The Three General Phases

🌀Three Phases, One Living Cycle

There are no hard and fast absolutes about the process of Social System Mapping. As you proceed, your network will naturally constrain, re-frame, and co-generate its own path to your collectively-desired end-point. And you should invite that — because without the community’s ultimate ownership, the map won’t live up to its greatest potential for guiding and giving insight to your network.

Still — without at least a little planning ahead, the project can quickly spin out of control, or just as easily grind to a halt. I don’t want that to happen to you, so I offer up our experience as a starting point. Consider what follows as a place to begin thinking about the process — based on experience across many different contexts. But know that it’s only a beginning. You should indulge your creative impulses. Make it your own.

The phases outlined here could easily be sub-divided, collapsed, blended. There’s overlap. Circling back. Fuzziness. I wouldn’t advise over-thinking it — because whatever you imagine at the beginning, the process will take you somewhere different.

So — jump in.
Start where the people are.
Do what you can.
Then go back, revisit, deepen.
Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.
Let it emerge.

Having said all that — here’s how I think about the three core phases:

🔭 Envisioning

This is everything that happens to get a project underway — before there’s anything meaningful to look at. If a map doesn’t yet exist for a specific group and you want to help that group make one, you’re in the Envisioning phase. You’re wearing the Visionary Hat.

Your imagination is engaged with what could exist — but you can’t build it alone. Social System Mapping is inherently collaborative.

This is the time to invite others in, gather clarity about purpose, and begin sensing what kind of map your network needs — and why. It’s also where the Storytelling Hat first appears: helping name what called the map into being, and weaving a narrative that others can connect with.

🛠 Mapping

Mapping, in this context, means everything related to the online interfaces — sumApp setup and administration, Kumu setup and view design, the data-flow work needed to get information from sumApp into Kumu, and whatever interface choices you make to share the map with your community.

If your questions fall into this category, you’re probably wearing the Technician Hat — the one focused on structure, clarity, and function.

Storytelling continues here too — helping make the technical choices legible, the design intentional, and the process inviting. Sometimes that’s a simple framing sentence in an email; sometimes it’s a metaphor that helps your team stay oriented in complexity.

🧠 SenseMaking

SenseMaking is what you do with the map. It’s the reason you built it in the first place — the process of using it to gain insight, reflect, learn, and support action.

This phase includes:

• Exploring the map with community members

• Connecting the visual to lived experience

• Asking good questions together

• Embedding the map in network practices and rhythms

• Helping others use it to meet their own goals

If your imagination lights up here — or this is when your energy kicks in — you’re likely wearing the SenseMaker Hat.

And again, the Storytelling Hat is present — helping distill insights, surface tensions, highlight patterns, and communicate meaning across different audiences. The story becomes a bridge between the map and the movement.

🔁 It’s Not a Line — It’s a Cycle

SenseMaking doesn’t end the process — it feeds the next round.

When you’ve worked with the map, you start to see its limits. You discover new questions. New needs. New clarity. And that awareness brings you back around to the Envisioning phase — this time with deeper grounding, better questions, and more collaborators.

Social System Mapping is not a linear project — it’s a living cycle.
Each pass through the phases brings more coherence.
Each iteration reveals what the system is becoming.

And the Storytelling Hat?
Worn all the way through.

Let me know if you’d like this version dropped into a shared doc for easy editing, or if you’d like to pair it with a visual representation of the cycle.

Why think about each phase separately?