Air Sandwich

An Air Sandwich (also known as the Underpants Gnomes Plan) is a plan that has high-level objectives and low-level implementation details, but no good way to track progress or evaluate if the implementation details are contributing to the objectives.

The Air Sandwich metaphor comes from Nilofer Merchant’s book The New How.

An Air Sandwich is a strategy that has clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle […] When a company has an Air Sandwich, the most valuable details and decisions that enable a strategy to succeed are left out of the strategy.

– Nilofer Merchant

Underpants Gnomes Plan

In “Gnomes”, the 17th episode of the second season of the animated TV series South Park, a group of gnomes sneak into people’s houses and steal their underpants. Pressured to explain why they are doing that, the gnomes always repeat that phase 1 of their master-plan is to collect the underpants, without being able to answer any questions about phase 2, yet insisting that phase 3 is “profit”.

Underpants Gnomes Plan
Underpants Gnomes Plan

The plan, along with the image of the gnomes presenting it, became a popular meme to mock bad business strategies. In effect, the Underpants Gnomes Plan is an air-sandwich, as the gnomes collecting underpants have no idea how that leads to profit.

Air sandwich plans in product delivery

In product delivery, a common example of an air sandwich is a plan that contains a bunch of features and delivery tasks under the assumption that they will lead to increased profit or market-share, but no concrete way of validating those assumptions. Even if such assumptions exist (which is rare), they are not communicated with delivery team members.

Another typical example is what Anthony Ulwick calls “customer-driven paradigm” in What Customers Want, where a delivery team is effectively just taking orders from business stakeholders or customers and delivering what people asked for, rather than focusing on outcomes that the customers need to achieve.

Effectively, such plans miss one half of the value exchange loop. One side of the air sandwich is the expectation of how the delivery organization will capture value from the market, the other is a set of outputs for the delivery team, but the assumptions about how the value will be delivered to the market are missing.

How to avoid an Air Sandwich

Anthony Ulwick suggests that people “entrenched in the customer-driven paradigm” traditionally test solutions or features instead of jobs, outcomes and constraints when conducting research. A good way of avoiding the air sandwich plans is to focus on testing outcomes (whether customers are doing the jobs they want to perform) instead of evaluating progress by measuring outputs (task completion by the delivery team).

The 4 Disciplines of Execution model explicitly requires stating both the wildly important goal and the leading indicators for achieving that goal, with the suggestion to formulate such indicators as behaviour changes. This helps to avoid the air sandwich as the behaviour changes help track short-term customer outcomes.

In the GIST model, each idea needs to be backed up by a pair of top-level metrics, one tracking the progress towards the business goal and the other tracking the delivery of value to the market. The second metric (“North Star Metric”) helps to avoid the air sandwich by directly communicating assumptions about the value delivered to users, and helps to track progress for that delivery.

Impact Mapping requires explicitly stating both the key milestone business goals and the impacts on individual actors, connecting them to deliverables in a hierarchy. That helps to avoid an air sandwich because the middle of the impact map (actor and impact) contain assumptions about short term value delivery to users or customers.

Learn more about the Air Sandwich

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