Shitty Maps: A Trojan Horse for Sensemaking
Summary
You’ve made shitty-looking maps before. The rough sketch on a napkin while you were figuring out what you actually thought. The boxes-and-arrows scrawl on a whiteboard that helped the room land somewhere. The marginal doodle that did more work than the deck it sat next to. You probably hid them, or threw them away, or recreated them somewhere fancier or “more acceptable” before showing anyone. This session is about not doing that anymore. Polish is a trap. A finished-looking map either gets waved through—it looks done, so it must be right–or the room balks because they weren’t part of figuring it out. Either way, your map is treated as something fixed, and the thinking stops. The rough version doesn’t have that problem. It stays in motion. It invites the room in. And it’s faster than the “real” tools, which only feel fast because they look legitimate while you’re using them. We’ll dig into why looking shitty works, then practice making rough maps together, and the skill behind the practice that makes the whole thing come together.
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