I get asked many questions about crystal mapping as people start to hear about it and use it. One question that comes up alot is – “ok…so why do you call it crystal mapping?” To many people it sounds a bit ‘new agey’ and has over tones of  it being ‘away with the fairies’. To others its too close to mind mapping which, as they start to use it and understand it, it clearly isn’t. To others it’s just a bit of a mouthful! So, to clear things up – here’s why its called crystal mapping.

When I started to formulate my ideas for visually communicating information in radiant circles to show ‘content in context’,  the first thing I did was to start drawing it out on paper. Starting from the centre or the core objective of whatever I wanted to communicate using my, as yet, unnamed approach, the radiant circles began to flow intutively. I then started to do this in powerppoint. An early painstakingly built powerpoint example is below:

This clunky looking map tried to show how a particular project’s vision (explained in more detail in my book) required all the parties to accept responsibility for certain key goals that were vital in delivering the overall plan.

It shows the top level map and got the main aims across for each business group in the project and showed the bigger picture. But it didn’t show the details for each main element. Step 2 was to crystallize (see what I did there) each business group further into its key teams and objectives.

Map 2 looked like this

The critical aspect of Map 2 was that it was clear that while the business group had specific and identified goals, they were all subordinate to achieving the overall vision and plan. It was a small step to continue iterating from that to the full blown map below.

Once I’d created the above visual which showed how plans and goals for each business group could be formed into a bigger picture structure it struck me that the map looked kind of  ‘organic’ and seemed to grow naturally – a bit like how ice crystals grow.  A bit more thought on the nature of how organic mechanisms grow and I soon arrived at Crystal Mapping via a few ‘molecular’ and ‘atomic mapping’ side streets and ‘genetic’ and ‘DNA map’ alleyways.

One other attribute of the name also struck home instantly. Everything I was trying to do was about ‘clarity’. There’s nothing better than crystal clarity!