on the wall.
3. Ask the team to group similar notes together. Everyone should be participating.
4. Come up with names for the groups of notes: these are your benefits.
5. Organise the notes into sub-groups of must-haves and nice-to-haves.
6. Identify the Prime Benefit (the one main thing you want). This may not have been captured.

Challenge every statement on your wish list and ask yourself ‘why do I want that? What’s good about it?’ This challenges you to uncover all the benefits you really want – and prevents you from jumping to premature solutions.

Ideal Outcome, Prime Benefit and Ultimate Goal

After you’ve identified the benefits you want, you identify your Prime Benefit – the one thing your system exists to deliver. Sometimes this will have been captured in the benefits you’ve listed, sometimes not: that’s okay – just make sure you capture it.

Prime Benefit: Portable container for carrying water

Then you define the Ultimate Goal – why are you doing this? Ultimate Goal: Access to clean drinking water on demand

Defining your Ultimate Goal is the point at which you have a discussion over what single goal you’re trying to achieve. If, instead of a portable container for storing water, you want access to drinking water on demand, you could consider providing water fountains, or create a subscription model where participating restaurants and cafes give water on demand.