Mind Mapping Software

Making Content Come Alive Using Crystal Maps

Nicole Andrews

I have to begin with a confession. I love writing reports. In a career spanning 20 years, I have written hundreds of them, initially as a HR practitioner and latterly as a HR consultant. I research them beautifully. I take pride in drafting and re-drafting to produce exquisite clarity and depth. I present them with pride and confidence, anticipating the huge impact they will have on the audience.

However, in truth, I know that the vast majority end up gathering dust in someone’s drawer. The initial impression may be good, and may indeed justify the effort exerted in producing the report – but over time, inevitably, the written word gets left behind. This isn’t just true for reports. I’ve had the same experience with business plans, job description, resourcing plans, Employee Handbooks etc.

People quickly move on and the detail gets left behind. As a “hands-on” Personnel Officer, in a big blue-chip company, I remember being inundated with queries which could easily have been solved by consulting the readily available information sources – the Policy Manuals, the Managers Guidebooks, the Employee intranet and so on.

So why is this? Perhaps it is the fast pace of business change. What’s true today is unlikely to be true tomorrow. “Oh that was written before we started expanding overseas – it’s meaningless now”. Maybe it’s linked to the new relatively short dwell time in senior roles. As soon as a new boss comes in, they want to commission a new report and the old stuff becomes redundant. Perhaps it’s just that the average worker doesn’t have the time, or indeed the inclination, to take an interest in anything that’s beyond their immediate zone. By the time they have got through their “ to do” list, there’s no capacity for anything else; the “quick-fix” wins through.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the value is in the preparation of a report not in the final document. As long as a Company has a set of Employee Policies, does it matter if nobody outside the HR team looks at them? Perhaps it doesn’t in some cases – but surely this is not true in all cases. There’s a huge opportunity here to communicate differently and more effectively. The challenge is to make the written word come alive – so that it carries a momentum and engages people way beyond the initial “first hit”.

Crystal Mapping

For me, this is what Crystal Mapping is all about. It offers the HR practitioner a new way of influencing and connecting with people. If you have something novel to say, why not attract people’s attention by saying it in an innovative way? Otherwise they may be forgiven for assuming that you have nothing original to offer. To embrace Crystal Mapping you need first to break down your paradigms about how information should look. A Crystal Map won’t fit neatly into an A4 folder and it challenges our own constraining assumptions about how to convey information and offers something radically different.

Let’s think about the mind mapping analogy. If you were drawing a map, you’d want to help people navigate quickly to the places of most interest to them. They need to be able to do this, whilst still keeping their bearings and sense of scale. They’d need to be able to find their route easily, within the context of the overall plan.

Maps rely on images rather than prose. Pictures and visuals can be more quickly assimilated and committed to memory than words. If you are trying to find your way somewhere for the first time, which works best – a visual representation of your route or a list of written instructions? It has to be the former, unless of course you have someone sitting next to you in the passenger seat reading out an instruction line by line as you go. (And we all know how unrealistic that is in business?).

Maps have boundaries, but they don’t follow a linear progression – they don’t have a beginning and an end. You can glance at them at any time and investigate a different place. You never finish reading a map. You re-visit it when you need to know something and it always leaves a print behind in your mind.

This is how Crystal Mapping (unlike typical mind mapping software) works. It enables people to extract the information they need to know quickly, whilst keeping them in touch with the framework in which it belongs – the bigger picture. It gives ideas shape and form, showing how everything fits together and entices you to explore and re-visit.

So perhaps there is, after all, a way to escape that seemingly inevitable “bottom drawer” death for that perfect report? A Crystal Map isn’t conventional. An organisation chart or a set of performance targets conveyed via a Crystal Map won’t look like any you have produced before. It will, however, give people a route to the information they seek, whilst always keeping in view the broader context. It will create an image rather than a set of words. People will remember what they see, they will want to go back and see more, and maybe, just maybe the content will come alive and stay alive.