Sociomapping is a state-of-the-art technology and a key tool to support effective collaboration and communication within a team and across an organisation. Sociomapping tracks relationships between team members to visualize team processes. Using Sociomapping in teams improves their performance and efficiency.
As the name implies, the method uses the metaphor of a landscape to illustrate and clearly visualise the relationships between team members. This next-generation tool helps managers and consultants solve collaboration problems, increase team effectiveness, discuss problematic issues and monitor team development. Sociomapping provides specific insight into what to develop, and the workshop itself answers the question of how to develop it.
Sociomapping helps manage teams and develop their effectiveness in Fortune 500 companies around the world and across industries. Outside of work teams, Sociomapping helps increase team cohesion and trust in sports teams, classroom groups, military units, or critically exposed teams in space exploration. Since the early 1990s, we have worked on a number of research projects with ESA and NASA.
Everyone probably got lost at some point and needed a map. With it, you can find out where you are, where you want to go and how to get there. Suddenly everything is clearer because the map allows you to be above the road. You do not have to wander only in real space. You can also get lost in complex situations where there are too many interrelationships that you do not know about or do not know enough about. Just as we need to orient ourselves in space, we also need to orient ourselves in interpersonal relationships. We need to understand how people communicate with each other, work together, how they can multiply or destroy each other's strengths. The behaviour of a small group of people or a large organisation cannot simply be inferred from information about individual members. Mutual ties are far more important. What determines the outcome of a sports team is not the individual performance of the players, but their cohesion and teamwork. This is also true for our brain, which is a team of nerve cells, that its performance is not determined by the number of nerve cells but by their interconnections (synapses). Moreover, these connections are easier to influence than the properties of the nerve cells themselves.
Sociomapping is a method that allows you to navigate in social systems - from small social groups to organisations and larger populations. It takes advantage of our ability to make sense of large amounts of information and make effective decisions when transferred into the language of spatial relationships. Sociomapping offers a way for us to think about teams and organisations as a whole. Representing relationships using maps increases our social sensitivity and allows us to think strategically about teams. It draws the attention and focus of its users to an area that is not very tangible to most and therefore often not given as much attention. Thus, it allows us to flourish the social capital that is hidden in our relationships with others. And to create visions that are easier to work towards.
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