Strategy Survival Guide

Strategy Survival Guide Version 2.1
Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit
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Strategy Skills > Structuring the Thinking
Issue trees
> in practice
> template
Issue trees help to identify the key issue or question that the project should address, and break it down into
its smaller component parts. They can be used:
• at the beginning of a piece of strategy work to identify key workstreams
• to plan individual workstreams
• to analyse specific key questions
• to communicate the shape and direction of the work.
The trees are a useful reference point throughout a project providing context and showing how each piece of
work fits into the whole. A well thought out tree should also inform how to structure communications about
the project, including the final report.
Issue trees
Before embarking on the detailed thinking, some time should be spent thinking through the overarching
question that the project is attempting to answer. One way of creating this statement of the problem is to
note down some of the areas of enquiry and, crucially, those areas that lie outside the scope of the project.
The opening question must be wide enough to encompass the full overview of the strategy if it is to be used
to plan the project. Defining the starting point can be the most difficult part of building an issue tree.
The next layer should set out a series of questions that together answer the question above them in the tree.
For example, if the starting question is "How can we most effectively increase employment rates through
improving access to childcare?" the next layer in the tree might comprise two further questions:
• What are the most effective forms of childcare to help parents into work?
• How can government best support parents in accessing these forms of childcare?
The answers to these two questions should provide the answer to the original, higher level question. These
two questions will then be further broken down, and so on, until a level of questions is reached that address
the fundamental root causes of the original issue. Specific analysis can then be designed to address each
one.
Each time a question is broken out into lower level questions, these lower-level questions should together
give the answer to the higher level question. Moreover, these lower level questions should together cover all
the issues needing to be resolved, but should not overlap each other. Questions to be resolved should fall
into one of the buckets, not both. In more technical parlance, this is known as Mutually Exclusive,
Collectively Exhaustive.
Although it may seem cumbersome, writing out the questions in full is very helpful as it forces clarity of
thinking.
This issue tree template may be helpful.
For any problem, there will be a number of ways of drawing out the issue tree, frequently resting on the way
in which the first set of branches is constructed. It is worth having a number of attempts at the tree (perhaps
done by different members of the team), using different structures. The trees can then be evaluated on the
basis of how well they seem to be working best in terms of breaking down the issues into smaller,
answerable questions; in terms of breaking the project out into workstreams; and in terms of structuring
future communications (reports or other documents). Techniques that can be helpful during the question-
Strategy Survival Guide – Strategy Skills
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