From small co-founder teams, to large groups working together to bring an idea to reality, progress is sometimes frustrating:
🤷🏾♀️ Important responsibilities get lost between people
🤯 The initiative gets pulled apart in too many directions at once
👮♀️There is too much forcing and power-over people
But it doesn't have to be this way!
Wouldn't it be great to:
✅ Have people working on what they personally, truly love doing
✅ Get everyone clear on who’s responsible for what
✅ Ensure all the work is aligned to an overall vision
✅ Foster bottom-up emergence
✅ Share power and authority wisely
🙌✨ Good news! The practice of Creative Field Mapping can help ✨🙌
It's a method of enquiry to understand what’s going on in our teams and collaborations, and a way to visualise this as a useful point of reference that brings more clarity and more sanity to your initiative.
The practice is centred on maintaining an ever-evolving picture of how a vision for an initiative deconstructs into its smaller parts, using a pattern of nested circles. We call this a creative field map (or field map for short). A bit like an org chart, but actually useful.
With a field map to guide you, collaboration flows more easily and a vision comes to life.
It's easy to learn. In 90 minutes you'll be up-to-speed and have created your first field map.
learn how to map emergent initiatives using the Creative Field Mapping practice
uncover who has natural authorship over what
track who’s contributing to what
practice by mapping a real initiative you’re involved in
get useful tips for taking action based on what emerges from the mapping
get help from an expert to answer your questions
build and share a map digitally using the open source software Maptio, (you can also set up a free trial of Maptio's hosted service)
leave with clear next steps to keep bringing more clarity and sanity to your initiative so you can keep focussed on realising your vision
People developing self-managing organisations, DAOs and other purposeful initiatives
Founders, operational leads, org developers, coaches and consultants
Think about a purposeful initiative you have a good understanding of in your head, but where you need to make things really clear. It could be a company, non-profit, DAO, or just a project where you’re trying to make something happen in the world. Anything from a handful of people involved, or hundreds.
Join using a desktop or laptop computer (a mobile device won’t be sufficient to fully participate) with a good browser like Chrome or Firefox.
Tom Nixon is the founder of Maptio, author of Work with Source: Realise big ideas, organise for emergence and work artfully with money, an Associate at Greaterthan, and a coach and advisor to pioneering founders.