Lets look at an example;

Suppose we go back to that development investment decision that we mentioned above.

There may be some hard facts;

• Absenteeism is rising
• Customer satisfaction is declining
• Profitability is down
• Staff turnover is up
• Sickness levels are rising

• Sales targets are not being met

and there may be some soft aspects;

• We feel we are lagging in staff development
• We have difficulty in relating to our management colleagues
• We all seem to be working long hours
• It is hard to take all our annual leave
• Meetings seem to take up far too much time
• Many meetings seem to be a waste of time

When we put these together we may have a map that looks like this;

With such a map we can explore what changes we need to make and how we need to proceed to get the results we seek.

Without the means of expressing this to our colleagues (or even to ourselves) we may make a decision based on little more than guesswork. As we express such patterns and share them we can begin a process of exploration and design that develops a shared strategy for change. In doing so we spread the capacity to make good decisions in such fuzzy areas and also improve the quality of those decisions by including more minds in the process. What is happening here is that we are developing a way of moving up the hierarchy, changing information into knowledge – actually creating meaning through our interactions.

[ Up ] [ Patterns in the mind ] [ Externalising Patterns of Thought ] [ Mapping ideas ] [ Making meaning ] [ Example ]

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Last modified: Tuesday, 09 September 2003.