Why map-making skills matter in innovation

GUEST POST from John Bessant

There are some questions in life which can be answered quickly, no real thought required, simple yes/no options. Others might involve a longer period of time, perhaps a pleasant exploration of the possibilities. Philosophical enquiries, searching for meaning in life, the universe, everything….

But there’s one set of questions which brook no hesitation, which demand instant application to the task in hand. Those are concerned with ‘helping with daughter’s homework’ and which usually extend to occupy most of the available evening. Which is how I’ve found myself pondering the big question of ‘how can maps help us?’, as an accompaniment to trying to create with her a schematic map of our house and garden….

It’s easy to take maps for granted — but we’d be pretty stuck without them. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world. They seem to have been — independently invented by many cultures across the globe, and they’ve been around a very long time. Fragments etched on tusks or scratched on stones, dating back 25000 years or more all point to maps as something important. Which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view — it would help our survival a lot if we were able to chart where to find food, mark dangers, settle boundary disputes. Especially if we could share that knowledge with others.

And it’s not just maps of where we’ve been and how to get back there. Maps also drove exploration and enabled trade. Phoenician sailors way back 3000 years ago were managing long trips like discovering a way round Africa and the explosion of global trade and imperials expansion owes much to explorers like Magellan, Columbus, Drake and da Gama. Their voyages showed us that (a) the world isn’t flat with an edge you can fall off and (b) that there were impressive profits to be made if you could reliably head for (and more importantly come back from) exotic destinations like the spice islands. Maps were at the heart if this — and one reason why the Portuguese lost their early advantage to the Dutch East India company was the acquisition (by fair means or foul) of the key maps ….

Maps aren’t just passive guidebooks either. They can certainly help us get from (a) to (b) reliably and repeat the trick. But they also act as warnings, signposting where to go but also what to avoid and why — from ‘here be dragons’ markings on medieval charts through to today’s detailed lines of demarcation around danger areas.

And maps can set the rule of the game. Much of the work of early cartographers was charting not only the physical layout of land and sea but the political and economic one. Wars have a nasty habit of involving incursions into territory ‘owned’ by someone else. And maps continue to play a role in the political landscape — for example redrawing electoral boundaries isn’t simply a psephological exercise, it’s a power game.

So maps matter — and (as my daughter’s homework underlines) we need to learn to work with them, even in an age of GPS and automated guidance.

What has all this to do with innovation? Quite a lot in fact: maps and map-making provides a powerful metaphor for much of what we do when we try to manage the uncertain journey which innovation involves. There’s probably hundreds of applications of the idea but here are five which spring quickly to mind:

1. Navigating uncertainty

Innovation is all about uncertainty, it’s not simple planning but a probe into unknown territory. When we think about radical innovation we are certainly in the realm of high uncertainty, trying to feel our way through the fog. Even incremental innovation — doing what we do but better — has its surprises, like the diversions we might need to make on a well-used route because of road works or repairs.

So making even the crudest of sketch maps for ourselves might help, and using charts begged, borrowed or stolen from other voyagers would be a recommended strategy. After all someone else may have made a similar journey and there might be clues in their codified experience — a sort of ‘trip advisor’ resource, or (for those not yet familiar with the classic ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) a guidebook plus maps with the important reassurance ‘Don’t panic!’ scrawled across the front cover.

Maps can warn of topographical challenges like rivers to be crossed or mountains to be climbed and in similar fashion making maps of the wider context in which our innovation is going to emerge will be helpful. For example, a healthcare start-up needs to map regulatory challenges, market demands, and technological barriers. Understanding these “elevations” and “obstacles” helps the company prepare strategies to overcome or navigate through them.

Maps come in many flavours, including exotics like ‘heat maps’ which can be useful in terms of analysing energy consumption for example (I got that one from Lara’s homework book). Same thing with innovation — sometimes ‘heat maps’ can help focus attention on key areas for development, for example in identifying market trends, customer preferences, and areas ripe for innovation.

Starbucks uses heat maps to analyze customer behaviour and preferences in different regions. This data helps the company identify hotspots where certain products or services are more popular, allowing for targeted marketing and product offerings. For example, Starbucks identified a growing trend in mobile ordering and payment, leading to the successful rollout of their mobile app, which has significantly enhanced customer convenience and engagement.

And, especially in service innovation, journey maps can help visualize the customer experience, detailing each touchpoint and interaction a customer has with a product or service. This helps in refining and improving the innovation to better meet customer needs.

Airbnb uses journey mapping to enhance the user experience for both hosts and guests. By mapping out every interaction a user has with the platform — from searching for a property to post-stay reviews — Airbnb identifies pain points and opportunities for improvement. This customer-centric approach has led to features like the Superhost program and streamlined booking processes, significantly enhancing overall user satisfaction.

2. Sharing the message

Innovation is a process, and anyone might get lucky once. The real skill lies in being able to repeat the trick, to recognise that it can be a managed process which depends on more than just luck. For which we need a map, some codified representation of what we’ve learned about how the process works and what to do about it.

Which is good news for people like me — our role has been to try and make sense of the hundred plus years of research and the reported experiences of tens of thousands of people to detect patterns — make maps — of how the process could be managed over time. What to do — and what not to do, much in the manner of early ‘here be dragons’ guidance. We’ve come a long way; our maps of the process are well-documented in text books, consulting offers and even at the heart of an International Standard (56001) for innovation management.

3. Forecasting and back-casting

Smart players of the innovation game don’t just grope their way through the fog and hope; they make use of futures tools to help develop a strategy — a map of where to go and what to do next, which steps to take. It’s a two-step process — forecasting involves looking forward, imagining and engaging the help of others to make more than random guesses, weaving them into coherent pictures of future scenarios. But it also involves back casting — working out how to get ‘there’ from ‘here’. Where and how to start?

That process is called road-mapping for a reason — it’s all about making relevant maps to guide our journey (and our resource commitment) into the future. You don’t get to launch a major new piece of software or a radical alternative product by simply pressing the ‘go’ button — it involves careful planning of each key stage from exploratory research through to prototype development, beta testing, market launch, and post-launch support. Each stage has specific goals, timelines, and checkpoints, helping the team stay focused and aligned with their objectives.

4. Simulation and pivoting, updating our maps

Drawing a map in the abstract, without understanding the conditions on the actual ground itself, is not a good approach to navigation. On account of the fact that maps are not the actual territory, they are a representation of that reality. Plenty of people have commented on this problem, from Prussian general von Moltke with his famous ‘no plan survives the first contact with the enemy’ through to boxer Mike Tyson’s more succinct version, ‘everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face!’

So we need the ability to revise our maps en route, improve them and press forward in a mode which Rita McGrath calls ‘discovery driven planning’ — map-making on the fly. These days this principle lies at the heart of ‘agile innovation’ and the ‘lean start-up’ model. Innovation involves testing assumptions , learning from feedback and course correcting — the innovation equivalent of GPS saying ‘off route, recalculating’.

For example, Netflix leverages real-time data analytics (akin to a GPS) to continuously adjust its content strategy. By monitoring viewer preferences and engagement in real-time, Netflix can quickly pivot its content offerings, invest in new shows, and even decide on canceling underperforming series.

The good news here is that we have a rich set of tools to help our adaptive cartography — simulations, FMEA, pre-mortems, etc. — which allow us to explore and change course before we actually hit the iceberg emerging through the fog.

An extreme variant of such map -making is the idea of ‘escape maps’ — escape routes developed to navigate out of a crisis. For example Toyota’s response to widespread recalls due to safety issues back in 2010 was to develop a crisis management plan to address the problems, communicate transparently with customers, and implement quality control improvements. This escape map helped Toyota navigate through the crisis, restore customer trust, and enhance its safety standards. But it also provided a resource on which they could build in the face of future challenges , like the supply-chain disruptions caused by earthquakes.

5. Co-operative cartography

Innovation is a multi-player game and in todays’ borderless digital world that’s become more relevant than ever. Open innovation is all about collaboration and consortia, finding or building an ecosystem in which all players bring something to the party and when well orchestrated can create emergent properties. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. And a key piece of this puzzle lies in the shared maps which they use for their collective journey.

Such maps may be built around something abstract but compelling — a vision into which people can buy, something which focuses their collective energies and points the way towards Treasure Island with enough for everyone. Platform businesses offer a good example of such collaboration, where platform owners orchestrate the players across a multi-sided market. Such arrangements depend on having clear maps of where and how shared value is created.

But a big part of the shared value ecosystem story is the fact that the ‘rules of the game’ are made explicit and become the boundaries and geography of the game. In other words the map of where and how the game will be played out. That’s often an underestimated aspect of the innovation story but it highlights the key role of cartography. Who is making the maps which set out the context within which shared value might be created?

Amazon, for example might see a future for drone delivery and be able to articulate the. vision, engage the technology companies, recruit the pilots, etc. But that innovation will only work if a key cartographer — in the case the FAA — adapts their tight control over airspace to permit it. (Which incidentally they have just done; they can now operate a beyond line of sight drone delivery service)

Malcom Mclean’s revolution in world trade catalysed by his containerisation innovation might have run aground at an early stage. His voyage might have involved ships stuck in port if he hadn’t managed to find a way of working alongside the unions who were key cartographers in that context.

Mobile money across Africa is nothing special, it’s just how things work in that world, even as we still marvel at the power of smart transactions on our phonies. This leap-frogging to a new financial world connecting millions of people has been enabled by innovations like M-PESA and its lookalikes and has ushered in a quiet revolution. Over half of Kenyan GDP runs across M-PESA’s platfrm) — but this massive social innovation, bringing banking and financial services to the unbanked, wouldn’t have been possible without the active support and smoothing of the pathway played by the central bank. Their role as cartographers, supporting and promoting the innovation has been central to its widespread adoption.

Uber uses a topographical map approach to understand the regulatory, market, and technological landscape when expanding its services globally. Each city and country had unique regulations, market demands, and infrastructure challenges. By mapping these out, Uber can try to tailor its strategies to navigate through regulatory hurdles, optimize its technology for local conditions, and address market-specific needs effectively.

So maps matter in innovation — and the skills of working with them seem worth developing. In particular three key skills ought to be at the fingertips of anyone working in the innovation space:

Map reading — if there’s one thing we’ve learned in an era of GPS and navigational accuracy measured in millimetres it’s that the best maps in the world can still lead you into trouble if you don’t know how to use them properly. GPS has an enviable track record of leading strangers on to rocks or to other unexpected places, one of which Ulysses’ sirens or the Lorelei Rhine-maidens would be proud.

We need to learn to use maps intelligently, checking our position and adjusting, correcting course, pivoting with the map as a guide. But maps are not a substitute for thinking about and actively managing our journey.

We know a lot about the innovation process so whether you’re a start-up entrepreneur or a team inside an established organization, the journey to create value from ideas doesn’t have to be a random one. Importantly we have maps for many different contexts — it’s not a case of one size fits all — so there is guidance for innovators working in the public sector or not for profit world as much as the commercial world

Map making — we also need the skill of constructing storylines, roadmaps into the future which provide us with the key information at key stages on the journey. We can use maps which others have prepared but it’s also important to develop our own skills , just as our ancestors would have found ways to communicate what they were learning. Embedding key questions around which we need to explore and chart is a key stage in the evolution of any business model — it’s a story which sets out where we’re trying get to and what we’re learning on the way. We need this to engage others and recruit their questions, experience and insight — and if we succeed we can offer our maps for others. After all there’s a booming market in offering templates for business models which can be adapted and configured to suit…

Co-operative cartography — scaling innovation involves building and managing an ecosystem so finding who are the key cartographers, and where and when the maps are made or revised, is critical. Sitting on standards committees working out product specifications may not sound the most inspiring innovation gig — but those standards matter, they are the maps of the future game. Big bets get made on the way standards will evolve and become accepted — think VHS/Betamax or more recent Blu-Ray/ Toshiba HD-DVD and the billions that involved.

But standards are only one part of the story. It’s not just committee work, it’s about engaging with cartographers on many levels, drawing them in, getting their support, buy-in, insight and influence. Think of an ed-tech solution which could transform the learning experiences of millions of children in rural Africa — and then try and introduce that without the support of the relevant Ministry of Education.

Or try and fight some of the powerful interests in trade unions or professional associations. Maybe wrestle with the regulatory thickets associated with trade bodies or government departments. Battle with the rules and those employed to make sure things are done by the book. Doesn’t take long before you realise that most changes don’t take place on a blank canvas — they involve negotiating a way through all sorts of obstacles. For which geography it would be helpful to have a map — but even more helpful to have a guide, someone who could help smooth or clear a path.

Learning to identify and recruit cartographers to your value network is increasingly a key skill in scaling innovation for impact.

So (back to our homework question) can maps help us ? In plenty of ways; we’d literally be lost without them. But the real question isn’t so much about whether they can help us but rather how we can best equip ourselves to create and use them….

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Image credits: Pexels, John Bessant

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