Cense

Innovation to Impact

Mind Maps For Complex Projects

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A mind map is a powerful, simple organizing tool that features a lot of information on a single page. We use mind maps and other visual tools to communicate relationships between ideas, people, project components and topics with our clients and partners. We present a short introduction to how and why you might want to use mind maps in your work.

A mind map is a visual representation of a project that links actors and actions together. This article focuses on using mind maps, not creating them.

Below is an example from software provider Lucidspark (which is a tool for creating mindmaps) that illustrates what a mind map is and how it can connect ideas and actions together.

Visualizing our Relationships

A search of Google (or any other search engine) will find thousands of visual examples of what a mind map is. There are few ‘essentials’ for mind mapping, which is among its most attractive features.

A complex project is one where there are many things happening at the same time, at different time scales, and involving many interdependencies and actors. That’s just a way of saying: there’s a lot going on.

It doesn’t matter how you organize your mind map only that it is useful. That means it provides information that you can make decisions with and act on. If it does that, it’s a good mind map.

Once we have that in place, the mind map allows us to examine the relationships between the nodes and topics to assess their fit. The expression ‘getting on the same page‘ reflects an ability for all of those looking at the document to have a similar representation of what’s on that page. The mind map allows us to verify relationships between entities, determine gaps or inaccuracies, and explore different ways of connecting things together.

There may not be a single ‘master’ map that is better than all, but there may be a map that is more useful than others.

How to Use Mind Maps

When we use this with clients and partners on projects we aim for the following:

  • To examine the assumptions involved in the project
  • To explore alternative relationships of fit and see if the map is the best representation of what we are looking at
  • To guide the project and keep the topics on track
  • To provide a building block for connecting ideas together (in ways that weren’t done previously)
  • To map out a system of relationships
  • To use colour and visuals to surface feelings, thoughts, and other emotional aspects of the project that might influence the strategy or outcomes

By creating a visual representation we see the whole project and the relationship context. Relationships are the key in any complex system. When we visualize these relationships it allows us to see how the actions in one relationship can affect others. Visual maps can aid us in anticipating possible effects.

(Note: We don’t use the term ‘unintended effects’ – just effects because in complex systems it’s too hard to predict cause and effect with any degree of accuracy).

We continually refer back to our maps to help ensure we are accounting for all relationships of importance throughout the project and not just those that have the most amount of activity within them. It’s incredibly difficult to track this in our heads or in something like a spreadsheet or text document.

Mind maps can be great tools to visualize a lot of information and get you and your collaborators on the same page when it comes to understanding what is going on in a complex system and program. Try it out — they are easy to create and simple to use.

If you want to use this approach to visualizing your programs and using this to help you innovate, contact us – we’d love to hear from you.

Systems Mapping Cautions

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A systems map is a useful means of visualizing connections between ideas, actors, institutions, and activities. Systems maps can be designed using many different conventions and methods, but the basics are the same. The point of mapping systems is to get a lot of information on a single page.

System maps can help generate insight into patterns that influence behaviour and outcomes. In short: they help us see things better.

A system map is also a potential trap. Maps can lead us into false beliefs about the subject of systems and what the real system is. It’s much like the Buddhist phrase about the finger pointing to the moon: we confuse the system map for the system itself.

Luke Craven, a designer and systems consultant, has remarked on the paradoxes found in system mapping. Among these paradoxes are the tendency toward generating a single, over-arching map. This article reminds us of many conventions we recommend in using system maps.

System Map Suggestions

  1. Diversity in Form. Systems Thinking has many different schools of thought and systems mapping often follows conventions generated from these schools. These forms or conventions are the visual languages of the system. For example, System Dynamics emphasizes causal loops and stocks-and-flows. Social Networks use nodes and links to represent a system.
  2. Awareness of Form. Merging forms together can be useful but must be done mindfully. When we deviate from a convention, we violate certain rules (while creating opportunities). A systems mapper needs to be aware of what is lost and gained when using multiple visual forms. Hybrid maps require coherence to be useful.
  3. Volume. Multiple maps using multiple forms can generate insights that can’t be found when using a singular approach. It’s important to create the time and space to generate multiple maps. Too often we find organizations fail to do this.
  4. Validation. Every map reflects the map-maker. Thus, the more map-makers involved the more the map reflects the diversity of the system and different realities. Show your maps – in any form – to others. Feedback is fuel for system diagrams.
  5. Continuation. A system map’s value changes over time. It’s important to recognize that as the context changes, so does the map’s utility. We recommend updating and revisiting a map over the life of the project.

Map-making can be a powerful way to learn, explore, and illuminate relationships and patterns in a system. It is because maps are so powerful that we must be cautious in making them.

Good map-making requires thoughtful consideration to what a map is and how it is to be used. When you have done this, you have a remarkable pathway for shaping change.

If you want to make system maps and see what they can do for your organization, contact us. We will help you chart a path toward insight and impact.

Perspective Taking: The Power of Ten

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Great innovators often see problems or solutions that others miss. This is as much about perception as it is anything else.

To illustrate the power of perception, consider the famous perceptual illusion below which profiles a young girl and an old woman (or “wife” and “mother in law”). The image, which dates back to 1888, shows how the same image can produce two very different stories about the subject matter.

There’s a way to create the same effect by looking at a situation through the lens of time. The Power of Ten is a perceptual forecasting and innovative technique that can help you can perspective on a situation, a product, or service by looking at the effects in layers, each offering a new possibility.

How to do it

The Power of Ten technique is simple. Take the current situation, topic, product, or service and forecast what might happen in ten minutes from now, ten hours, ten days, ten weeks, ten months, and ten years.

In some cases, you’ll find little effect or difference between the two and in others the differences are dramatic.

Consider waiting times for a service call. In that case, ten minutes might be a long time and ten hours is insufferable. If you are on a waitlist for an elective surgery, ten days might be incredibly fast, ten weeks reasonable, and ten months is anxiety producing.

What about a particular situation? Consider the dynamic situation that unfolded with the COVID-19 pandemic and policies that affected how and where we work. Time perception changed, value changed (e.g., Internet access), and certain things like parks, groceries, restaurants and bars, and video conference tools all changed their value in a matter of days, weeks, and months in different ways.

The Power of Ten activity is designed for you to forecast and spend some time thinking about what will something look like, feel like, interact with, and impact the world at each of these different scales.

This simple exercise will allow you to see constraints, opportunities, effects, and interactions that are either not present or imperceptible at one scale at other scales. This allows you to see connections between things that were not perceived before.

This is best done as a group and can be performed in a short time as a facilitated activity or at a distance.

If you want to see possible futures using this approach and want help, contact us. We can help you multiply your perspective by a power of ten.

Note: This exercise draws inspiration for a video first produced in the 1970s by the legendary design partnership of Charles and Rey Eames for IBM.

The Personal Inventory Method

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What’s important to you? It might sound simple, but when we engage in service design the way we ask that question will shape the answers we get.

Keeping with a design-inspired ethos of ‘show, don’t tell’ the Personal Inventory method is a simple means to answer that question of importance for people.

The method is simple, flexible, and can be used in physical, digital, or hybrid contexts so it’s suited to a variety of situations where we might seek to understand the values and beliefs of an audience or particular service user. The Personal Inventory method is a means for participants to gather and catalogue artifacts and evidence of their activities that help answer the question they are posted about what is important to them in a particular context.

Setting Up

The Personal Inventory is shaped around a specific question tied to importance and value within a context. While it can be helpful to ask the question generally, most often we want to focus attention on a particular topic. For example, if we are seeking to design a system that supports patients in navigating their healthcare, we might ask a question: What is important to you about your healthcare experience? Or, What is important to you when being cared for?

The next step is to provide a context for data gathering and presentation. For those who are using digital tools, it might be worth using a platform that is easy to navigate such as a Pinterest board, a shared Google Photos or Flickr folder, or a more sophisticated, but highly modifiable tool like Milannote. The tool should be something that your participants feel comfortable with and this might require some initial training and support.

For using a physical media, a simple scrapbook or posterboard will do.

Gathering, Sharing, and Learning

Provide a timeline for the project that is reasonable and have individuals capture artifacts that represent or illustrate what is important to them. This might include original photos or videos, representative images from the Internet or magazines, even sound recordings. For physical-based projects, this could also including bringing in physical items (or photos of them).

The guidance for the participants is recommended to be light so that individuals aren’t too directed toward a particular ‘idea’ and influenced to give what they think the researcher wants.

Once gathered, the process of ‘show and tell’ can be illuminating for everyone involved. This can be done as part of an individual interview/conversation or as part of a group (with permission from all participants) to allow everyone to speak to what they are sharing. Sometimes items might have a clear explicit meaning and an implicit meaning. The design team has an opportunity to converse with participants and ask further questions to help understand values, behaviours, and memories.

Outcomes

The Personal Inventory method is a creative, visual means to engage participants in research and elicit knowledge about values-in-practice. The opportunities to inquire about things in context and in relation to the problem domain that we are design for is high and it allows individuals to speak to their experience freely in a non-technical way. This method works well for people of various literacy levels and means and can produce insights into what both current designs do (and don’t) and what future designs might consider.

This is a simple method to use. If you want or need help designing your project and using this, reach out and contact us. This is what we do.

Visual Thinking

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Service and product design involves creating something, envisioning it’s use, consideration of its effects, and hopefully seeing it achieve a goal. When we are creating or planning our project we need to consider all of that on top of the many ideas we have about what that product or service ought to involve. That is a lot to hold in our heads at one time.

This is why designers often rely on visual thinking and communication to help illustrate these ideas as systems. The benefits of this approach are many and include:

  • Providing a way to communicate your thoughts in multiple dimensions. Time, space, sequence, and effects are all different considerations for service design and visualizing that allows us to see these all in one space. Our language is linear, visualizing allows for linear and non-linear effects.
  • It creates a space for everyone to participate. Whether you are a skilled visual communicator or someone who hasn’t drawn anything by hand in 20 years, nearly everyone can draw. Visual thinking tools can provide a means to literally get people working on the same page. Simple methods like the Sketch Map are easy to employ and get everyone sharing ideas together.
  • Visual language – such as that illustrated by XPlane in their useful guide to visual thinking transcends spoken words and allows us to communicate even when our shared spoken language isn’t strong.
  • Visual thinking allows us to use metaphors, express complex emotions, and connect physical and emotional things together during a service journey in a way that is difficult to convey through oral or written language.
  • Visuals provide an artifact that can be interrogated, explored, and reviewed from many different perspectives allowing people to point to objects, relationships, and structures and ask about their purpose, illustration, and meaning without requiring much technical understanding of the problem-domain (allowing outside and alternative perspectives to meaningfully contribute).
  • It also provides a means to generate a shared understanding of the system boundaries, components, and purposes that guide your development of the service. It gets people on the same page metaphorically and literally.

Visual communicator Angelika Skotnicka provides a strong case for why we want to consider visual thinking and how it is done from the perspective of graphic recording.

Consider ways to bring in visual thinking to your project planning, service design, evaluation, and strategy development. It is low-risk, high-reward and is an engaging, low-cost, and often enjoyable way to generate enormous insight quickly and effectively.

Try it Out: A Tool

One of the best, low-friction tools to help you get your teams up and running is Milanote, which can allow you to brainstorm, plan, and design strategies using a web-based interface that allows you and your team to see your ideas on a canvas that can be edited, shared or adapted from a template.

Using tools like this can be a great way to practice visual thinking and build some of that ‘design muscle’ that we all have, but might not realize it.

Want to learn more about how to apply visual thinking to your work? Contact us and we can help you bring your ideas to light visually and more.