Tools for Thought

Flowscaping is a cognitive mapping technique pioneered by Edward de Bono in the 1990s that never caught on the way some of his trademark techniques and concepts have (Six Thinking Hats, the term “Lateral Thinking”). A flowscape is designed to give the thinker a topographical view of his or her stream of consciousness around an idea, theme or topic. The book Water Logic, which introduced the technique, is unfortunately out of print.

The diagramming used to construct a flowscape looks superficially like those in more familiar knowledge mapping techniques, like the concept mapping or mind mapping strategies discussed in Distributed Cognition. Flowscaping serves a very different purpose. Where knowledge mapping techniques are design to use free association for brainstorming, the object of flowscaping it to capture free associations in the order they occur and analyze which are dominant, which thoughts lead to which.

As such, flowscaping is not expressly a problem-solving technique. A flowscape enables a more objective view of how a problem is viewed subjectively. Once we see the pattern in front of us, it’s easier to make interventions in that pattern. Flowscapes are entirely subjective, since they’re schematics of the flowscaper’s perception. Because they depend on the individual’s perception, it’s important to recognize that there’s no “right” flowscape for a situation. If three managers each constructed a flowscape about making a policy for employee tardiness, they would probably look very different while being equally valid.

How to make flowscapes

Let’s try constructing a flowscape. Here’s the procedure:

Decide on a subject for the flowscape. In this case, we’ll pick “Commuting to and from work.”

Construct a base list. A base list is a stream-of-consciousness list of thoughts, items, factors, considerations or ideas about a topic. Each thought is listed on a separate line, enumerated alphabetically at the beginning of each line. A base list for our subject might look something like:

1. Long drive
2. Gas is getting more expensive
3. Traffic on the 110 is perpetually clogged
4. How to make the commute more pleasant
5. Modes of transit
6. Things to do while driving
7. Need to leave earlier
8. Errands to run along the way
9. Possibility of telecommuting

The main guideline is to write down each item as it occurs to you. Avoid thinking too hard in an attempt to create a “comprehensive” list of considerations. Completeness is not the point (a base list can have a half-dozen items or 20), nor is the objective “importance” of the items. We’re only looking for what immediately comes to mind, what enters the flow of attention, not what’s retroactively judged to matter most after second-guessing.

Going down the list, one at a time, decide for each item which other item on the list it leads to. For instance, as I look at Long drive, the item on the list it seems to associate into most easily is Traffic on the 110 is perpetually clogged. For Gas is getting more expensive, what comes next to my mind is Modes of transit, since driving is typically a more expensive commuting option. When you’ve picked the connecting item, write its letter on the right side of the current item. So the line Long drive would look like:

1. Long drive C

The order of any base list will depend on the individual’s perception of the subject. Another person looking at Long drive might see Need to leave earlier as the connecting item. This is just as valid as my pick for traffic on the 110. If you come to an item on the list that seems to reasonably flow to two or more other items, just pick the one that’s slightly more compelling; if all else fails, guess. A completed base list would look something like this:

1. Long drive C
2. Gas is getting more expensive E
3. Traffic on the 110 is perpetually clogged G
4. How to make the commute more pleasant F
5. Modes of transit I
6. Things to do while driving H
7. Need to leave earlier C
8. Errands to run along the way G
9. Possibility of telecommuting A

Make the flowscape using letter indicators to represent the items. We draw an arrow from each line’s letter indicator to its connecting line’s letter indicator. For Long drive we draw:

We continue this procedure for all of the points. A completed first draft of a flowscape would look something like this:

More often than not you will need to make another draft. You may have arrows that cross each other. You might have an item with two or more items leading into it: these are called collectors. There might be two or more items that lead into each other: these are stable loops. In any case, these will create layout issues that need to be cleaned up for clarity. Ordinarily, flowscapes are done by hand with pen and paper, but that would have looked crude for a blog post. When flowscaping by hand, there’s no need to encircle the letters with bubbles unless you find it graphically appealing.

What to do with a flowscape

Great, we have a pretty diagram. So what? Since any one flowscape can only show certain aspects of the issues you might run into, I’ll stick to addressing the above example, and discuss other flowscaping issues in further posts. For now, let’s see what to look for the salient features in a flowscape:

Collectors: A point that has two or more points leading to it is called a collector. Some collectors have two points, some have six, or what-have-you. The more points a collector has leading to it, the more likely it is to be a dominant idea. Sometimes just glancing at a collector and seeing how many points lead to it reveals how preoccupied you are with one aspect of a subject. Shifting your emphasis to a less obvious point on the flowscape may jog new ideas or perspectives on a subject.

The Commuting flowscape has only one collector: A-C-G. C has only two points leading two it: A and G. Referencing our base list, we see that Long drive leads to Traffic on the 110 is perpetually clogged, which leads to Need to leave earlier. Leaving earlier might alleviate the problem, but if freeway congestion in continually increasing (implied by “perpetually clogged”), leaving earlier might turn out to be an unscalable short-term solution. One counterintuitive alternative would be to take a different freeway whose entrance is farther from home but fairly untrafficked. Taking the 5 Freeway to the 134 may add 3 miles distance but cut the commute time by a third. By taking a snapshot of the thinking pattern involved, we can reexamine it more easily and change our assumptions. The path of least resistance, to go with the flow, would have been to go along with the first assumption that leaving earlier is the best approach.

Stable loops: Without exception, each flowscape will contain at least one stable loop. The stable loop in our example is C-G: the preoccupation with leaving earlier to circumvent traffic. Some loops involve more than two points. What debaters refer to as “circular logic” is an example of a stable loop, but stable loops aren’t limited to logic. Flowscapes capture the flow of perception, so one point can lead to another for any reason. The base list that generated the flowscape was a free association, and it’s unlikely that the list would be in a logical order. Notice that the items on the example list tend to be phrases and sentence fragments rather than complete propositions. Perception is like that. The flow of perception is what de Bono calls water logic, which requires perpeptual tools rather than analytical tools to work with.

Water logic refers to how the brain’s nerve networks behave as a self-organizing patterning system. Information enters into and flows through these networks as a series of neural activations that ultimately settle into stable patterns (for more information see de Bono’s The Mechanism of Mind). Hence the inevitability of at least one loop in the flowscape. If your flowscape lacks a stable loop somewhere, reexamine your base list. Something in the flowscape is bound to be wrong.

Links: Each link can and should be examined carefully for possible interventions. D-F is a link between How to make the commute more pleasant and Things to do while driving. What immediately comes to my mind is improving the music playlist I drive along to. But swiching to H opens up the possibility of making the commute more pleasant through the sense of accomplishment of getting errands done enroute to and from work

That’s enough of pumping neurons for now. We’ll cover some more ground on flowscapes in later posts.