Metaphor Mapping: A visual tool for hands-on, highly practical, fast and increasingly considered a best practice for teambuilding

1. Metaphor Mapping Builds High-Performance Teams,
Fast!!
Solve a problem while you build a team!
Team-building involves establishing caring and constructive and helping behaviors that further a
group’s objectives. Those behaviors and the resulting group effectiveness are called teamwork.
If you want to build a team and teamwork, focus on something critical to their objectives. Have the
group address items like:
Showing how they fit into their environment. Who are the stakeholders in their success? What
values guide them? What problems or competitors are they facing? What are the groups
relationships with others?
What do they do? Define the components of their work and how they fit together. What doesn’t
work well? Why? What’s their vision of how they want their work to flow? Where will the benefits
be visible?
Explore the “soft side” of their interactions and reach group agreement about roles and behaviors
Plan a project or set of actions, such as how to achieve their vision. Establish clear responsibilities
Metaphor languages help the group achieve all this, and make it great fun at the same time!
In a metaphor language workshop, all the members are faced with the challenge of thinking in
metaphoric terms. They need help from each other to think visually and that makes them interact in
large and small ways. Members learn the perspectives of their collaborators and how problems in
one part of their work process affects others. By solving problems together, building visions and
plans together, they commit to each other and take joint ownership.
They’ve solved a problem and… become a team!