Mapping, Packing and Storytelling

…because you’re really not smart enough to afford to lose 80 IQ points!

“Perspective is worth ±80 IQ points” — said a really smart guy that invented OOP and the concepts behind all modern GUIs (I just added the plus/minus sign)

Or in other words, it matters A LOT what our perspective on things is. Whether we see and talk about things as:

• Maps of concepts
• Packages of isolated infos
• Stories about things and people

And it matters because we can choose how to think or talk about something. And at the bottom of this article there’s even a nice “How to get your +80 IQ pts. cheatsheet” table… but it won’t really make sense without the context, so read on…

Some folks thought of dividing people into “Mappers” and “Packers”. Mappers are the smart guys that can really connect the dots into complicated maps of the world inside their heads, and use these maps to invent new things and change the world. Packers are the dumb people that only store isolated purpose-labeled packages of information in their heads but can’t see the connections between them.

Some also talk a lot about the power of stories and all that stuff.

But I believe that thinking in maps and thinking in packs and thinking in stories are really three different “mind modes”, or combinations of matching perspective + learning style + communication style, that one can choose to use in different situations. Unfortunately most people don’t realize that they can choose, so their minds fall into one of the default modes and they get labeled as “mappers” or “packers” or “story tellers”.

Now let’s explore the pros and cons of these three “mind-modes” and learn how to properly switch between them to gain those mythical +80 IQ points:

Thinking in Maps

I’ll start with this mind-mode because it is what lots of smart people call the ideal. It’s the mode that tends to be associated with bright and creative people that really see the connections.

As a perspective, thinking in maps means seeing the world as:

• Things connected by Relationships (nothing is isolated!)
• all Things and Relationships on either the same Map (or on a few maps that are themselves connected by lots of inter-map-relationships)
• a huge number of Paths that you can follow to get from any One Thing to any Other Thing
• there should be No Contradictory Information, like something being both true and false… people thinking in maps spend huge amount of brainpower on “idea reconciliation” to avoid “splitting their map”. Or they really try to sort out how something “truly is”. And most also aspire to “one grand theory of everything”.

As a communication style, communicating in maps means that you need to figure out how to “break apart” bunches of things together with their relationships in way that can be easily delivered to others. This “break apart” step is hard. Even painful to some. And this is why many map-mode oriented thinkers tend to become what we call introverts.

Visual communication is most of the time the only way of getting enough bandwidth to push maps form one brain to another. But this does not mean that thinking in maps is the same things as visual thinking. Phylosophers tend to think in words but have complicated webs of concepts in their heads. But unless you want to produce a piece of writing so complex that it will take years of study to decipher, you’ll kind of have to use visual communication with lots of textual annotations to share a map. This is why the delivery step of communicating maps used to be such a bottleneck before the invention of multi-media-capable personal networked devices. And this is why people that think mainly in maps tend to be much more communicative nowadays. After all, the WWW is kind of a giant multi-mind-map.

Now, learning while thinking in maps is a pretty… unpredictable process. As you learn, at first, you need to take every new concept and either (a) break it apart and re-assemble it into pieces that can be connected to your existing map or (b) refactor the relevant portion of your map so you can easily fit the new concept. This is why people who think in maps, while they are at the early stage of learning something new, are seen as “slow” or “not that sharp” by fellow package-mode-thinkers. But smart mappers tend to get very good at step (b), refactoring their map. Refactoring allows mappers to quickly end up with a new version of their map where new information can be instantly “snapped in”. So after the early “slow” stage, learning in maps gets very fast, and new concepts can even be “guessed” before they are actually learned because they are indicated by the shape of the map. At this stage, people who learn in maps tend to be re-labeled from “slow” to “gifted” or “genius” because they simply leave everyone else way behind…

Thinking in Pack(age)s

Using the name “packers” for people that prefer to do more “thinking in packages” is in my view a pretty bad thing. It sounds really dumb, and it brings to mind images like this:

…which is a bad thing, because it downplays the great practical advantages of this way of thinking. And IMHO these advantages were pretty huge if natural selections brought us to a point where more than 80% of people are what we’d call “packers”. Or what we ought to call “people inclined to think in terms of mostly-isolated purpose-labeled packages of knowledge”.

Now, let’s see the perspective of someone thinking in pack(age)s:

• knowledge is grouped in Packages, mostly isolated from each other
• labels of Purpose are given to each Package (like “how to repair the car”, “stuff to know to pass next exam” or “strategies to increase quarterly profit”)
• Contradictory Pieces of Knowledge can exist, as long as they’re not in the same Package

At first, this way of thinking sounds pretty bad, especially compared to thinking in maps. But when you think about it having infos grouped in independent packs labeled by purpose, like “car repair” and “basic thermodynamic for next exam” is quite practical. That knowledge of basic thermodynamics is very unlikely to help you repair a modern car anyway. So why even bother keeping the interconnections between “car repair” and “basic thermodynamics” around?! Lose the mostly-useless links, and have two neat packs instead! After that exam you can even throw the second pack away and make room for something new and more useful.

When it comes to communication, thinking in packages has a huge advantage: it’s very easy to share isolated packages of information. Plain old words suffice most of the time. Photos and videos are good… but you’ll mostly use them for emphasis as words are simply “good enough”.

An this ease of communication lends easily to collaborative problem solving. You tend to see people that think in packages hanging around in…packs. The pack works well together, but they also tend to get stuck together. Because they’ve shared the same packs of knowledge, they lack the same connections that may be needed to make progress on a hard problem.

…so an “effective wolf-pack” can easily become a “useless flock of sheep”, unless they have some map-thinking people around to help them find an alternate path around the obstacle they got stuck at.

When learning, people thinking in packs can swiftly ingest large numbers of packs of knowledge, and get very fast to a basic-competency level… provided they have access to these pre-made neat packages of information. So when learning in packages thinking mode, you are really dependent on good teachers to bake these packs for you. And on good learning materials, like byte-sized tutorials or well structured books. When learning in pack-mode, you don’t need to spend time trying to place the new information in the right place on your existing map or to even have to take time off to redraw portions of your inner mind map. Just throw the pack into your mind’s “cargo bay” and move one. Move on fast!

…just like we’re moving on right now, to the next mind-mode:

Thinking in Stories

Now, map-mode thinking is great when you have to explore a novel problem. And pack-mode thinking is great when you need to quickly solve a known problem.

But what about when you need to explain to someone how to solve a complicated problem? Or maybe you need to explain it to yourself so you can find the flaws in it (like in rubber-duck-debugging). Or you need to convince someone that your idea is a good idea. This is where thinking in stories comes in.

a good story is like a well-drawn path on a map, with some interesting characters added to captivate your attention

You see, maps have too many connections and there are too many possible paths. Huge confusion arises when you try to explain something using only a map because there are simply too many possible paths between any two points. And pre-packaged knowledge has too few connections for it to be able to actually explain something.

Thinking in stories is about

• following a predetermined Path in a predetermined Direction, so only a few of the connections you’d normally see on a mind map are visible, and the order you move through them is fixed
• having an Epic Core with “something cool happening” and a Beginning that makes people curious about how it will End and is actually enticing enough to captivate people’s attention
• adding Extra Stuff that will sound interesting and work as a subtle way to guide people’s attention to the important bits (like the pictures in this article for example)
• being able to break up the story in Packages, or chapters, or smaller short-stories, if it get too long: because a story is useless if it’s too long or boring to keep the reader’s attention

As it’s probably obvious by know, stories are great for explaining and learning, as long as you have a good teacher that also emphasizes that “there is more to how things actually work than the story says, so go and hunt for more information and make up your own map!”.

…but you all know what stories are actually good at:

• convincing people
• selling, aka “convincing someone to buy something” or “explaining to someone that he/she needs to buy something”).
• manipulating, aka “convincing someone that what you want them to do is what they should do”

All good sales and marketing people need to be good story tellers. And polyticians too. And I won’t dwell on this too much because others have written volumes about “how to sell (yourself) (with) a story” and so on …nasty (and powerful) stuff.

I will stress though that thinking in stories does not mean “thinking in words”. You can have very good graphical novels. Or things like the awesome visual-story-explanations by the RSA folks:

…and now we can get to the “getting your extra 80 IQ pts.” cheatsheet:

How to effectively use the right mind-modes to get your +80 IQ pts.

(the table above is a GitHub gist, lovingly awaiting your pull requests, so come and contribute!)