The Agreement~Certainty Matrix

The Liberating Structure “Agreement~Certainty Matrix” 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.

The Plexus Institute is (was?) a non-profit network that addresses real-world challenges through the understanding, advancement, and diffusion of ideas and practices rooted in the principles of complexity.

Recently, someone asked me three simple questions: 
1️⃣ When to use it?
2️⃣ How to use it?
3️⃣ What would be a good next step?

When to use it?

• Support organizations in approaching challenges, new initiatives, or product development endeavors.
• Make clients aware of the number and type of challenges they face in their organization. Plotting all challenges, initiatives, and products in one overview triggers essential conversations on how to move forward.
• If people vastly overestimate their abilities while underestimating the complexity of something.

How to use it?

1. Generate a list of time-consuming challenges. Encourage people to add both large and small challenges.
2. Ask: “What is the degree of agreement about the challenge and how it should be addressed?
3. Ask: “How certain and predictable is the work required to address this challenge and the results when we complete it?”
4. Based on the answers, distribute the challenges on the matrix.
5. Debrief patterns and next steps.

What would be a good next step?

Reflect on whether you use the right approach for existing initiatives and projects. Maybe you’ve chosen a plan-driven approach for something that requires a sense-making approach because it is highly complex.

The more your challenges move into the top-right area of the matrix, the shorter your feedback loop should be.

In complex work, more is unknown than known, and you mostly make assumptions about the ‘how’ and ‘what.’ You can only validate your assumptions and learn what is needed by doing the work.

Scrum, XP, and Kanban are common approaches that use a short feedback loop. Kanban is recommended for challenges in the ‘Chaos’ domain because it has the shortest feedback loop (no iterations).

Because organizations face different types of challenges simultaneously, it doesn’t make sense to use only one approach. For example, not all teams must use Scrum. Instead, give teams the freedom to choose the approach that helps them resolve the challenges. That’s agility.

In short, this is how I use the Agree~Certainty Matrix. 😃

For a more detailed description, check this blog post by Christiaan Verwijs.

What’s your take on this? How do you use it—or any related complexity, sense-making models?