Mapping Out What's Next For You

Perspective is everything when you’re making a big change. You’re starting a new chapter here, and you need to be open to new possibilities and options. By altering your perspective just a little, you may find yourself with a solution to an “unsolvable” problem, or you may discover a more efficient way to do things. You can see something you’ve gone over a hundred times in a new light by writing about it, visualizing it, and talking it out with your colleagues and friends.

This video is from a Facebook Live Event with our partner FAReverse on September 6, 2020.

Because we are visual people, mapping out the moving components, various entities and their relationships to each other has proven to be an insightful bird’s eye view of what we’re doing. So much of the time we are in the middle of it all and don’t see the interconnectedness of the pieces.

There are a few approaches to this practice sometimes known as “mind-mapping.” Mind-mapping involves creating a diagram of your project or plan, and shows a hierarchical representation of all its parts. It is centered on a single concept, with major ideas and dependencies branching out from there. Those ideas can be represented with images, words, and symbols. Practitioners encourage you to move quickly. It’s quantity over quality foregoing organization and criticism for now.

Given the affinity of tech folks to make associations this way, there have been software tools to do this around for a long time. For a low-tech approach we usually just grab some index cards or post-its and affix them to the nearest wall. They do tend to move around, plus the physical act of writing and placing them is helpful to the visualization process.

A similar approach can be used for drilling into a specific project. Where does it fit in the higher level map? What are the connecting points? What is an obstruction? The act of mapping it helps you clarify and prioritize.