DoView Planning is a rigorous, field-tested way to get strategy out of people's heads and into a clear visual model. One that shows the outcomes you want and how your actions lead to them. It's grounded in established theory, proven across hundreds of organizations, and free for anyone to use.

The thinking behind it. DoView Planning is built on the work of Paul Duignan, PhD, a strategy psychologist who has spent his career making planning, outcomes, performance management and evaluation easier to do. He approaches the strategy problem from the fresh perspective of a strategy psychologist. His core insight is that planning usually fails not for lack of effort or ideas, but because the work overloads people: too many documents and too many undisciplined and meandering strategy discussions. And, most importantly, the absence of a ‘shared thinking tool’ that extracts decision-makers’ mental models of their strategy into a concrete map in the real world they can directly deliberate over. A tool that is directly analogous to the mandatory use of a blueprint when constructing a building or a map when planning a battle. DoView Boards address this issue by making strategy visual. One fully detailed picture of outcomes and the steps to them that a whole group can see, debate and act on. He developed outcomes theory, the conceptual framework beneath it all, and is now is exploring extending the same approach to AI, on the principle that an AI agent taking action in the world needs an explicit outcomes model just as much as any human organization.

Why you can trust it. Duignan has directed a national parliamentary research unit in the New Zealand Parliament, been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and held research and research management roles at the University of Auckland and Massey University. He has consulted on planning and outcomes with hundreds of organizations, including international bodies such as the IMF. The approach was first built into an award-winning planning app recognised as a Gartner "Cool Vendor" and used in 55+ countries, developed with software engineer Richard Proctor and Jennifer Parker, with input from Matthew Duignan, PhD. DoView Boards are the next AI-powered generation of that work.

What you can do with it. DoView Planning is open and free, and DoView Boards are an open-source project. Use it yourself, train others, or build DoView Boards into your own tools, just with acknowledgment. And if you would like our input, get in touch for help putting it to work or integrating it into your systems, or collaborate with us on the future of planning.

Get more information: the outcomes theory behind DoView · the 100-tool handbook · what a DoView Board is