Sort Challenges Based on Their Complexity with “Agreement-Certainty Matrix”

Sort Challenges Based On Their Complexity With The“Agreement-Certainty Matrix”

Avoid underestimating how complex things are and, because of that, choose the wrong approach to deal with your challenges

Liberating Structures are a collection of interaction patterns that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group — from extroverted to introverted and from leaders to followers. In this series of posts, we show how Liberating Structures can be used with Scrum.

What approach do you pick when you’re faced with a challenge? Do you try the first solution that comes to mind? Do you make a detailed plan where you specify who does what and when? Or do you ask someone with experience to come up with a solution for you? And what if the challenge isn’t just owned by you, but by a larger group of people?

Whatever approach you pick, you do well to match it to the complexity of the challenge. Cleaning up your office probably doesn’t require a plan or an expert opinion, and is something you should just do. Then again, if the office is large and involves many people, you may want to come up with a basic plan to get everyone on the same page. If your office is an operating theater in a hospital, you probably want to get an expert opinion on how to best disinfect the surfaces. And if the office is in the International Space Station, you may want to do more trial-and-error on how to actually clean up in zero gravity.

In this post, we cover a Liberating Structure that is designed to help groups come to terms with the complexity of their work and choose the right approach.

The purpose of the Agreement-Certainty Matrix

“It isn’t that difficult, right?”. I can’t imagine how often I said these very words before starting an initiative. Whether it was in my work as a software developer, as a Scrum Master, or in my private life. This deep optimism about how simple things should be is not unique to me. It’s a good example of a common cognitive bias called “Illusory Superiority” (which we covered in a recent post) where we vastly overestimate our own ability while at the same underestimating the complexity of something. This is problematic because it often leads groups to pick a plan-based approach for a challenge where neither the work nor the effort can be predicted upfront. On the other hand, some organizations are so used to creating plans that even straightforward activities such as setting up an Instagram account require a detailed “marketing plan”, effectively stifling attempts at innovation.

The Liberating Structure “Agreement-Certainty matrix” exists to help groups sort the challenges they face based on their complexity. This allows them to reflect on whether or not their approaches are suited to the kinds of challenges they face.

“The Liberating Structure Agreement-Certainty matrix exists to help groups sort the challenges they face based on their complexity.”

This structure was inspired by work done by Ralph Stacey and Brenda Zimmerman, with whom the creators of Liberating Structures — Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless — collaborated during their work for the Plexus Institute. We wrote this extensive post about their work and related work by Dave Snowden.

Steps to facilitate Agreement-Certainty Matrix

1. As preparation, prepare a large and empty Agreement-Certainty Matrix on the floor or on the wall.
2. (5 min) Ask people to individually generate a list of challenges (4–7 is usually good) that take up their time. Encourage people to add large and small challenges.
3. (5 min) Individually, ask people to draw an Agreement-Certainty matrix and distribute the challenges where they think they are in the matrix for their group. Ask: “What is the degree of agreement in this group about what the challenge is and how it should be addressed? And how certain and predictable is the work required to address this challenge, as well as the results when we complete it?
4. (5 min) Ask people to form pairs and share their matrixes with each other. What do they notice?
5. (10 min) Ask the pairs to find another pair and identify commonalities and differences in the individual matrices. Where does there seem to be an agreement? Where are mismatches?
6. (5 min) Invite everyone to post their challenges in the large and empty matrix you prepared.
7. (10 min) In small groups, ask people to notice patterns in the large matrix. Where are obvious commonalities? What mismatches should we address? How does this influence our approach(es) to tackle these challenges?
8. (10 min) With the whole group, debrief patterns, and next steps.

Examples of Agreement-Certainty Matrix

• We frequently use Agreement-Certainty Matrix during our Professional Scrum Master classes to help people understand why a plan-based approach isn’t suited for complex problems. We begin by asking people to plot the challenges they work on with their teams on the matrix, then talk about the patterns. The tendency to underestimate complexity often manifests here when people optimistically put something obviously complex (“Develop a connection with our Enterprise Resource Planning software for our sales department”) in the “Simple” area of the matrix.
• The Agreement-Certainty Matrix can be used at the onset of a change initiative to plot the various challenges. This is a good way to help groups identify which approach works where.
• As a Scrum team, you can plot your Product Backlog on the matrix to see how much is or can be, gained from an empirical approach like Scrum. Scrum is most suited for complex and complicated work but tends to add too much overhead for simple work.
• Together with product teams and management, you can plot the portfolio of products or services and the matrix. How do the approaches we use match the complexity?
• This Liberating Structure can be easily used with remote teams. You can set up an empty matrix in Mural or Google Slides for the group as a whole, and one for each participant. A conferencing tool that allows break-out rooms is ideal here, like Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

Combinations with other Liberating Structures

1. When there are many mismatches, it helps to follow up Agreement-Certainty with Liberating Structures like Integrated~Autonomy, Critical Uncertainties, or Ecocycle Planning. This is a great way to help groups develop new strategies.
2. You can precede Agreement-Certainty Matrix with Impromptu Networking, 1–2–4-ALL, or even 25/10 Crowd Sourcing to rapidly generate a list of challenges that a group faces or to explore approaches that are more suited to the complexity of a challenge.
3. A Liberating Structure like Conversation Cafe, User Experience Fishbowl, or Discovery & Action Dialogue can be used to drill into specific challenges.

Closing

In this post, we covered the Liberating Structure “Agreement-Certainty Matrix”. It exists to help groups discover what approaches are most effective for the kinds of challenges they face, or at least create transparency around where mismatches. It’s a wonderfully powerful if under-used, structure. Give it a try! And let us know what happened.

Interested in learning many different Liberating Structures in an intense 2-day workshop? Check out our agenda for upcoming Immersion Workshops. If you’re aiming to join, book early — they are exceptionally popular. And join the Dutch User Group to learn more about Liberating Structures.