Stephen Wolf — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:28:06 GMT

Indi, I’ve been a fan and practitioner of mental models for doing UX design – both when I was consultant and now working in-house as a UX manager at Symantec. So I was excited to see your book, and just bought a copy.

But recently I’ve been getting my head around a different aspect of mental models and mental maps – related to your examples from Visa and Webvan. It’s about mental maps of people within organizations and how people learn and unlearn.

This is a quote from “How Organizations Learn and Unlearn,” from the Handbook of Organizational Design (Oxford, 1981):

“Learners discover themselves and their environments; these discoveries lead to comprehending of reasons beyond events, and ultimately to mental maps of relevant aspects of the environment…. Learning thus encompasses the processes whereby learners iteratively map their environments and use their maps to alter their environments.”

Like your example about the gap between the mental maps of Webvan’s stakeholders and their end-users’ mental maps – around scheduling delivery windows – one of the keys to working with stakeholders is facilitating unlearning or relearning. But it’s a big challenge to try to change organizational myths and the way companies understand their environments and their customers.

If you see this post, I’d love to hear your thoughts on ways that you go about closing gaps between stakeholders’ mental models and those of their end-users and customers.

Thanks!

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Stephen Wolf