The Mapping Phase: Wearing the Technician Hat

Once the vision is seeded and the design begins to take form, we enter the Mapping Phase — the part where that vision gets translated into structure. This is where the Technician Hat comes into play.

This role isn’t just about pushing buttons or filling in fields — it’s about stewarding the bridge between imagination and visualization. It’s where we turn conceptual clarity into actionable structure. It’s where we build the container that will later hold insight, story, and transformation.

Wearing the Technician Hat means:

• 🧭 Navigating alongside Visionaries and SenseMakers — with patience, humility, and clarity. They may not make your job easier, but they make it matter. Your role is to translate their dreams into forms that can be lived in.
• 🧶 Understanding data-flows — especially the concept of evergreen data (data that can be updated over time rather than needing full re-entry).
• 🧩 Supporting good survey design — helping collaborators make choices that will yield clean, analyzable, and useful data. (Example: use dropdowns for predictable data like states instead of open text fields.)
• 🪄 Designing Kumu views with clarity in mind — always asking, “What will help someone see this system more clearly?”
• 🧹 Keeping data clean — resolving duplicates, ensuring consistency, tracking changes with care.
• 🎯 Making tweaks to sumApp without data loss — and adjusting Kumu accordingly to maintain functionality.
• 📚 Learning the underlying tools — especially sumApp and Kumu, their features, limits, and potential.
• 🌱 Building the infrastructure with future use in mind — because maps that adapt can grow with the system they reflect.

This phase is invisible when done well — but foundational. The Technician lays the groundwork for insight to emerge. Without this role, we risk mistaking a tangle of data for a map.

And yet — the map is not the end. It is a threshold.