The Logical Thinking Process is most often applied as a systemic approach to solving deep-rooted organisational problems: defining the goal, identifying critical success factors, surfacing root causes, resolving underlying conflicts, testing injections and planning implementation. But LTP can also be highly valuable when the challenge is to prepare for the successful implementation of something new.
In this presentation, Thorsteinn Siglaugsson will describe how a Goal Tree, a Future Reality Tree and a set of Prerequisite Trees were used at Statistics Iceland to improve the probability of success in implementing a new standardised organisational data-flow.
At first glance, implementing a standardised data-flow structure may appear to be a mainly technical project. In practice, it proved to be much more complex. This was the fifth attempt over two decades to introduce such a standard. Like many national statistical institutes, Statistics Iceland is a highly specialised organisation in which subject-matter experts work within distinct domains, each with established processes, priorities and local practices. Achieving organisation-wide standardisation therefore requires more than a technical design; it requires a shared understanding of the goal, the critical conditions for success, the assumptions behind the solution, and the obstacles likely to emerge during implementation.
Previous attempts, both at Statistics Iceland and in comparable organisations elsewhere, have often struggled because these non-technical dependencies were underestimated. Treating a standardised data-flow as a purely technical implementation risks leaving too many loose ends unresolved when the project moves into execution.
The presentation will show how the Goal Tree helped clarify the true objective and the necessary conditions for success, how the Future Reality Tree was used to test whether the proposed design would produce the desired effects, and how the Prerequisite Trees helped identify and sequence the obstacles that had to be addressed before and during implementation. The case illustrates how LTP tools can support implementation readiness by making the goal explicit, exposing assumptions, reducing ambiguity and helping ensure that as few critical issues as possible are left unresolved once the project gets going.