Remember the CEO we talked about a couple of days ago? He was stuck on the onboarding for his AI-powered finance platform. After we did a spot of mapping with him, he realised he could avoid the problem entirely. An option that had been invisible to him until he saw the map.
We said we were thinking about recording a video walkthrough of this (anonymised but real) map – and how the CEO's decision unfolded.
Thanks to all of you who replied, "SEND IT!". Your wish has been granted. Check out the video below.
We also got some interesting questions that folks were most curious about. You can read our answers underneath the video.
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Your questions –
Francesa asked:
"I’m most curious about how you elicit the information. Last week when working with a client, I thought I understood the outcome we wanted to get to and started asking clarifying questions about it. And when I realized the client couldn’t answer these, I just let her talk about what she does and tried to loosen my grip on my conception of the project. That was clarifying! So I’m curious to know how others get this clarity as they work in differing circumstances."
Yes! You'd be surprised by how often people struggle to answer direct questions about outcomes. (We dig into this in detail in our article about OKRs.) The solution that we find invariably works best with clients is the one you'll see in the video, where we set out to map a coherent story of how someone in the real world finds, chooses, uses and gets the value from the product or service in question. The outcomes tend to naturally emerge from this. Either it turns out that the team is already somewhat clear on what they're working towards, or (more likely) everyone's differing conceptions of the project will shift towards better alignment as a result of the mapping.
Side note, you're right about the value of loosening one's grip on one's own conceptions of the work. Sometimes our own beliefs and goals can become an obstacle. Not to mention the fact that everyone's true goals or true strategies are often illegible anyway. It's almost always easier to come at it from an oblique angle instead.
Ganesh asked:
Mostly curious about how the starting mentality of the CEO was and how receptive they were, and also about the point in your walkthrough when they started to be open about avoiding the onboarding problem altogether.
Great questions. We address the first one in the video. In terms of "starting mentality", we use the very process of attempting to make a Multiverse Map as a safe-to-fail probe. This experience itself gives us a sense for where the CEO, stakeholders, team members are right now. Basically, so far we've never encountered a situation where it wasn't worth at least trying mapping. (We do get situations where we can see that the mapping isn't yet enabling the person we're working with to make decisions. In those cases, it helps us to better calibrate the engagement.)
And the second question touches on the killer twist in the video. We'll leave you to watch it, but in short, the moment when a client or teammate changes their mind is almost always a slow, invisible process that's outside of anyone's conscious awareness. Also, people can usually tell if you're trying to change their mind about something. Which can backfire pretty horribly ...
So, we simply make different information, different data, different options visible through the map. If there's "one weird trick" we use, it's that we start eliciting and capturing more stories from our clients about what might be going on, and therefore create more options for action. Perhaps we could label that process as the moment when people start to become willing to change course, because increasing the range of stories and options tends to open the door for even more to show up later.
Most importantly, we don't go into a session believing we already have a better answer – or that a better answer even exists at all. We create the space for the team to figure it out themselves.
Craig asked:
I’m most curious about showing how mapping first can help thought processes and decision making.
Thanks, Craig – the long answer to this is in the video. The short answer is that mapping can change what's salient, make concrete part of what's abstract, and expose incoherence and misalignment. You'll notice that at no point in the mapping session did we explicitly challenge onboarding or verbalise the decision about the customers, but seeing the process laid out was what ultimately enabled (maybe triggered?) the CEO to think past the surface level.
Katrina asked:
What I’d really love is to walk through how you might apply this process to social innovation/systems change projects. I have a real scenario that we just led and while we as the consultants could see some of the bigger issues at play it seemed like we couldn’t quite get others to see them as well.
Thanks Katrina, this is an interesting one. We didn't directly address your question in the video but we reckon you'll be able to see the parallels. A systems change or social innovation project can often seem messier and harder to map than a digital experience, but the principle remains the same, because your success still always depends on the behaviour of people and systems that are outside of your control.
As we've also touched on in the responses above, mapping can make visible some of the bigger issues at play, and the potential consequences of making different choices. From there, however, it comes down to the individuals in the room. It's pretty much impossible to make people care about the bigger issues if they just don't want to.
If you watch the video and give this form of mapping a go yourself, we'd love to hear how you get on!
Tom & Corissa x
