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WMBT

A book by Sean Gwaltney. Tools to follow.

What must
be true?

When work gets cheap, a leader’s real job is choosing the Next Most Valuable Work.

What is your goal?

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Pick one. See the first thing that has to be true.

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The premise

The future is always changing. Asking what must be true starts changing it.

Agents make work cheap and judgment expensive. Bad judgment used to be slow. Now it scales.

From the Introduction

Effort creates evidence of effort, and evidence of effort gets mistaken for evidence of progress.

From Chapter 1

How it works

The Belief Chain

  1. A surveyed summit. A dashed route climbs from a square marked You are here, through four waypoints, to an amber beacon at the peak.

    01 of 05

    Goal

    Name the outcome you want, plainly enough that you could tell if it happened.

    Mark where you are and name the summit.

    Now Not known yet Goal
  2. The same summit and route. The climber stands at the first waypoint, What Must Be True. One stretch of the route is broken and the path goes around it.

    02 of 05

    What Must Be True

    List the conditions the goal depends on. A request is not a condition. The few that collapse the goal if false are the Load-Bearing Truths.

    Each truth is a waypoint, and it has to hold. When a truth fails, a Tripwire fires and the route changes.

    Goal Holds Holds Weakest Holds Load-Bearing Truths
  3. The same summit and route. The climber stands at the second waypoint, Who Must Believe.

    03 of 05

    Who Must Believe

    For each truth, name who must believe it. The person whose beliefs most need to change is usually you.

    A waypoint holds only when the people who decide believe it.

    Truths Boss Customer You Team
  4. The same summit and route. The climber stands at the third waypoint, Projects.

    04 of 05

    Projects

    Tie every project to the truth it moves. Work the weakest Load-Bearing Truth first.

    Projects are how you get from one waypoint to the next.

    Weakest Moves it Noise
  5. The same summit and route. The climber stands at the last waypoint before the beacon, the Next Move.

    05 of 05

    Next Move

    The Next Most Valuable Work: the one piece of work, available now, that most raises the odds the goal comes true. Not the most urgent.

    Not the whole climb. The next stretch of the route.

    Next move Truth Believer Goal

Where you are

Position decides which truths bear the load.

Your scope and your authority decide which truths are Load-Bearing. Move the four controls. Watch who has to believe first.

A team
Bigger role
You recommend
A few people

Who must believe first Your boss. The decision sits above you, so the first truth is what your boss has to believe.

Position map: you as a square, with your boss, your team, your peers, and your partners and customers as circles around you. Your boss Your team Partners, customers Your peers Goal You
A summit built from small triangles, circles and squares, with one amber triangle at the peak.

Why do smart, hard-working people look at the same facts and confidently do different, wrong things next?

From the Introduction

The book

What Must Be True

Finding the Next Most Valuable Work for Your People and Your Agents

“Own the Belief Chain. Write the spec. Judge the output. Stop the machines.”

From Chapter 11
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Coming: the WMBT tools

What the tools will do

An application is being built on the method. It asks what must be true first, then helps with the work that follows. Four tracks are planned. None is available yet.

  1. Two circles made of small shapes joined by a line, one with an amber centre.

    01 Coming

    Sales development

    What must be true first A buyer believes the problem is worth solving. A lead list is decoration until someone talks to the lead.

    • Customer conversations
    • Pitches
    • Explainers
    • How-tos

  2. 02 Coming

    Leadership development

    What must be true first Your team knows which work is Core, which is Tax and which is Noise.

    • Coaching materials
    • Project management frameworks

  3. 03 Coming

    Career development

    What must be true first One person with a say believes you already do the next job.

    • Personal brand assets
    • Explainers
    • Resume augmentation
  4. A large square assembling from small squares, one of them amber.

    04 Coming

    Brand and product assets

    What must be true first A customer can repeat the claim when you are not in the room.

    • Brand assets
    • Product assets

There is one list. It tells you when the book can be pre-ordered and when a tool is ready to use.

Join the list

From the Conclusion

If the answer is ‘good,’ you have not asked yet.

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Go choose the work.