Mapping Experiences, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 8. Align: Making Sense Together

Visualizations act as a campfire around which we gather to tell stories.

—Al Shalloway

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using diagrams to gain empathy
• Envisioning possible solutions
• Making ideas concrete
• Running an alignment workshop
• Collaborative methods for alignment

I’m lucky: throughout the majority of my career, I’ve had the fortune to come into direct contact with the customers of the companies I worked for. I’ve observed hundreds of people at their workplaces or in retail stores or in their homes, across many industries. I’ve seen what they experience in context. This is a privileged position.

Ideally, everyone in an organization would have firsthand contact with customers. But for many, this type of exposure is limited. Even frontline personnel, such as customer support center agents, may see only a small portion of the experiences customers have. Anecdotes come in without context.

A broader picture is needed to connect the dots of varying perspectives about the customer experience across the organization. Diagrams provide such a view. But creating a diagram is not the ultimate goal. Rather, it is a means to engage others in a conversation. It’s your job to make that happen.

Having secured buy-in, done your research, and created your map, you have to take the story of what customers actually experience back to the organization. At this point, your role switches from mapmaker to facilitator. The aim is to get alignment on the current ...