Lead by Visual Example: Concept Mapping 101

First in a series of issues about tools I use to helps teams understand complexity and communicate better. Hi, I'm Steve, content strategist for agencies and brands that create digital products (previous work for Amazon, Box, MetLife, Work & Co, many more). This post contains a Figma template for designing concept diagrams, enjoy!

A picture, it's been said, is worth a thousand words.

Or, I might add: a thousand back-and-forth DMs.

Or a thousand frustrating zooms.

Or a thousand daily scrums spent talking past each other.

When you find yourself in those situations—when your team is talking in circles, or you're confusing each other with vague hand-wavy gestures and poorly defined corpspeak—what you need is a concept diagram.

Which is, simply, a visual representation of a thing.

That thing can be an idea.

That thing can be a system.

It can show anything from how a car engine works, to the composition of a financial product, to the constituent parts of an app.

In other words: Anything where there are things (concepts, ideas, systems) that are related to each other.

Like this:

Or like this:

Recently, I finished a two-month engagement as the lead content strategist for a Brooklyn product design agency.

Our job on this project was to re-design the web site of a complex B2B services company.

In this case, the client created and sold a variety of products that were difficult to categorize. In order to redesign the container for that content, we needed to first understand the content itself. As in: What is it? Who is it for? How does it work? Why does it work that way?

My job as the content strategist was to make sense of the client's content. And so, to answer those questions, I created concept diagrams.

The forgotten tool for communicating complex ideas

Concept diagrams are something of a forgotten tool. I think there are two reasons for that.

First, concept diagrams may have gotten confused with mind maps—which they most definitely are not. A concept diagram is used to represent tacit knowledge, like an existing theory or concept. The ideas in a concept map show topics with cross-linking and multiple relationships, and they're used to communicate how something works to an external audience. A mind map, on the other hand, is used to generate a set of ideas for internal discussion.

In other words: Mind maps are usefully messy. Concept diagrams are usefully precise.

Second, in most companies, the role of concepting tends to be either precise and technical (systems architecture, data mapping, etc), or imprecise and amateur—as is the case with most shoddy PowerPointilism, where the creator seemingly wants to persuade the audience that "this is complicated" rather than take the time to explain "here's how to understand this complexity".

To take one infamous example:

When and how to use a concept diagram

Concept diagrams simplify complex relationships.

Importantly, they visualize relationships when those relationships are not hierarchical.

For example, a concept diagram is not:

• an org chart—org charts represent a hierarchy by role.
• a site map—site maps represent hierarchy by content type.
• a user journey—user journeys show hierarchy by role, time, and activity.

Rather, a concept diagram reveals a variety of conceptual relationships, where those concepts interlink and cross-reference each other.

Like this:

You can make concept diagrams for anything.

For example, a concept diagram can help you:

• Collect business requirements
• Learn a client’s language
• Map an internal language and systems usage (I am personally on team Put a Concept Diagram of How Work Actually Flows in Your Company inside every onboarding package)
• Identify dependencies
• Model flows like inventory or cash

Anybody can create a diagram that represents these topics. All you need is to be curious about how concepts relate to each other, and interested in communicating those relationships—whether to yourself, or to your team.

A template for making concept diagrams

If you’d like to get your hands dirty, here’s a figjam that contains everything you need to know to build a concept diagram.

If you or your team need help understanding how complex concepts in an information space relate, give me a shout. I’d love to help out.

In the meantime, goodbye, good luck, have fun diagramming the castle.