Why Consultants Should Use Concept Maps
Concept Maps help to align people
Do you want to decrease the time to be productive in a new engagement by roughly a week? If you are a consultant, following this approach will immediately convince your client of your ability to help them.
Have you ever needed help with the meaning of emergent new terms? I had such a term in my career. The simple term “chassis” was taken from a suitable car metaphor. It made sense immediately. But when I used the below method to align people, it turned out that people took very different understandings from it. For some, it became the whole software ecosystem; for others, it was an abstraction layer. It wasn’t clear that people had a very different understanding of the same term. It wasn’t clear as everyone translated the term chassis into their mental interpretation. Discussions on the meaning were only hitting minor side effects and never hitting the problem’s core, as everyone assumed the other side would interpret it the same way. At the same time, any alignment delay would have delayed the whole project.
So, what did I do? I created a Concept Map. You didn’t come across a Concept Map before? It’s a simple visual notation that allows defining terms (“concepts”) via their relationships to each other. It’s so simple that everyone understands it within a minute or two and can read it. Creating one is simple, but most haven’t tried to create diagrams. But if you ever did a Mind Map, you can create a Concept Map! So, how does it work? You put concepts in boxes and create lines (“edges”) between them. On the lines, you write a verb, sometimes with prepositions or similar. The result looks like below.
In this drawing are three simple concept maps, with two concepts and one relationship each. Each connection can be read out: “Concept A relates to Concept B”, “[a] dog is a mammal”. “[The] library card is needed to borrow library books”. The beauty is that it puts concepts in a falsifiable statement about the two. For example, nowadays, most libraries allow different ways of identification (authentication) and the library card is no longer needed. So, once you talk to the right person and review the Concept Map with that person, s/he will correct you to change that part about a library concept map to look something like this:
Coming back to my experience with the chassis. I started with two people that had (without me knowing) a similar interpretation. So, I captured their terminology in a concept map. Then I aligned with more people and came across different opinions. It followed some challenging discussions of what we try to achieve and how - all facilitated by the Concept Map. In the end, we had an entirely new Concept Map with some 40 concepts, reflecting the adjusted shared understanding of all participants. From that point, the team had a shared vision (“chassis”) and a sense of how to translate that chassis vision into reality (the alignment created via the Concept Map). As a result, we saved at least a month. And the department lead was convinced by the process that for the next annual planning session, a concept map per initiative became a strong suggestion.
In short, a simple facilitation technique, the Concept Map, revealed where people used the same word for (at least) two different concepts. And it is so simple that you can use it too. In environments that need to align, it can prevent delays of days or, as above, months.
And in case you are starting a new engagement as a consultant, you can shorten the time until you are fully productive by a few days to up to a week (depending on the complexity of the work). It’s an easy way to get into the task, and you might fix some misalignment.
Equally important, you show your customer that you can help them from the very first days. Reflecting on your understanding of the client, discussing the correctness of the understanding and creating a first deliverable in the first days will ensure a good start for the engagement.
Contact me if you want to know more or need some help along the way! I will support you to get on your way to ensure your client is working in alignment.
