Visual Strategy Mapping

Graduate School Seminar Series: Collaborative Leadership & Grand Challenges Research

**Room change! The location for this seminar has changed to 101 Walter Library.**

Visual strategy mapping is a powerful technique for tying actions together to foster understanding of what links to what, how, and why. Strategy mapping therefore can be an important aid to both disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary work.

Visual strategy mapping is a causal mapping process. A causal map is a statements-and-arrows diagram. The arrows indicate how one idea or action leads to another in a means-ends relationship. In other words, an arrow means “might cause,” “might lead to,” “might result in,” or some other kind of influence relationship. The term causation is thus used loosely, but is still meant to indicate a plausible understanding about how to change some aspect of the world. Note, however, that a cause-and-effect relationship specifically maps out influence, not chronology. In a visual strategy map the statements represent potential actions that, if taken, are presumed to cause a given outcome(s). Each action in turn is informed by actions that support it as explanations (in-arrows), and each action may be an outcome (out-arrow) of earlier actions. As a result, statements on a map can be both an action (explanation) and an outcome (consequence).

By using a few simple but important rules for formulating statements and creating links, visual strategy mapping makes it possible to articulate a large number of statements and their interconnections in such a way that people can know what to do in an area (issue) of concern, how to do it, and why, since each chain of arrows indicates the causes and consequences of an idea or action. The maps then help focus dialogue and deliberation on which possible statements would or should be chosen and classed as important values, mission, goals, strategies, actions, and underlying assumptions. In other words, the logic structure of a visual strategy map is the same as that of a strategic plan – the difference being that the strategy map details the logic that holds the statements together.

This session will introduce participants to visual strategy mapping. Participants will produce a strategy map of their own around something that they would like to do either personally or professionally. Examples of mapping by groups will also be presented.

Presenter:

John M. Bryson, McKnight Presidential Professor of Planning and Public Affairs, Humphrey School of Public Affairs