Wishcraft

[Alan Baljeu]

Many years ago Barbara Sher wrote a popular self-help book called
"Wishcraft". It was a practical guide to turning dreams into
reality. According to the author, the reader's favorite chapter by
far was the one that introduced a diagramming technique to plan out
goals. Essentially the idea was to draw a graph like your Mikado
graph, but instead of refactoring steps the steps were actions to
carry out in a project plan.

I'm finding the graph-building idea is useful for any complex
problem. Currently we're analyzing the behavior of software under a
variety of operations and trying to decide where is the most logical
place to make adjustments that will make the whole operation more
intuitive. The answer comes from graphing the information flows
through the various commands and then building a derivative Mikado
graph highlighting which steps we undertake to revise the flows to
achieve our new objective.

[Daniel Brolund]

Hi Alan,

Cool! Thanks for sharing!

Graphing is a powerful technique, especially when the problem is
non-trivial. Probably so because evidently, a larger part of our brain
is stimulated when posing information/problems in a spatial manner,
like in mindmaps.

Thanks for the book suggestion, added it to our shopping cart.

Please, keep us updated on your progress and any insights you get. I
would love to see pictures of the graphs, but I understand that your
work is confidential.

Cheers
Daniel

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Daniel Brolund
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[Ola Ellnestam]

Wishcraft sounds really interesting.

Daniel and I are also exploring concepts on how to combine the Mikado
method, real options and 'Wishcraft'. I sometimes refer to it as an
idealized future. You could use it for an idealized design and that
design can be about organizational transformations, larger systems or
projects. Probably a lot more too.

I personally use it to plan parts of projects, my own career to a
certain extent, visualizing others peoples options and a lot of other stuff.

When Daniel and I talk about this we often refer to it as a 'lying down
Mikado [graph]', because there is often a need to map it to time
eventually. Which many people are accustomed to going from left to
right, on a horizontal axis.

This we think really is out of the scope of the current book. Although
very much related.

Thanks a lot for the tip about Wishcraft.

Cheers,
Ola

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Ola Ellnestam

Agical AB
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