[A02] Create your practice cascade

📋 Instructions

You’ll practise building a simple cascade by mapping the work behind a commonplace activity.

Here are some activities/results you could choose:

• Making a cup of tea or coffee (result = a tasty beverage)
• Cleaning your home (result = a clean home)
• Shopping for groceries (result = a restocked kitchen or pantry)

👣 Steps

1. Pick a tool for building your cascade, e.g., Workflowy, MindMeister, Google Docs, or Microsoft Word
2. Pick one of the results above (or choose your own) and add it to the top of your cascade with the prefix “RESULT”
3. Decide the 3-7 essential achievements that lie on the path to that result and add them underneath the result (so that they effectively become the “children” of the top-level entry) using the prefix “ACHIEVE”
4. Taking each achievement in turn, decide what chunks of “doing” and “learning” work are required to make the achievement happen and add them as children, this time using the prefixes “DO” and “LEARN”

Example: The Perfect Pancake Playbook

The Perfect Pancake Playbook helps novice cooks to make delicious and expertly cooked pancakes so that they can celebrate Pancake Day without the usual doughy disasters.

• RESULT: Perfect Pancakes
  • ACHIEVE: Make the perfect batter
    • LEARN: The ingredients you need for pancake batter
    • DO: Gather your ingredients and kitchen equipment
    • DO: Measure out the ingredients and mix your batter
  • ACHIEVE: Cook the pancakes to perfection
    • LEARN: The best type of pan for cooking pancakes
    • LEARN: How much oil and batter to use for each pancake
    • DO: Add oil to a frying pan and heat
    • DO: Add batter and cook one side
    • LEARN: How to flip a pancake
    • DO: Flip the pancake and cook the other side
  • ACHIEVE: Add the fillings and serve!
    • LEARN: Popular pancake fillings
    • DO: Add your chosen filling
    • DO: Fold the pancake and serve!

Note: You can also explore this cascade interactively inside Workflowy here.

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💡 Tips

• When filling in the individual chunks of work under each achievement, trying to focus on the “doing” work first, then backfill any learning which has to happen to make the doing possible.
• Since we’re mapping commonplace activities to gain experience building cascades, don’t worry if your LEARN tasks seem a little basic. Just imagine your imaginary students are oddly unfamiliar with the activity.

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🛠️ Resources

Here’s a tutorial video showing you how to use Workflowy, my favourite tool for creating your course cascade.