Stage 1: Preparing for your Modelling Project

Your first task is to define your modelling project by specifying its:

Overall Outcome

What results have you noticed other people achieve in the world that you would also like to achieve?

Sensory specific evidence of completion

How will you know you have got these results?

How will others know you have got these results?

Scope

Time scale

Breadth of project - what is included and what is not

Contexts in which you (and others) want the results

Definition of terms

Value to you

What's important to you about being able to consistently reproduce the results specified above?

Exemplars

Who consistently demonstrates the results you want?

What is your evidence?

How will you get access to such people?

Be careful how you define your criteria for an exemplar. One modeller discovered the organisation that commissioned the work picked their 'top performers' by how much they contributed to the top line (revenue). They later realised these people did it at the expense of other people – they burned relationships and therefore were not building a constructive culture.

Presuppositions

What are you presupposing to be true before you start?

What metaphors are you using to describe your project?

How are you going to describe the project to exemplar's with minimal presupposition and metaphor? (Hint: think behavioural examples.)

Your second task, is to plan how you are going to gather the relevant information. To help you do that see the article:

Introducing Modelling to Organisations has a chart, The Who, Why, How, What, Where and When of Modelling which uses two of Robert Dilts' frameworks to consider a modelling project from a number of perceptual positions and Logical Levels. (First published in Rapport magazine issue 40, Summer 1998)