Last year I gave a talk at FastFlowConf called “A Ferrari with No GPS: Why Fast Pipelines Can’t Fix a Flawed Strategy”. The argument was simple. As an industry we’ve spent a decade making our delivery pipelines faster, slicker and more automated. The only problem? A faster pipeline mostly helps you deliver a bad idea to your customers more efficiently.
In that talk I shared the Triple Diamond Initiative Playbook. It’s a map that takes an initiative from a rough idea through to running software, so a cross-functional group can see the whole value stream in one place. After the talk I promised a blog post to dive deeper into the playbook, and it’s taken me the best part of a year, but better late than never. Until now it has lived on a Miro board, and that’s still there as a Miroverse template. Today it’s also an interactive page at daowolf.com/initiative-playbook, where you can map your own initiative. It’s an early version, so please tell me what’s missing.
We’ve mastered the how
Every stage of the delivery loop, from planning and coding through to deploying and monitoring, now has a shelf full of tools to pick from. And yet the same pattern keeps turning up. You’ll probably recognise some of it: information silos, long feedback loops, agendaless meetings, ambiguous requirements, rework, scope creep and frustrated stakeholders. Sometimes it’s a solution looking for a problem. A team can have a high deployment frequency and still deliver very little value, and that often gets mislabelled as “being Agile” or “failing fast”.
The bottleneck usually isn’t the tooling. It’s a thinking problem. And now AI is speeding the pipeline up again. If your sensible defaults, processes and practices aren’t up to scratch, throwing AI on top will just amplify the problems.
The invisible context gap
Strategy talks in goals, like improving customer retention or capturing a new market segment. Delivery talks in tickets, like building a new API endpoint or changing a button colour to blue. The space between them is what I call the invisible context gap, the missing bridge between the what and the why.
It’s invisible because everyone genuinely believes they’ve communicated perfectly. But communication without collaboration leaves plenty of room for assumptions to settle in quietly. That’s when you start hearing “I thought you meant…”, “we assumed they knew…” and “is anyone really going to use this?” Jeff Patton’s “I’m glad we all agree” sketch, which I used in the talk, sums it up. Three people agree while each pictures a different shape, and it’s only when they draw those pictures out that they get to one they actually share.
My friend Nicola Sedgwick, creator of the Quality Radar tool, puts it simply: “You cannot improve what you cannot see.” That’s the whole purpose of the playbook, to make the invisible, visible.
Map your own initiative
The Triple Diamond is a design thinking model. It extends the Double Diamond popularised by the British Design Council, and each diamond is a diverge then converge move. You open up the options, then narrow down to a decision. That shape traces back to J.P. Guilford’s work on divergent and convergent thinking.
The board is split into two halves. Discovery has two diamonds of its own, Understand the Problem and Shape the Solution. Build the right thing runs from Idea to the midpoint of Shape the Solution, and Build the thing right takes over from there, through Delivery, where you create the outcome, and Measure, where you refine and iterate. Three milestones act as pit stops to check you’re still moving in the right direction: Discovery Kick Off, Opportunity Playback and Solution Playback. Each phase lists its phase goals and the activities that help you get there.
On the interactive page you start by writing down the idea, then reframing it as a problem or opportunity statement. Next, you work through each phase and mark the goals and activities Yes or No for this initiative. None of it is prescriptive, so ignore whatever doesn’t fit. You can add signals from the board’s emoji legend, like “Frustration is in the air”, “No engagement”, “Confused” and “Lots of energy”. There are two markers as well, “Practices we highly recommend” and “Practices that help us stay secure”. Add an owner and comments as you go. The mapping itself takes about 15 minutes, so it isn’t a big ceremony.
Then look at the two maps. The heat and cold map shows which phase goals and activities you’ve selected, so you can spot the phases that are empty and the ones that are full. The emoji heat map shows where friction concentrates, from the emojis your team adds. It won’t predict your DORA metrics. It tells you where to look. When you’re done you can export the map as Markdown or JSON. Everything stays in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere. The page also lists the nine steps for running a session.
If you missed the thrilling saga of context gaps and Ferraris without GPS, the talk recording has worked examples of the heat map in action.
Credits and what’s next
I have a few giants of my own to thank for this playbook. It was co-created at Cazoo with the team’s Lead Designer, and Zendesk’s version of the Triple Diamond was our springboard. It’s a living thing, born from collaboration and shaped by feedback across disciplines.
Next up for the page are lens overlays for AI, quality, security, accessibility and compliance, and a way for teams to work on a map together. None of those are built yet, but I’ll be sharing more soon.
So please give it a go at daowolf.com/initiative-playbook. Map a live initiative, or a finished one. When you map after the fact, the gaps tend to announce themselves. Then drop me a message on LinkedIn and tell me what’s missing. I’m genuinely keen to hear how you get on with it.