On the same post, Ozzie Gooen (Nuno’s colleague at QURI) wrote:
I looked over an earlier version of this, just wanted to post my takes publicly.[1]
I like making diagrams of impact, and these seem like the right things to model. Going through them, many of the pieces seem generally right to me. I agree with many of the details, and I think this process was useful for getting us (QURI, which is just the two of us now) on the same page.
At the same time though, I think it’s surprisingly difficult to make these diagrams to be understandable for many people.
Things get messy quickly. The alternatives are to make them much simpler, and/or to try to style them better.
I think these could have been organized much neater, for example, by:
Having the flow always go left-to-right.
Using a different diagram editor that looks neater.
Reducing the number of nodes by maybe 30% or so.
Maybe neater arrow structures (having 90% lines, rather than diagonal lines) or something.
That said, this would have been a lot of work to do (required deciding on and using different software), and there’s a lot of stuff to do, so this is more “stuff to keep in mind for the future, particularly if we want to share these with many more people.” (Nuno and I discussed this earlier)
One challenge is that some of the decisions on the particularities of the causal paths feel fairly ad-hoc, even though they make sense in isolation. I think they’re useful for a few people to get a grasp on the main factors, but they’re difficult to use for getting broad buy-in.
If you take a quick glance and just think, “This looks really messy, I’m not going to bother”, I don’t particularly blame you (I’ve made very similar things that people have glanced over).
But the information is interesting, if you ever consider it worth your time/effort!
So, TLDR:
Impact diagrams are really hard. At these levels of details, much more so.
This is a useful exercise, and it’s good to get the information out there.
I imagine some viewers will be intimidated by the diagrams.
I’m a fan of experimenting with things like this and trying out new software, so that was neat.
[1] I think it’s good to share these publicly for transparency + understanding.
On the same post, Ozzie Gooen (Nuno’s colleague at QURI) wrote: