How I map an organisation in one notebook page

I do this with a pen, on paper, before I open anything. One page, every domain the business runs on, written down without judgement. It takes about forty minutes and it is the most useful forty minutes in any quarter I have worked.

The output is not a plan. It is a map of where I would be surprised, and surprise is the thing I am hunting.

Step one: list the domains, not the problems

Write the areas the business genuinely operates in. Not the org chart, not the departments. The domains.

For a clinic network mine tend to land as marketing and demand, sales and consultation, clinical delivery, clinical quality and audit, training and certification, standards and SOPs, technology and automation, data and reporting, franchise and partner management, brand and legal protection, compliance and advertising standards, products, patient communication, and the leadership layer that decides between them.

The rule at this stage is that nothing gets ranked and nothing gets dismissed. If you start judging while listing, you will stop listing early, and the domain you leave out is almost always the one that bites. The point of the page is completeness.

Sub-branch where a domain has real internal structure. Under technology I will branch into CRM, telephony, messaging, bots, automation and dashboards, because those fail independently of each other. Under compliance I branch into advertising standards, certification, audits and trademark. The branching is where the page starts telling you things.

Step two: mark what you actually know

Now go back over the page and mark each domain one of three ways. Something I have seen with my own eyes. Something I have been told. Something I am assuming.

This is uncomfortable and it is the whole exercise. Most managers, myself included, discover we are running two or three domains entirely on report. Not on evidence. On a version of events assembled from meetings.

Wherever the mark says "assuming", you do not have a gap analysis. You have a gap in your own information, which is a different problem with a different fix. The fix is to go and look.

Step three: name the gap, in one line, with a solution beside it

For every domain, one line for what is missing and one line for what would close it. Both short. If the gap needs a paragraph to describe, you have not understood it yet.

I insist on the solution line because a page of gaps with no solutions is a complaint, and complaints do not get funded. A gap with a named fix beside it is a decision waiting for someone to make it. The discipline also protects you from the fake gap, the one that sounds serious until you try to write what you would do about it and find there is nothing.

Step four: score, then cut to three

Four columns. How strong is the evidence. What is the gap costing now. What would the fix cost. Is the fix inside my control.

That last column decides more than the other three. A large gap I cannot touch is context, and I will write it down and stop thinking about it. A medium gap I can close this month is work. Spending the working week on the first kind is the most common way senior people exhaust themselves without moving anything.

Take three. Not five, not the whole page. Three, because three is what one person can actually push through a business at once while still doing the job they are paid for. Everything else gets a review date and goes to the back of the notebook.

Step five: give the three a shape

Each of the three gets an owner, a first observable change and a date. The first observable change matters more than the plan. If I cannot say what a person outside my team would notice within thirty days, I have chosen a project rather than a fix.

Then I put the page away and take a photograph of it. The photograph is the record I compare against in ninety days, and the comparison is usually humbling. Some domains I marked as fine have quietly gone wrong. One of the three I picked turned out to be the wrong three.

Why the paper

Because the page cannot be reorganised. In a document I will start moving headings around and grouping things sensibly, and sensible grouping is exactly how a missing domain disappears. On paper the mess stays visible, and the mess is the data.

There is also a Stoic argument for the method, and I will keep it brief because the idea does not need decoration. Most of what a business faces is not yours: the regulator, the currency, the competitor's launch, what the market decides to want. The page separates that from the small set of things that are yours, which is the standard you hold, the process you run and the evidence you collect. Everything in the fourth column is the second kind. That is where the week should go.

I have never regretted an hour spent on this page. I have regretted several quarters spent on a plan built without one.

Questions people ask

What is a domain map?

A single page listing every domain a business actually runs on, written before any judgement about which ones matter. It is a completeness exercise, not a priority exercise. The priorities come after.

How do you decide what to fix first?

Score each gap on evidence, cost of the gap, cost of the fix and whether the fix is inside your control. Take the three that score highest and are inside your control. Everything else goes on a dated review list.

Why write it by hand?

Handwriting is slow enough to think in and hard to reorganise. A document tempts you to tidy the structure before you have finished collecting. Tidy structure is what hides the missing domain.