Map the Pain, Not the Process

Instead of mapping how work should happen, gather your team and map where it hurts.

This play is for when:

• You all agree something needs to change
• You're faced with a 'blank page'
• You need to avoid repeating old mistakes

How to Play

Step 1

Rather than trying to 'start at the end' and come up with a new solution, instead, start with what you know all too well: the pain.

Each team member contributes one or two key points. These could be:

• A pain you're facing
• A bottleneck you're experiencing
• A workaround you're using

You can do this using post-its or a virtual whiteboard like Miro.

Step 2

Review the contributions together, and ask yourselves the question:

“Why is this happening?”

Spend 10 minutes as a team discussing. Write down one or a few answers.

Next, take your answer, and ask again:

"Now, why is this happening?"

Again, discuss as a team and answer the question. Repeat this process until you've asked "why?" 5 times in total.

Step 3

Once finished, you should have a list of root causes to the pains your team are experiencing.

Finally, prioritise these together as a team.

Why it works

Teams are often too close to their routines to see where effort is being wasted. Focusing on pain points rather than formal processes surfaces what people quietly tolerate and rarely question.

This is called the Five Whys and is a technique used to really drill down into the root cause of something.

Rigorously asking "why?" ensures any superficial causes are picked apart until you arrive at a problem really worth solving.

Use it to

• Identify where new ideas can remove friction
• Spot low-effort, high-impact improvements
• Build empathy between teams that rely on one another

Read the Story

Read more about the importance of mapping pain over process in our innovation story, below.