Project 52: Week 24 (5/6/24)

An opening reflection and invitation.

Grivas and Puccio write:

“The faster things change, many experts say, the stronger your creative thinking and problem-solving skills must be.? To successfully compete in the twenty-first century, leaders are calling for increased training in creative problem solving everywhere from boardrooms to elementary classrooms.”

~ From The Innovative Team and FourSight

"Our artwork can be a springboard to share glimpses of the gospel we profess." ~ Eden Champagne

We are delighted to continue with a year-long offering as part of the Career Services Initiatives. ~ Gerald Doyle

Project 52: Week 24 (5/6/24)

Welcome to Personal maps

In our Tri Cosain work, expressing our history, challenges, opportunities, and visions in visual terms can be remarkably liberating and insightful.

For this reason, we often invite our participants to make personal “maps.”? These maps may take many forms, but one form we like to encourage is a large sheet of paper, like flip chart paper, on which we can draw or diagram aspects of our lives that matter to us.*

• [Doyle's personal note: For me, creating personal "maps" -- I often use crayons -- has the effect of slowing me down amidst the rapid pace of change (and everything else that might tend to overwhelm me). Slowing down allows me to be present to myself -- and others. To be.]

When we illustrate ideas in visual or symbolic form, insights often arise that don’t come as naturally when we only talk or write about those ideas in words.

For map-making, we invite three stages of the work.

• Reflection - consideration of the topic at hand, giving uninterrupted space and time for impressions to arise, including emotional, intuitive, embodied, and rational ones.
• Making - creating the map.? We invite people to be creative and unrestrained, to let images and pictures come and record them freely.
• Sharing - sharing the map with others, explaining its significance, and experiencing the impact of others' reception of our ideas. The sharing audience should be trusted, perhaps including mentors, friends, members of our MasterMind group (see separate article), or dialogue partners in Conversations of Inquiry .? The role of sharing partners is not to critique or improve but to understand and appreciate, significantly to help the map-maker deepen their understanding of their map and the experiences it represents.

A map-making session can take varying amounts of time according to the context, but as a starting point, we usually suggest 10-20 minutes of reflection, 15-20 minutes to draw, and 20-30 minutes to share.

Map-making in this way is not a drawing contest. “Skill” in drawing or graphic design is not required. The map must be our expression, true to ourselves, our history, and our situation. “It is impossible to do this wrong,” as our teachers in this work* have often said to us.

Some possible applications of map-making include

• Origin maps - drawing out our journey to the present day.? How did we get to the place we are today? What is a visual representation of our journey?
• Influence maps - related to origin maps; what were the key influences that made us the person we are today - people, experiences, ideas, events?
• Identity maps - how do I represent pictorially the person I am today?
• Situation maps - how might I represent a particular situation, conflict, challenge, or opportunity I am facing today, including the people, forces, and influences that make up the current system with which I am engaged?
• Inspiration maps - how might I visually represent what inspires me today?
• Vision maps - how might I visually represent my vision of the future, in my career or different aspects of life, for myself, those with whom I am in a relationship, communities, ecosystems, and the world?
• Dialogue maps can illustrate or illuminate a dialogue, such as a Conversation of Inquiry. It can be insightful and stimulating for a pair or a small group to make a map together, perhaps collaborating on defining a situation map or creating a shared vision in a particular context.

Reflecting on Tri Cosain's career work, you can see how doing some map-making, particularly sharing maps, can help elicit, illuminate, or clarify the Inspiration and Vision stages of our career roadmap, among others. If you need more clarity or direction, map-making can often get ideas or insights flowing.

Like usual with Tri Cosain work, we invite you to keep your creative work product; here are your maps for future reference and reflection. You can keep your maps in physical form or record them as images in digital files.

As always, I'm ready to support and accompany you on your map-making journeys. With my help or that of others, you can facilitate individual or group map-making and sharing sessions.

I'm sharing an example of a map we have made in similar contexts. We share only our maps not because they are better (or worse) than others but to preserve the confidentiality of the maps others have shared.

*Our original source of inspiration for map-making is the “Temenos” work authored by expert coach and change agent Siraj Sirajuddin, presented to us most directly by Olaf Lewitz and Christine Neidhardt.? We wish to pay tribute and give credit here to the inspired work of Siraj, Olaf, and Christine.

Monday, 6 May 2024

Gerald Doyle,

P.S. Click here to read Project 52: Week 23 (Welcome to Ikigai)

Closing inspiration (with gratitude to good friends and colleagues)

"You deserve to love what you do and be loved for what you do." ~ Olaf Lewitz

"Do it! We all deserve a life living our talents, experiencing love, joy, connection and growth. These are the spaces we want to experience." ~ Christine Neidhardt

"People don't resist change; they resist being changed!" Siraj Sirajuddin , Temenos+Agility

Additional Resources:

Creativity as a Life Skill: Gerard Puccio at TEDxGramercy

The Innovative Team: Unleashing Creative… by Chris Grivas · Audiobook preview

Tri Cosain materials are developed with my colleague and friend of 40+ years, Scott Downs.

Copyright Scott Downs and Gerald Doyle, 2023/24

Residing in Chicago, Gerald Doyle provides ministry placement research and consulting for Career Services at the Catholic Theological Union ( Herbert Quinde and Christina Zaker ), as well as career services and job search coaching to students, families, and community members at Wolcott College Preparatory High School ( Miriam Pike , Kelly Ramos ) and through the The Tyree Institute .

He advises several tech companies, including Upkey ( Amir Badr ) and GetSet Learning ( Eva Prokop ); he has also joined TSI - Transforming Solutions, Inc. ( Dan Feely )in their Higher Education and Career Services practice.

Scott? Downs, a former investment banker, management consultant, and entrepreneur, now works as an Agile coach, seeking to call forward great leaders and great organizations based on great cultures. He is a consultant with Expleo Group and is an associate of the TrustTemenos Leadership Academy.

Scott and Gerald are co-founders of Tri Cosain, a practice that weaves inspiration, learning, and career for leadership in life and work. Gerald and Scott co-authored 9 Questions for Leadership in Life and Work, Conversations of Inquiry, and several other volumes in the Tri Cosain series. Their work embraces equity, inclusion, diversity, and well-being as foundations for personal leadership.