It took me a long time to come up with the 5-page Communications Current Reality Tree (CCRT). Much of that is down to inexperience, confusion, multitasking, holidays, book writing, struggling with visio, long distance learning ... but mostly inexperience on my part.
I started with a list of UDEs, converted them into clouds, then built mini-CRTs for each UDE cloud.
Then I set about linking them up into this one big tree:
... which, as you can imagine was tricky to work with. Jim gave me a hand, of course - he learnt to use Visio especially too - and if you could see the details you would see the entities for the cloud at the bottom and all of the UDEs near the top with bits of logic in between.
This was too hard - physically - to work with or to comprehend so Jim kindly spent an entire evening of his life breaking the one big tree into 11 smaller pages. It looked like this when printed out:
At this stage I was getting a little sick of doing this ... so I went on holiday and took a month off.
When I came back to it - with fresh eyes - I realised that I obviously had far, far, too much detail in the tree. So I started again. I grabbed some little yellow stickies and built the cloud at the bottom of our bedroom mirror, then I grabbed some bigger yellow stickies and picked out what I now considered to be the UDES and put them on the tree, then I put some supporting "facts" on pink and orange stickies.
I fiddled about with the stickies a bit and came up with this (my face is hidden because I am impossibly ugly):
Which I put into Visio again and came up with a one page version that looked like this (I've deliberately saved it low quality ... the details aren't important):
I then broke the tree down into 5 individual chunks, adding a few entities as I went so that it now won't fit on one page easily, which gives us the five pages we've been reviewing.
Next, breaking the conflict.
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