Nonetheless, these same individuals grasp general concepts of everyday living and task performance. When one begins to fathom the depth to which their own language slants with references to how metaphors promote creativity it becomes astounding. However, when we need to become creative the human mind becomes a playground, as it were, not just for ideas, but also for the words used to convey these ideas. In business terms, if we were to think of a change management situation, where a manager is beginning to build a team to lead the rest of the company through a specific set of manufacturing alterations that need to result in improved production. One of the first steps in the process is to get the group to buy into the idea as feasible.

A next step might then be to map out the group’s hierarchy of needs to accomplish the main objective, such as make an improvement in the manufacturing process.  One might then state that as a group, ” You need to toss your ideas around and sift through them to locate the best plan in order to put pur best foot forward.” The ideas that are present in this last sentence are metaphors. Thus an example of how the uses of metaphors promote creativity. The first being the concept of throwing something, that something is an idea. We do not or cannot literally throw and idea. The idea is another metaphor for whatever the “idea’ represents. Lastly, is the phrase “sift through them”, now, we understand that to sift something we separate one thing from another or from a group of something.

Additionally, we may consider the word “them” as another metaphor for the ideas. Now, what have we just accomplished with this breakdown, look another metaphor? Well, we presented and explained a concept of how and why metaphors promote creativity. At the same time, we have mapped out the metaphors that were necessary for the example. Now that we understand the concept, we can move into deeper areas of exploration into mapping the process ignited through reasons why. For more information contact us.

“Create the Business Case” – In order for your employees to understand why a change is necessary, especially if jobs or the company is in danger, leadership must be transparent. They must clearly explain why the change is needed. It does not matter if the reason is loss of market share, a poor financial decision, or a change in the direction of the business itself. Once the purpose for the change is understood, your faithful employees will be more willing to assist in making change.

“Clarify and Communicate the New Way” – Now that everyone understands why changes are necessary. They need to know what the new path is. This is difficult to explain alone, and …
No doubt several key leaders were involved in hatching your new strategic plan in the first place. Exploit and enlist this key network of early adopters and ensure that they fan out across your company and ‘spread the gospel’ of the new way just as you are. If necessary, make changes in key organizational positions that are critical to the new plan.

“Enlist Your Core Team” – The best way to disseminate this information make a list of key people in your firm and allocate divisions of the company to each key person. Call a meeting to discuss the new strategic plan, and ask if everyone understands the new direction the company is headed. Answer questions honestly. After the plan is clarified and understood by all in the meeting, explain that each individual in responsible for clarifying and communicating the new strategic plan to a set number of people or department(s). Now is a good time to suggest techniques or to discuss ways to reach out to the employees and communicate.

“Mobilize Commitment” – As your core team shares the new strategic plan with the company as a whole, ask them to make mental notes of individuals in your company who are experts at their job, and willing to assist in creating a shared vision. Enlist these individuals in creating a shared vision.

Don’t forget your team can use Metaphor Mapping to define what the new strategy means to the operations of your company.  It’s an ideal tool to cascade workshops, bringing ever more people into understanding what the strategy and vision mean to them as they implement the changes. Contact us if you’d like to discuss.

Almost everything else leading up to that point might well be a blizzard of information, ideas and data awaiting labels and identifiers to lead the team onward to its goals.

“Controlling or Influencing? The real use of project controls,” an article on the ProjectAccelerator.com website may have as its primary focus “financial management,” but the over-arching premise might well apply to any company committed to Change management.

One of the three primary considerations to cause change, is making sure all the information and data is clearly communicated with the right team, the relevant group and individuals; secondly, the effort must promote understanding and believability; and thirdly, strategies are then implemented using information to bring about desired outcomes.

Metaphor Mapping heightens such collaborative processes through the use of Visual Metaphors keyed to unlocking the flow of ideas and producing results in a few hours; more importantly, teams and groups collaborate more freely once they agree on what symbols embody the issues at hand.

Workshops with Metaphor Mapping can tackle even the most elusive issues, like defining ‘company culture’ in a bid to understand it, identify it and ultimately bring about the desired changes.

In this instance, the biggest challenge is to not allow a single department or individual to define what com pany culture is…or is not.

According to a post on Forbes.com, “The Key to Changing Organizational Culture,” John Kotter, it’s no surprise that attempts to alter such fiber “typically go nowhere.”

First, virtually no one clearly defines what they mean by “culture,” and when they do they usually get it wrong. Second, virtually no one has read the original research that shows why culture — when clearly defined — is so important, how it is formed, and how it changes.

Making sense of a lot of random and disparate ideas and information is what Metaphor Mapping is all about.

Contact us to learn how we can bring the metaphor of the Village—and more—to your next organizational meeting.

Metaphor Mapping can help them to do that. Metaphor Mapping promotes teamwork and gets people to say what’s on their minds.  It makes tough work fun by providing a fame-like environment.  It galvanizes innovation through collaboration by eliminating some of the worry that’s commonly associated with social strictures in the workplace and that deters colleagues from sharing their valuable input.

Since reduction of anxiety is one of the most important factors for improving communication and creative problem-solving, Metaphor Mapping puts small teams together in a comfortable setting where everyone has a stake in the goings-on.

Teams get a thorough understanding of their assignments by using multi-sensory activities that appeal to the different learning styles of their members. They handle pictorial stickers and label them to identify, map out and discuss the key elements of the groups’ challenge, and together they figure out the best course of action to solve it.

A collaborative strategy setting ensures that participants perceive the environment as non-threatening and a safe place to offer insights and suggestions that can lead to sought-after solutions.

To generate a safe haven when forming groups, bring everyone together for a Metaphor Mapping workshop to define the issues they are working on and ensure that:

• Participants  share equal footing and refrain from assigning leaders
• Protocols give equal access to the discussion and to promote self-regulation
• Demonstrate respect for others’ opinions
• Ensure adequate time for effective discussions to take place.
• Introduce the practice of using appositives to bolster self-confidence

A well-planned collaborative strategy setting will promote the creation of multiple high performance teams that share a vision. Metaphor Mapping will give you that edge. It will encourage participants to brainstorm realistic solutions to the challenges that they openly and respectfully identify and acknowledge.

Using Metaphor Mapping, colleagues validate each other, and that validation serves to instill a more personal, even passionate, commitment to change to effectively secure the company’s desired goal or outcome.

For more information, please contact us.

Studies found that fear of rejection prevents participants from actively offering valid ideas, and it even impedes learning and understanding new information that’s presented by someone else.

Metaphor Mapping avoids this problem by engaging participants in a hands-on, everyone-is-part-of-the-team, game-playing fashion that can alleviate the tension. But that’s just part of it.

To set the stage for real camaraderie, the game players need to learn how to use language to really say what they mean, and sometimes that’s not easy.

Mark Twain once said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” And, it’s true because words alone can’t always convey the message the way a communicator wants them to. And getting the wrong message or taking the wrong action can be devastating.

The trouble is that finding that right word or group of words can be daunting, especially in today’s society where the workforce contains such a wide range of skills, abilities, and, most especially, backgrounds. References don’t always click.

That’s why it’s important for team members to enhance communication among themselves using visual cues that map out how to get from point A to point B and to make time for clarification and reiteration so that all parties gain a clear sense of the issues at hand and can learn to explain their perspectives.

Today, corporate facilitators have to find ways to incorporate strategies that put everyone on the same page by providing opportunities for hands-on collaboration and fruitful peer discussions.

That’s where Metaphor Mapping comes in. It entails having small groups of workers place and label picture stickers on a map to explain and explore various topical issues that are integral to the development and success of their companies. The purpose is to clarify the issues and to identify and offer solutions to those challenges that might impede reaching goals in specific areas.

The cornerstone of this process rests with the collaborative strategy setting where metaphors can act as bridges to understanding. A mapping workshop is a safe haven for employees, a place where unfettered brainstorming will generate more productive discussions among peers, and that’s what successful corporations look for: discussions that will ultimately lead to problem-solving and other desired outcomes.

1. Forming
2. Storming
3. Norming
4. Performing

If you have to develop a team and deliver results in short order, a month for example, you’ll be greatly hindered by the time lost in the first two stages (Organizational research tells us that three-fifths of team time is taken up by  forming and storming.)   Metaphor Mapping sessions can give you a jump-start by getting you clear on objectives and how to reach the, effectively completing the first three stages in a single session that can take from two hours to a full day.

In that short time, all your members will be in agreement on

• The purpose of the team and the the significance of what you’re trying to accomplish
• Roles of the team members
• Schedule and how to work together

Metaphor mapping ensures team members are not quiet or reluctant to share their viewpoint.  You can’t map villages and rivers and be a wallflower!  Please contact us if you’d like to discuss a situation that needs both high performing teams and speed!

Just take a moment to imagine your typical meeting.  You want to roll out a new project and your team is working to foresee problems and implement solutions to solve them.  In addition, they need to find opportunities to engage other employees, or customers, or clients and help them manage the change in an effective and least problematic way.  There might be notepads in your meeting, there’s probably a white board or a computer screen projection writing down ideas.  You might have 1/2 the team working productively throwing out ideas.  The ideas may be organized neatly, or you may find yourself having to re-explain what the idea was or the intention.  You come away from the meeting feeling somewhat defeated, hoping to have accomplished more in your meeting than what was done.  You schedule another meeting, and then another, hoping to get more clarity on the issue.

Metaphor mapping helps prevent wasted time, and makes process planning more effective by engaging all your team members in a creative project.  Using visual symbols and metaphors is engaging and turns on the creative portion of your team members’ brains and allows them to have more free thinking processes, giving them opportunities to visually see different paths, different problems, and new solutions.

This free thinking and creativity allows your meetings to be more effective and  involves people more deeply and prompts them to take ownership of the strategy and tasks.  Being involved and feeling like you’re a part of the solution is a huge step towards successfully implementing change within your company.

It’s hard to believe that such a simple strategy can be so successful, but it won’t take you long to become a believer in the metaphor mapping strategy.

For more ways our unique metaphor mapping can help your team meet your business needs and succeed, please contact us today!

Facilitating growth in a company begins with adopting a culture of creativity among the thought leaders in the organization. Once you’ve recruited the right people to propel your company to your next benchmark, you need to implement a set of values that everyone agrees on. It becomes necessary to have a series of conversations about who will fill which role in the company. Confusion in this particular area is common. It’s also deadly.

If you understand that patience is required to achieve your company’s goals, you may find yourself in a situation that many start ups face during their otherwise successful first years. No one knows who is supposed to be doing the next important thing.

Company culture that facilitates creativity is vital to the entity that is the fragile, mysterious, amazing start up. Don’t let it be damaged by your team’s confusion about what their individual roles are within the framework of growth.

It’s hard to read the label when you are inside the bottle.

Metaphors promote creativity, and creativity solves problems. In this case, metaphors also clarify the roles, responsibilities, and privileges of each of your team members.

Someone needs to be the designated leader. That leader will need a partner, and both the leader and her partner are going to need someone to implement the activities that the group has agreed on. The leader will make decisions, consult with her partner, and give authority to the person who is in charge of implementing the activity.

This structure makes sense to people who are ready to move forward, but are confused about their particular role.When the roles are described using metaphors, the way forward becomes crystal clear.

To learn more about our unique, simple, effective method for using metaphors to promote creativity and clarify roles in the typical start-up company, please contact us.

Change management is a hard thing for any individual to swallow. Getting an entire company on the same page progressing towards any modification can be a daunting task. Lionel Wijesiri in a recent article shared some advice from Erika Andersen, a Management Consultant and Author:

Identify the problem clearly and convey the problemun ambiguously. If the predicament is unclear, arguments may arise over what needs to be changed. To communicate adequately, call a strategic planning meeting for all your key employees. At the beginning of the meeting, state exactly what the dilemma is. For example, if sales have decreased for your product or service, is it due to poor customer service, a change in marketing strategy, or a manufacturing error?
Once the issue is identified and all parties involved understand what area needs focus. Educate everyone on the history of the problem. When did it begin? How many times did it happen? Perhaps the problem has only happened once or twice. On the other hand, if it is an issue that has happened once or twice, but the effect on your business is severe, the problem may need to be addressed immediately. If necessary, determine together if this an issue that needs to be watched or acted upon immediately.
Next identify exactly what you intend to change. Again communicate this as succinctly and clearly as possible. If uncertain which course of action to take, ask your executive team.
After you identify what needs to be changed, give a clear description of your plan. According to Erika:
Your goal is to navigate through these changing times while positioning yourself and your company for future success. Following these basic steps can take you from simply saying, ‘We need to be more strategic’ to actually doing so and reaping the rewards that follow.

Now you have a clear path for creating change within your organization, but what do you do with those who are resistant to change? Before the close of your meeting, address this conundrum before the question even arises. Explain how these attitudes can keep you from realizing success. Ask executives how they would address these attitudes when they are seen in the workplace. If they are uncertain on how to handle the issue, devise ideas to encourage employees to break away from these thought patterns.

We believe an easy-to-use tool like  Metaphor Mapping can fit right in with this approach.  Please contact us if you have any questions regarding our products or services. We would be happy to help you be an agent of change.

for Group Mind Mapping

The logical connections you make when developing a mind map help you organize your thoughts and clarify your situation or plan.  When you try to achieve the same clarity and insights with groups, the conventional techniques from Mind Mapping fall short.  Their lines and text work on paper or PC but they don’t ensure cross-function or cross-culture communication, don’t stimulate intuition, draw people into conversation or develop teamwork.

Your group will become more than the sum of its members if you bring in visuals to promote spontaneity, symbols to bring instant meaning and metaphors to provide a syntax for the big picture discussion and promote creativity.  Taken together, you can achieve real teamwork and commitment to shared goals.

This is what Metaphor Mapping does for you.  Its four metaphors take your group along a path to think out its strategy, develop a plan, assign roles and responsibilities and deal with any problems of attitude or mindset.  The team can always take home digital images of their maps, tweak them and communicate with them throughout their project.

Check out the Metaphor Mapping site to learn how it works!