Mapping Experiences, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2. Customer-Centered Collaboration: Aligning Inside-Across

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

—Peter Drucker

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Visual models and alignment attrition
• Activating insights through collaboration
• The mapmaker as facilitator
• Three dimensions of team performance
• Behavior change: simple acts become culture

Organizational theorist Karl Weick famously liked to retell the story of a small unit of Hungarian soldiers during World War I who became hopelessly lost in the Alps during a severe snowstorm. For days they huddled together without food, their morale collapsing as the situation grew desperate.

Then one soldier discovered a map in his pocket. With renewed confidence, they used the map to navigate their way back to safety. Once back at base camp, the lieutenant asked to see the map that had saved them. To everyone’s astonishment, it was a map of the Pyrenees. The “wrong” map had guided them out of harm’s way.

Weick uses this story to make a point: the soldiers were saved because the map gave them a shared reference point that broke the paralysis, aligned their efforts, and allowed them to make sense of their situation together.

To be clear: I’m not arguing for creating inaccurate experience maps. An actual map of the Alps would have been better for the group of soldiers, for sure. Your maps should absolutely reflect customer reality as faithfully as possible. But Weick’s story reminds us that a map’s value extends beyond its technical accuracy. ...