Business Thinking for Designers

The Team Mapping Tool
Time and time again, culture trumps strategy. What sounds like 
a simple and straightforward plan quickly evolves into different 
expectations of what the design should be. What works for one 
stakeholder is not working for another, and people in the room 
seem to be speaking past each other rather than listening. 

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Develop your business perspective
These are not great conditions to make quality business 
decisions and it’s not the time to try and address the 
misalignment. While strategy can be captured, culture is much 
more difficult to pin down. Next time, try a different type of 
preparation.
In her book The Culture Map, Erin Meyer introduces a visual 
diagramming tool called the Team Mapping Tool to help 
teammates better understand the cognitive, behavioral, and 
relational differences between one another. As a professor at 
INSEAD, a top international business school in Paris, Meyer 
developed this tool for organizations as a way to decode 
cultural differences so teams could better work together.
The tool includes a total of eight cultural dimensions with 
ranges of differences for each. As a quick workshop activity, 
this tool helps design teams understand how their preferred 
methods and styles of communication, decision-making, 
persuasion, etc. may be different than their cross-functional