Dialogue MappingTM is my topic this week and will lead into a podcast with KC Burgess Yakemovic of Cognexus Group. This excerpt is from next week’s Business901 podcast about applying Dialogue Mapping.
Joe: It sounds like a structured mind map that I can go in and out very quickly. I can bounce between an overview or dig deep, but then I can bounce back to a broad perspective.
KC: Yes. We have had people who’ve come to our training from a Mind Mapping background and in a way, you can think of it as a very specific form of Mind Mapping with a specific structure, the IBIS structure around it. There are people who use Mind Mapping software rather than Compendium, and they’ve built the kind of structured notes that you need to represent the components of IBIS. So in that sense yes, it is a form — it can be a form of Mind Mapping if your background comes from that to start with.
Joe: You don’t see thrilled about that. What would be some of the problems thinking that way?
KC: Well, the issue is that one of the big benefits of Mind Mapping is the freedom and flexibility. And I like to talk about the structure of IBIS as being like roads on a map or roads in the world. They don’t limit you from getting from here to there, but they make sure that there’s not just chaos in the process of getting from here to there. So, yes it’s a structure but it’s a very, very open structure.
Joe: It’s a connected structure would you say?
KC: What I mean by open structure is you can build anything with it. I have not yet found anything that I couldn’t capture in the structure of IBIS. But certainly are people who if you give them any kind of — well, there’s some sort of organization principle here, they’ll find that to be too constricting. And that’s often the case I find with people who come at it from a Mind Mapping background; they’re invested in their previous learning and it can sometimes be a struggle to give that up for yes, there is some structure, and there’s a benefit to having the structure in this IBIS language.
Joe: And I think that’s very interesting as to how you phrase that because there does seem to be a path to get the best results. If you follow this structure, we’re going to be able to make a deep dive and get the answers.
KC: Well, what it does is it gives you a space to investigate to as deep a level as the group wants to. Any of the aspects of a particular problem, you know if you’re working with a say a customer service problem that has just defied solution, getting all of the aspects out and it can be particularly helpful to involve people that haven’t been maybe necessarily wrapped up in trying to solve that problem who’ll give it a slightly different perspective. But you can get all the aspects out and all of them as I said on top and in front, which is a hard thing to do in if you’re just like say using email to try to discuss something, or passing documents back and forth. Inevitably people decide, well we’ll just ignore this little piece or whatever because it’s just too hard to keep all of that information in mind, and I think that’s the big benefit of the map.
KC has over 25 years of experience capturing and using decision making rationale within both the corporate and small business environments. She worked with Jeff Conklin a (author of Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems) during his early research on the technology needed to support the IBIS methodology in the “real world.” Since January 2011, KC has been the Director of Training at CogNexus.