Pivotal Events

In EventStorming, Pivotal Events act as splitters between distinct phases of the business flow.

They are instrumental in building a structure for the many narrative of a business flow, and provide information that later may be useful in decomposing the system.

Detecting Pivotal Events

During the enforce the timeline step of a Big Picture EventStorming, we might ask the audience for common events that look like good splitters between different phases.

We might pick the key moments of the overarching business transaction, like Contract Signed, Payment Received, Item Delivered, etc.

The number of duplicate sticky notes might also provide insights. Different workshop participants tend to converge on the same events.
The precise wording may be different (and interesting to investigate), but a cluster with compatible interpretations is probably signalling an event on event on a responsibility boundary.

Marking Pivotal Events

During in-person workshops, we usually highlight Pivotal Events with a paper tape. This allows replacing and rearranging, if new insights pop up during the discussion.

In online workshops, we use larger events and bold font to differentiate pivotal events from the standard ones.

Once the first Pivotal Events are highlighted, usually we try to rearrange all the other events to be coherent with the new dominant narrative.

Refining Pivotal Events

The original detection phase is fast, meaning that we are trading precision for plausibility. We need to get into a workable structure quickly, and the initial candidate Pivotal Events may require a few rearrangements or rewritings before approval.

Don’t expect to finish the workshop with the same Pivotal Events you selected in the kick-off stages.

Consequences

1. Pivotal Events are very likely to mark boundaries between Bounded Contexts.
2. Pivotal Events are good candidates to become Public Events, part of an Event-Driven Published Language ( see Context Mapping) between the different Bounded Contexts in a system.