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This post is the second in a series on using the Natural Planning Method, the first post is here.

“One of the most powerful skills in the world of knowledge work, and one of the most important to hone and develop, is creating clear outcomes.”

~ David Allen, Getting Things Done, p. 69

How you envision the outcome of implementing your plan is essential to its final success. If you have a clear vision of exactly what you are working to achieve you can communicate it to the rest of the team.

Your vision of the outcome is the final mark on the yardstick that you will be using to measure your progress through the plan’s stages. When you have properly defined the outcome of the project you can then create and define specific activities and sub-goals to reach your objective.

What happens when it’s over?

If the project has been determined to be worth doing and you have outlined the “Why”, your next step is to set the conditions that define its successful completion. Here is a short list of questions that can help create the vision of a successful outcome:

• What are the potential rewards?
• What are the potential obstacles?
• Are there potential opportunities for changing the plan to meet changing conditions? How might this affect the outcome?
• What will the success of this project mean in a year? In three years?
• What is the best possible result of the project?
• What might prevent you from reaching the best result?

As with Defining the Purpose, clear Outcome Visioning can greatly increase the enthusiasm of the participants. Knowing where you are going is always preferable to blundering blindly about.

Tools for answering the questions

There are plenty of tools and methods that individuals and teams can use to capture the potential solutions. Brainstorming and Free Association can be helpful in exploring unexpected problems as well as opportunities. These also happen to be very good Team-building excercises which can be very helpful to the overall success of your project. Getting everyone to participate and contribute to the solutions to a problem raises the level of buy-in and enthusiasm for a project.

Flip-charts come in handy for brainstorming sessions, lots of room for writing down the ideas and suggestions. They are also very handy for mind-mapping, a method of capturing ideas and determining the connections between them. Often these connections prompt more ideas!

Mind-Mapping Software

Here are a few links to some of the mind-mapping resources that are available online:

• Mind-Mapping.org - a list of over 200 resources!
• Exploratree - web based “thinking guide”
• Flying Logic - web based mind-mapping
• Freemind - a free download that you can take with you

Other Types of Tools

Depending on the type of project that you are working on, other resources might be helpful as well:

• Storyboards
• Weddings
• or even Travel Planning

Whatever tool that you use, the basic principles are the same:

1. Understand “Why”, what is the purpose of the project?
2. Visualize the outcome, what is the final result?
3. Brainstorm ideas, and capture every one for evaluation.

In the next posts in this series we will discuss Organizing these ideas into a coherent structure and identifying Next Actions.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5d7sel. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen