A New Way to Visualize Risk
THE CHALLENGE
Having worked at BCG Digital Ventures (DV) for over 4 years, I’ve seen first hand how their codified methodologies for building and launching new ventures leads to success. However, what is always unknown is the risk-to-reward ratio of undertaking a new venture. Understanding how risky a new idea is affects team size, money invested, and of course, deadlines.
The DV managing partners wanted a tool which would consistently and accurately measure risks associated with new ventures and display this information in a simple, visual way. I was the sole UX designer assigned to the project, along with a visual designer and product manager. The timeline for the project was one month. ONE MONTH!
WAIT, HOW DO YOU MEASURE RISK?
And worse: how do we calculate it?
I knew the target user of this internal product were DV product managers, so I went straight to the source. I organized a brainstorming session with a group of DV managers to hear their thought process when deciding which products to pitch, how they currently measured risk, and what they wish they had to measure risk.
Out of these many discussions, the team and I conceptualized the following solution:
p (probability event will happen) x i (impact if it does happen) = r (risk)
To make things simple ‘p’ and ‘i’ would be selected from a 5-point scale of extra small (XS) to extra large (XL), each being associated to a different numeric value on the backend. This would give us a total numeric value of the risk, which would then be displayed in the tool. The next question then was how to display this value.
BUT WHAT DOES RISK LOOK LIKE?
Now that we made the equation for risk, we needed a way to visualize it. In the DV office, each venture has its own dedicated room with a large digital display outside. So we decided to display InVenture outside each room so that anyone walking by could quickly understand the status of the venture and how risky the venture is.
However, there was one major restriction: InVenture couldn’t display any information which could jeopardize client confidentiality. It had to work based purely on visuals!
How could I show one issue as posing a bigger risk than another? I thought about one of the general principles of gestalt perception:
Our brains are wired to see the above image as the smaller circle being further away, and the larger circle being closer. The object in closer proximity then poses more of a “threat” than the other.
You can also achieve the same effect with color (warmer colors feel closer than cooler colors). However, each InVenture board would eventually need to incorporate the venture’s branded colors, so I decided to remove color from the core design to allow for clarity and versatility down the line.
This is how I decided to show, at a glance, how each venture was doing:
Uh oh, this team has a lot of work to do!
Alright, this team looks like they’ve got things under control!
REDUCING RISK
If a managing partner walked by and saw a venture had a lot of risks, the first thing they’d want to know is what the team was doing to address it. To mitigate this, teams would create hypotheses to test. The results would either reduce risk (positive result) or increase the risk of that issue (negative or inconclusive result). To show how many tests were scheduled, and in what part of the process they were in, I came up with this color-coded system:
RISK OVER TIME
The final element was time. Each ‘risk’ circle has an outline. Upon first creation, the outline is aligned to the edge of the shape. This was done so that each sprint, as product managers go in and adjust the ‘p’ & ‘i’ of each issue, the risk would either increase or decrease. Then, the outline would remain the same size as the shape of the last sprint to show either the growth or reduction in risk.
The issue on the left has seen an increase in risk since last sprint, the issue on the right has seen a decrease.
INVENTURE AT WORK
For the initial test run, InVenture was adopted by all new ventures in the London BCG DV office for the second half of 2018. For six months, it has been in use and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. By the end of 2018 it was announced that InVenture would be immediately rolled out to all DV offices, with 2,000 people, for use on all current and future ventures.
Employer: BCG Digital Ventures
Role: Sr Experience Designer
