Planning your map‘s structure? Here‘s how.

1. Choose your topic

Planning and building structures is easy to do in a KontextMap. But first, you need to know what it is you want to structure. It‘s the most important single question you have to ask yourself! What‘s your topic? Choose one subject. This can be broad, but you might consider if there‘s a more concrete question that you would like to answer. We recommend to narrow it down as much as possible. An example: we could develop a KontextMap about how meteorology in general. It would be huge. So to get answers and actionable insights you could go further if you focus on the question: „How can we predict the weather?“.

2. Identify the aspects
Let‘s continue with the weather forecasting example. To start our map, we need to identify all the relevant aspects to the answer of our question. On a practical level, you might think of the physical tools used to predict the weather. But how did they come to be? And why do we want to know what the weather is going to be like anyways? how can we be sure that the forecast is accurate? And how do we properly communicate the weather through media?

There‘s all kinds of perspectives you can take. It helps to step out of your comfort zone: go economical, the political left or right, consider technology, look at a personal scale or take a step back and look at the larger perspective; look at data and look at historical points of view. You‘ll see that you've quickly collected many perspectives to approach your topic!

3. Connecting and de-connecting
Now, we‘ll put our main topic on the map and surround them by the sub-topics. What can we connect? Draw lines and develop your different aspects. But also sometimes take a step back? Does a certain connection really make sense? Or is there something else that needs to go in between?

4. Dive in

Each perspective has it‘s own necessary info, and those info‘s might have even more. Taking it to the next level, we add layers and in this way create a hierarchy in the KontextMap.

This will result in a KontextMap that is structured in three different dimensions: topic wise; aspect from different perspectives; and layered hierarchy. You‘ve created both clarity and depth.