Mental Maps and The Discovery Process

How customers view you or your products is garnered by a framework of assumptions, stories and images in their minds.

If you really want to influence someone, your first task is to understand how they think. An individual’s perspective on the world can be identified and “mapped.”

Skills for Understanding our Mental Maps

1. Suspending Assumptions/Judgments:  Holding our own views in abeyance; refraining from imposing them on others but not suppressing or holding them back: as if our assumptions are suspended in the air before us, hanging on a string a few feet before our noses.
2. Seeing Each Other As Colleagues: Seeing the other as a colleague in a mutual quest for clarity. The greatest benefits are achieved by viewing “adversaries” as “colleagues with different views.”
3. Pay Attention to Your Intentions: Understanding what you hope to accomplish: “What is my intention?” “Am I willing to be influenced?”
4. Reflection: Slowing down the thinking process in order to become more aware of how you form your mental models. Most people believe that, when faced with difficult problems, the thing to do is act. In dialogue, the motto could be “Don’t do something, just stand there.” “What is it I am thinking?” “What do I want at this moment?”
5. Advocacy: Making your thinking process visible by stating your assumptions and providing the data as to how you arrived there. “Here’s what I think, and here’s how I got there.” “I assumed that…”
6. Inquiry: Holding conversations where we openly inquire into each other’s assumptions, thinking and reasoning. “What leads you to conclude that?” “Can you help me understand your thinking here?”

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