Managing complexity

“It is not the task to simplify or to reduce the complexity of real lifeworlds of customers to a maximum. Instead, it is crucial to make them manageable and guiding for very important corporate decisions.”

Dr. Michael Schindl

The Concept Map

Concept Maps have been developed by  Professor Joseph Novak at the Cornell University/U.S.A. in the 60s. They illustrate knowledge in the form of a network with closely connected concepts or issues.

Concept Maps are perfectly suited for visualizing complex real facts. Concept Maps support the capture and understanding of comprehensive and detailed knowledge in a very fast way. Thus, they are a wellspring for new ideas.

Concept Maps are contrary to Mind Maps as they are not made up of hierarchical content. Instead, they show a network that is composed of concepts, issues and ideas including their relationships to each other. By this, all aspects of an issue can be clearly represented and can be understood at first glance.

The “lifeworld” of customers is key

With STORYlistening® a Concept Map is used in order to understand the lifeworlds of customers at a glance. People make decisions only in the context they see relevant issues for this decision and themselves.  Knowing these decision drivers and their contextual setting within personal, i.e., values, constraints, meanings or attitudes means to be able to draw the right strategic conclusions. The Concept Map elicits exactly these contexts.

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This Concept Map shows all relations of content elements in detail that has been revealed by STORYlistening®. The actual size of an element is not important. Important are those elements which have many connections to elements.

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The connections between the elements are actually more important than the contents of elements themselves. The connections define the relationships between the elements – they can be, for example, causal, associative, commenting or chronological. The relevant context emerges from these connections.

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Concept Maps may indicate content elements  respectively connections with different colours. These indications depend of the strategic question and may differ with each project. With this example, the blue elements describe important attributions.

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The Concept Map describes in detail, for example, attitudes, assessments, positions, meanings, descriptions, drivers or concrete actions. Even more, they are shown in context which illustrates a relevant part of the lifeworld of the customer.