Mind Mapping and Team Alignment
The logical connections you make when developing a mind map help you organize your thoughts and clarify your situation or plan. When you try to achieve the same clarity and insights with groups, the conventional techniques from Mind Mapping fall short. Their lines and text work on paper or a computer screen, BUT, they don’t ensure cross-function or cross-culture communication, don’t stimulate intuition, draw people into conversation or develop teamwork.
Your group will become more than the sum of its members if you bring in visuals to promote spontaneity, symbols to bring instant meaning and metaphors to provide a syntax for the big picture discussion and promote creativity. Taken together, you can achieve real teamwork and commitment to shared goals.
This is what Metaphor Mapping does for you. Its four metaphors take your group along a path to think out its strategy, develop a plan, assign roles and responsibilities and deal with any problems of attitude or mindset. The team can always take home digital images of their maps, tweak them and communicate with them throughout their project.