I like having a rough plan to help stay focussed. Often the challenge is working out what the goal is. I have found this is especially difficult for someone when asking what they want to do with their career. The question is quite open-ended, and it helps to have structure to pin down their thoughts.

Prerequisite Trees are a fantastic tool to solidify thoughts into a plan. It is in forming a career plan that they were first introduced by Goldratt in his book: It’s Not Luck. For this reason I often reach for a prerequisite tree when thinking about my career or when helping others with theirs.

Alex’s Tree

Alex, the protagonist, is at a point in the story where he needs to think about what he wants for his future. Julie, his wife, recommends that he follows the thinking processes they have learned. Alex tends to forget to use them due to his hectic schedule; Julie uses them religiously for almost the same reason.

The book itself does not show the tree, so I will create what I think it would look like to illustrate how they work. It should not spoil too much of the plot, and you may find it a handy reference when reading along.

I stress that this is a guess at what that tree could look like. We get some information, but the relevant chapter does not include the final tree, and refers to additional actions not fully disclosed.

What it means

The tree is an arrangement of the overall goal, obstacles to that goal and proposed solutions or solved states. The obstacles are represented by the orange octagons; the solutions are overlaid. We then organise the dependencies between the solutions to see what prerequisite tasks need to be addressed first.

Julie points out that the “identify positions” is the only action with no dependant tasks based on the tree in the book. In our tree we can see there are a few other items with no prerequisites; in the story line, those items are already being worked on, so Julie focusses on the other available action.

We see through the dependent links that focus is needed on the ‘lower’ actions. The items which come ‘higher’ will need to be tackled later. We can have supporting those later actions in mind when working on earlier steps.

Running with the plan

We don’t necessarily get a concrete plan through this process, this is still a high level plan. We do, however, have clear intermediate objectives to pursue.

The diagram shows, regardless of Alex’s worries, he should not focus directly on the value of Pete and Bob’s companies, but instead work through the plans which support the “Model” company approach. Once he has a working implementation and a pitch prepared it will be easier to see exactly how to persuade buyers of the true value of the companies.

Dealing with uncertainty

Alex’s plan does not directly solve his obstacles. There is still uncertainty for him around how to construct the pitch to the right sort of buyers; he does however have a clear idea of where to start in addressing that, and with whom.

Prerequisite trees provide high-level plans for reaching goals and therefore often result in some high-level solutions. The value of knowing what you need to strive for, as well as the order should not be underestimated; the weight of the unknowns can often paralyse, but the cohesive plan laid out by a prerequisite tree can provide both motivation and direction.

We can explore an intermediate objective in more detail using a goal tree , which is what I’ll cover next time.