Mapping Experiences by Kalbach James

Author:Kalbach, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-05-20T16:00:41.403000+00:00

Benefits of Alignment Diagrams

Alignment diagrams can have a broad set of uses that span projects, departments, and strategic efforts. Below are key ways to leverage them:

• Diagnosis. Alignment diagrams map current performance. They are a type of prototype for a person’s experience. As such, alignment diagram identify where interactions breakdown or where emotional intensity is highest. They also reveal redundancies and opportunities for streamlining services.

• Discovery. Alignment diagrams serve as a springboard into innovation. They provide insight into the human experience in a holistic way that inspires new solutions. They help teams arrive at new products, services, and experiences.

• Design. Maps aid in product and service design beyond mere improvements to existing offerings. They provide an architectural view of an intended experience, across channels, devices, and touchpoints.

• Development. Implementation efforts can be prioritized against a diagram for balanced planning. Alignment diagrams expose necessary cross-departmental communication, breaking down siloed thinking.

Alignment diagrams are no panacea, for sure. Still, they have many potential benefits across these uses. These include building empathy, providing a common “big picture,” breaking silos, reducing complexity, and finding opportunities. Alignment diagrams also generally enjoy a great deal of longevity.

Build empathy

It’s amazing – sometimes even shocking – how little organizations know about the experiences the people they serve actually go through. Alignment diagrams shed an important source of light on real-world human conditions. In doing so they instill empathy into an organization.

Bruce Temkin, a leader in customer experience management, stresses the relevance and importance of such mapping activities. He writes in a blog post:

…companies need to use tools and processes that reinforce an understanding of actual customer needs. One of the key tools in this area is something called a customer journey map… Used appropriately, these maps can shift a company’s perspective from inside-out to outside-in.2

Looking back into the organization from the outside causes a change in perspective, one that is invariably more sensitive to people’s thoughts and feelings.

People form feelings around the products and services they come in contact with. To design offerings with an emotional appeal, we must first understand people in the context of use and form a sensitivity to their condition.

Provide a common “big picture”

Alignment diagrams allow teams to rally around a common purpose. They serve as a shared reference, helping to build consensus. In this sense, alignment diagrams are strategic tools: they influence decision making at all levels and lead to consistency in actions.

But there is often a gap between strategy and execution. Some organizations may have a clear picture of what to do at the top management layers. And the teams at lower levels may be busy with implementation activities. If there’s a disconnect in the middle the resulting outcome won’t be successful.

In her book The New How, business leader and author Nilofer Merchant calls this gap an air sandwich:

An Air Sandwich is, in effect, a strategy that has a clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle–no meaty key decisions that

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