Est. 2019 © 2025 Sam Grayston
This is the new ‘North Star’
Architecture Leader
NEW: Help us write The Outcomes Tree book!
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How do you connect the very big and far away to the experimental and now?
I’ve been working on this challenge with various teams over the last few years, and I’d love to share the tool I’ve developed to help teams shape their strategy around value, purpose and outcomes…and I call it ‘The Outcomes Tree’.
There are three ways to experience The Outcomes Tree:
1.
FREE: Green Shoots introduction.
Join the hundreds of people who have experienced the 35-minute ‘green shoots’ introduction to The Outcomes Tree to find out more.
2.
Join the Growth Academy.
Take part in a dedicated, eight-week LIVE course where we grow an Outcomes Tree, side by side. You’ll start the next quarter well-prepared to succeed.
You’ll get:
- 8x LIVE sessions
- Access to Outcomes Tree tools
- Access to a private chat group for support
- Weekly blog or podcast
3.
1:1 Acorn to Oak coaching.
There’s no substitute for working one-on-one to nurture and grow your Outcomes Tree bespoke for your organisation, team, or for yourself.
It expanded my horizons from ‘what I have to do?’ to ‘how do I need to impact people?’
Product Leader
Imagine the tree.
In the roots of the tree lives the value and impact. Ask yourself ‘if we did really well, how would the organisation benefit? What do we deem to be ‘valuable?’. Is it customer satisfaction, brand identity, time to market, changes in behaviour in our users, employee retention, etc? Whatever it is, put this in the roots of the tree. This is our grounding. It’s what everything that comes out of the ground is contributing towards.
From those roots grows a trunk. The trunk is where our purpose lives. A single statement that expresses why we exist. There is a symbiotic relationship between the roots and the trunk – that is to say, that the reason to exist is because of the value we want to create; and the value we aspire to achieve creates a reason to exist.
Next, consider three or four large branches growing out of the trunk. Let’s call these three-year outcomes. Here, we look three years away from now, and describe what outcomes (changes in behaviour in our users) we would hope to see that would indicate that we’re living up to our purpose and reason to exist. We follow those branches along to create outcomes over different time horizons.
This way, there’s a beautiful, golden thread from every single quarterly outcome to the multi-year outcomes, to the lived-purpose, to value.
Sam Grayston
Then from each quarterly outcome, you can start to craft experiments.
Using #TheOutcomesTree, every task of every experiment connects to a quarterly, yearly and multi-year outcome, that connects to my purpose, and delivers value for my organisation.
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The tree metaphor.
One of the reasons I think the tree metaphor really seems to resonate with people is that it is a natural and living thing. A tree needs nurturing, tending, pruning, attention, growth, etc – in the same way that we need to constantly revisit the work we’ve done to see if the connections we’ve hoped to make are coming true. Then we can revise and prune outcomes based on feedback from users and grow new shoots where we see potential space in the market. It’s very visual, easy to understand and make connections, but really hard work to complete.
It profoundly changed the way we think about outcomes and value
Transformation Leader
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Sam Grayston 