James King

I was preparing a roadmap for a team, or more accurately letting AI summarise what I thought we had agreed to.

My goal was to share back what we had on our roadmap in the short term to align our action to the outcomes we have mostly committed to.

My goal

I guess that is a goal because

• The goal is an outcome that I want to achieve, which we can align our actions toward
• I am confident that we can achieve the outcome and I can identify clashes with other outcomes if I need to align and prioritise
• We succeed if we achieve the outcome and we fail (learn, get a runners up ribbon) if we fall short of the outcome
• We can see if we are on track and adjust our course if we need to, plus we can communicate if we are “at risk” of missing the goal

My hypotheses – invalid

I could say that I have a hypothesis that if I share the roadmap, we will use it to validate that we are on the same page. I could say that but I won’t.

I won’t because really, according to Buddhism and some theoretical physicists reality itself is an illusion. So if I list every assumption as something that needs to be validated it will get a bit silly.

When I say that there is a hypothesis in my roadmap I don’t mean that “There is some room for doubt and I am so into empiricism that I do not accept any outcome is real until it happens, so all outcomes are really an experiment”.

But my goals are often taken to be commitments because they are commitments based on a level of confidence. Some I will lock is as dependable unless there is a tsunami, while others might be optimistic.

So a goal is an objective or outcome with a level of confidence, some risks and the need to check in over time to see if it is still on track.

Hypotheses – valid

What then is a hypothesis? When I use them a hypothesis is a defined outcome that I want to test, but I don’t know if it will turn out to be correct.

That does not just mean it is an outcome with a lower confidence – it means that it is a predicted outcome of an experiment/spike/POC. So it is an untested assumption that I think is worth testing.

I guess that means that it is a hypothesis if:

• It is a prediction that can be tested in an experiment and we can then see if it is right or wrong
• I am confident that we can measure the outcome and that doing so will impact a decision of some kind. So it is something worth testing and not just a heading for some random discovery.
• We succeed if we learn from the experiment and either do more experiments or set a goal to achieve based on what we learn.
• We can see if we are on track to complete the experiment but cannot always say that we know what the result will be until the end (sometimes we can see it early)

A hopethesis is not a real thing

I accidently typed “hope/ethesis” when I was drafting the roadmap. It is a typo when I meant to type hypothesis.

But it led me to write this blog so it was a successful mistake.

I guess a roadmap should not contains hopes that we don’t think we can achieve – either outcomes we don’t believe our actions will deliver or hypotheses we won’t be able to validate.

Nor should a roadmap contain things we said yes to because someone else pressured us, or we didn’t want to say no to them.

But I have found that sometimes my roadmaps have contained things that are beyond “stretch targets” because I wanted to be optimistic today and, presumably sad tomorrow. They have also had things in them that I wanted to say no to but thought it was easier to say yes to for now and then say no when it was easier.

Hopetheses never seem to work well though. So I guess the outcome of a hopethesis is that you shatter the dream early or defer worrying about it until everything else is done and then come back to have a look.