A mind-mapping, information visualization, and file management program called The Brain has proven to be a usefully flexible platform for tracking results-based strategic design. See an example here (embedded below) of a Strategic Design Brain that was started in 2017-18 and revised in 2018-19. For confidentiality reasons, the actual university is not named; “D-Sein University” is fictional. The details have been slightly simplified from their original versions, but these are all real results of a results-based strategic design process.
Click on “How to use this app” for instructions on how to navigate within this Brain. Units of information are called “thoughts,” and they can be linked either hierarchically or laterally. This is useful because items in a strategic design don’t necessarily work in hierarchical fashion: for example, a particular strategy can serve more than one strategic result. Each thought can have one type–in this case they are classified according to their function in the design (“high level result,” “strategic result,” “strategy,” “tactic,” “prototype,” or “success measure”). Each thought can have multiple tags, which can include the person responsible, date revised, failure or success, fundraising opportunities or anything else that you want to use to organize a number of pieces of the design. The pins at the top of the screen are tags and types that you want to access often. A brain can be frozen in time and archived, or it can be updated on an ongoing basis with changes noted by date. The pane on the right can contain notes, documents, and links (such as unit designs or external sources relevant to the design piece), so everything related to strategic design can be visible in one place.
A read-only web version of a Brain (which is what you see here) can be distributed throughout the campus, while one person or a small team can have access to an editable version.