Understand your risks and assumptions

To maximise the impact and value of your change efforts, it’s important to understand which ‘unknowns’ carry the most risk.

Agreeing on your assumptions helps you to manage uncertainty and guides your next steps. Focusing on the most uncertain and risky elements is really helpful when you are trying to solve problems in complex situations. These situations can negatively impact councils’ resources, such as time, capacity and money.

When to understand your risks and assumptions

This resource is useful to identify some of your big assumptions before starting a project or when facing unknowns mid-project.

Before you begin, you should have:

• engaged with a range of stakeholders inside and outside of your council to gather diverse perspectives on potential risks and assumptions
• defined a clear problem statement that makes sense for everyone involved
• developed an understanding of the problem space, including any available data and evidence to support your decision making

How to understand your risks and assumptions

Collaborate with your team or in pairs to gather diverse viewpoints on the uncertainties. Start by asking, “is this really true?” If unsure, then it’s likely an assumption.

The resource is a simple matrix for mapping assumptions. It uses the same principle as the tower-building block game Jenga. In Jenga, players remove blocks from a stacked tower, hoping for it not to fall. Blocks nearer the top are less likely to cause collapse, whereas those close to the bottom are more likely to.

With this resource, you’ll map your assumptions in two categories:

• surface level – things that will leave a gap, but won’t generally make the change idea collapse or fail. These are less risky
• foundation level – things that are likely to affect the fundamental idea, and lead to a collapse. These are the most risky, and often more uncertain

There’s no right or wrong way to describe an assumption, as long as it is clear:

• where the assumption comes from
• who or what the assumption is about
• what type of risk or uncertainty it might relate to

Consider these types of risk and uncertainty:

• uncertainty about actions: actions can range from very small and trivial (changing a button on a form) to large and consequential (changing the funding of a service)
• uncertainty about outcomes: outcomes also range from very small (a handful of people now use your service) to very large (a shift in the behaviour of a population)
• uncertainty about cause and effect: understanding the connections between specific actions and specific outcomes
• uncertainty about value: understanding what the value of something might be. This could be in terms of money, time, or satisfaction.

What you can do next

Now that you have a clear idea of your highest risk assumptions, you can use them to develop and build on your root cause hypotheses. You can also define some experiments to help test this uncertainty.