Invitation to Chaos Map Live: How to find your place in a placeless world.
A live chaos mapping experiment coming July 28th.
Have you ever watched an entire soccer team chase the ball around the whole field with no sense of position? If so, you were likely watching toddlers learn to play. Hilarious, but not very competitive. But as kids learn their positions, games get more strategic and interesting.
Similarly, we learn to play music together in sensible positions: conductors don’t cram a violinist in with the drums or position a soloist in the back row next to a tuba.
Directors and actors block out the places and movements on stage as carefully as they attend to the script.
Being in the right place at the right time is everything when it comes to performing well in groups.
Our modern myopia.
There’s no meaningful sense of place in most of our work and life. We can't look around and see how we're performing together. So we all chase the ball and step all over each other’s toes. Turf wars and confusion abound as much as strategic, harmonious collaboration eludes us.
You may object: real life and work aren’t so simple as a game or performance.
Fair enough. Real-life isn’t child’s play: in an increasingly complex and diverse world, we’d benefit all the more from at least as much of a shared sense of space as we have in our games.
For millennia, real-world places showed us how we fit together. We knew our place around the campfire, in our town, or in the cathedral without thinking twice about it.
We haven’t adapted to a world of ever more numerous and intricate categories, facts, and models — but ever fewer meaningful places. Yet our brains still understand things spatially, from abstract ideas to memories.1
So most of us dive into work and life every day without any sense of where we, our work, or others are.
It’s like playing a board game without the board. Or assembling a puzzle together while each of us has a distinct and incomplete box-top picture reference.
Finish 2022 with a bigger picture.
The Chaos Map provides a mental surface for understanding how phases of work, levels of conversation, personality models, or any human environment fit together. Like a geographic map, it doesn’t provide step-by-step instructions. But it gives us a mental perspective from which we can more easily spot gaps, trace multiple paths, and strategize than we can from the ground-level view.
Visually mapping a space you care about will give you:
A clearer, more comprehensive, "big picture" view.
A sense of your natural place and that of those around you.
An ability to see where seemingly conflicting perspectives and agendas are coming from and how they fit into a whole.
”Working with your team after you’ve gone through a Chaos Map is so helpful. You know everyone's tendencies, where your gaps are, and how problems come up. The map ends up like a game board that shows how you fit together.” — Brendan Langen.
Over the summer, I'm taking a break from monthly essays to prepare a step-by-step guide for mapping any space you'd be interested in a clearer picture of.
I’m currently in the “usability testing” phase of design — observing how the process works in diverse scenarios and refining it. As part of this phase, I'd like to invite you to the first Chaos Map Live event:
An Invitation.
On Thursday, July 28th at noon EDT, I'll host the first live group mapping session.
In one hour we'll select an interesting human space and sketch a map of the order, chaos, relationships, and concepts in play. If all goes well, you’ll come away with a more navigable view of an interesting topic as well as a method for mapping other spaces you’d like to navigate.
This first Chaos Map Live event is free to join, but I’ll likely cap it around 5-10 people, first come first serve.
P.S., if you'd like to map your team or any space collaboratively, I have a few openings for doing so one-on-one or in small groups. I'd value the experience as a way to hone the process, so don’t hesitate to sign up if you’re interested.
This article provides a helpful summary of recent research confirming the common knowledge that humans understand ideas spatially. For a fuller exploration, see Why we need mental maps.