A Guide To Change For Everybody: Mapping Your Next Act
This chapter is from the book “Next For Me: A Guide to Change for Everybody” from the founders of Next For Me.
Because we are visual people, mapping out the moving components, various entities and their relationships to each other has proven to be an insightful bird’s eye view of what we’re doing. So much of the time we are in the middle of it all and don’t see the interconnectedness of the pieces.
There are a few approaches to this practice sometimes known as “mind-mapping.” Mind-mapping involves creating a diagram of your project or plan, and shows a hierarchical representation of all its parts. It is centered on a single concept, with major ideas and dependencies branching out from there. Those ideas can be represented with images, words, and symbols. Practitioners encourage you to move quickly. It’s quantity over quality foregoing organization and criticism for now.
Given the affinity of tech folks to make associations this way, there have been software tools to do this around for a long time. For a low-tech approach we usually just grab some index cards or post-its and affix them to the nearest wall. They do tend to move around, plus the physical act of writing and placing them is helpful to the visualization process.
A similar approach can be used for drilling into a specific project. Where does it fit in the higher level map? What are the connecting points? What is an obstruction? The act of mapping it helps you clarify and prioritize.
When the Map Reveals a Strategic Gap
This is how we approached mapping out Next For Me at a critical juncture. We were proceeding with a consumer-first approach. Content, resources, and events for our readers. The money would somehow fall out from that, or so the thinking went.
You’ll notice a distinct lack of financing or income generating activity in that map. 😉 It suggested and underscored that we would need to keep raising money as a way to stay afloat. The audience would not have been sufficient in size to monetize through advertising or paywalls.
As we’ve mentioned, we hoped not to keep asking for money and diluting our equity. Looking at the map showed us that we needed to consider other approaches for keeping the company afloat. Soon after we created the map we made the pivot to engage marketers as our customers by creating research products from what we knew about our audience.
Read: Knowing What You Stand For
Do the exercise: Identifying Your Core Values
This chapter is from the book “Next For Me: A Guide to Change for Everybody” from the founders of Next For Me.
