The MAPPS Assessment Framework: See the Whole Situation Before You Pick a Path

An issue demanding your attention is rarely the whole situation.

MAPPS provides a structured way to consider the people, purpose, conditions, experience, and outside forces that may shape what you decide.

A process change may look like an efficiency question until you consider the teams and systems affected by it. A promising opportunity may look different once you examine what pursuing it would require you to give up. The immediate issue is important, but it is only one part of the assessment.

MAPPS is an easy-to-remember mnemonic that stands for:

• Moons
• Asteroids
• Your Planet
• Other Planets
• Your Sun

MAPPS is designed as a memory device. While you may not always assess a situation in the exact order of Moons, Asteroids, Planet, Planets, and Sun, the acronym provides an easy way to remember the five perspectives that make up the framework.

MAPPS provides a simple way to widen your perspective before taking action. Not every decision needs (or can sustain) lengthy assessment, however:

The beauty of the MAPPS framework is it can be used in as little as 15 minutes or extended out for weeks of research.

Together, the MAPPS elements create a structured way to assess a situation before deciding what to do next.

You are not simply assessing a moment. You are assessing the system surrounding that moment.

Rather than viewing a decision as an isolated event, MAPPS encourages you to view it as a planet within a larger solar system. When you do, context becomes clearer, risks become more visible, and better decisions often follow.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Imagine your company offers a service that isn't particularly profitable and relatively few customers use. Someone suggests eliminating it.

The initial assessment seems straightforward:
“We’re putting resources into something that doesn’t make much money. We should stop offering it.”

Maybe that's exactly what you should do. But MAPPS asks you to widen the view before deciding.

The thing demanding your attention isn't necessarily the only thing that deserves your attention.

Now, let’s take a deeper look at how each element of MAPPS works.

Start With Your Planet

Your Planet is whatever you're trying to understand.

It could be a decision. A problem. An opportunity. A relationship. A project. A change you're considering. A situation that doesn't quite make sense yet.

Before assessing anything else, make sure you've accurately identified it. This sounds obvious, but it often isn't.

Stay with the service example from above. Before deciding whether to eliminate it, define the Planet carefully. You could frame the question as:
“Should we eliminate this unprofitable service?”

But that framing already assumes profitability is the main measure that matters — and that eliminating the service is the decision to evaluate.

A better Planet might be: 
“What role does this service play in our business, and does that role justify continuing it?”

Now the assessment has room to reveal more. The service may be weak on its own economics but valuable because it retains important customers, supports another offering, creates a path to larger work, or serves a strategic purpose. Or the broader view may confirm that it no longer earns its place.

Before you assess a situation, make sure you're assessing the right situation.

How you define your Planet determines what you are going to look for.

Going Deeper on Your Planet

Many situations benefit from a closer look. That’s where the Terrain, Soil, Winds, and Tides of your Planet come into play:

• Terrain: How difficult is this to navigate? Is the situation relatively straightforward or unusually complex? What obstacles stand between where you are and where you are trying to go?
• Soil: What conditions already exist? Is the environment ready for what you are considering? What else is competing for attention, resources or room to grow?
• Winds: What appears to be changing? What trends, signals or shifts are beginning to emerge?
• Tides: What changes can you already anticipate? What cycles or predictable movements are already underway?

In our unprofitable service example, Terrain might include the operational difficulty of changing or winding down the service. Soil might include whether the organization is ready to replace it with something better or if the environment is just beginning to become fertile for the service. 

The distinction between Winds and Tides matters. Customers beginning to ask for the service in a different way might be a Wind — an emerging signal whose direction is not yet certain. A contract renewal cycle that predictably changes demand every year might be a Tide — a change you can reasonably anticipate.

Find Your Moons

In MAPPS, a Planet never exists by itself. There are people, relationships, systems, processes and outcomes orbiting whatever you are assessing. These are your Moons.

Return to the service you're considering eliminating. If you look only at the service itself, the assessment may still seem simple: it costs more to support than it returns directly.

Now look for the Moons. Which customers rely on it? Does Sales use it to support larger relationships? Does it feed work into another offering? Which employees or processes are tied to it? What happens elsewhere if the service disappears?

You may still eliminate the service. But now you can account for what else might change when you do.

A decision rarely affects only the thing you're deciding about.

Know Your Sun

Every solar system has a center. Your Sun is the guiding principle your assessment should revolve around. It might be a purpose, a value, a desired outcome, a long-term objective or simply the thing that matters most in this particular situation.

This becomes especially important when several reasonable considerations compete for your attention.

In our service example, several reasonable priorities could compete for attention. Profitability matters. Customer retention matters. Strategic focus matters. Capacity matters. The team matters.

Your Sun asks a different question:
“What should this decision ultimately serve?”

Maybe the Sun is improving profitability. Maybe it's protecting high-value customer relationships. Maybe it's simplifying the business so the team can focus on the work with the greatest long-term potential.

The same facts can look different depending on what you're trying to accomplish. 

Your Sun reminds you what the decision is supposed to serve.

Look for Other Planets

You may have never evaluated this exact service before. But you may have made a similar choice about another offering, product, client type, location or internal capability. Your competitors might have shuttered (or expanded) a similar service. There are also likely parallels in wildly different industries with wildly different products.

Those are your Other Planets: comparable situations that can provide useful experience, patterns and lessons.

• Where have I seen something similar?
• What happened?
• What worked?
• What didn’t?
• What are patterns I can learn from?

Other Planets aren't precedents you have to follow. But they can provide insights

Watch for Asteroids

Not everything that could affect the service is already part of your company or customer relationships.

Competitors may change their offerings. Customer expectations may shift. New technology may make the service easier to deliver — or obsolete. Regulations or economic conditions may alter demand. These are your Asteroids.

The temptation is to pay attention to all of them. Don't.

Something happening outside your system matters only to the extent that it can meaningfully affect what your Planet. Consider four levels of Asteroids:

• Level 1: Won't hit your planet. Ignore it.
• Level 2: A distraction, but no impact. A shooting star. Ignore it.
• Level 3: Will break through and cause some impact. Understand its impact and how you’ll respond.
• Level 4: Planet-changers with extreme, life-changing impact. These are rare. Make sure it’s not actually a Level 3. If truly Level 4, know how you will survive.

Suppose a competitor announces that it is dropping a similar service. That might look like validation that you should do the same. Or it could create an opening for you. A new technology might dramatically lower the cost of providing the service. A broader market trend might sound important while having almost no effect on your customers.

But the useful question isn't simply: "Is this a big deal?" It's: "How big a deal is this for my Planet?" Sometimes the answer is: "not very."

Something can be a big deal without being a big deal for your Planet.

Try MAPPS Right Now

Choose something important enough that you're not entirely sure what to do. It could be a decision you're considering, a problem you're trying to solve, an opportunity you're evaluating or a situation you're trying to understand.

Or try this everyday example:
What should be for dinner tonight?

You may reach exactly the same conclusion you would have reached before. That is fine.

The purpose of MAPPS isn't to make every decision different. And it isn't to account for every possible variable.

It's to make sure you understand enough of the situation before deciding what to do about it. Because the quality of a decision is often limited by the quality of the assessment that comes before it.

Don't just assess the moment in front of you. Assess the systems surrounding it.