Relationship mapping

What it is

Relationship mapping is a powerful tool that helps you understand services as systems made of people and their relationships. Services are created and consumed through systems of relationships between people, things and processes. In order to innovate within these systems, it is important to understand the network of relationships between the people and organisations that make a service work - or that fail to make a service work. Relationship mapping helps you visualise those relationships.

What you get

People are an implicit part of a service experience - whether as providers or receivers of the service - and relationship mapping helps you capture all stakeholders involved and understand how they currently work together. We usually work with participants to explore the relationships that they can influence - and those that they can’t. We also ask them to qualify the nature of these relationships in terms of their purpose and what makes them succeed or fail.  By the end of the exercise, you’ll end up with a comprehensive map describing the connections between individuals, groups, organisations and society. Visualising a system of relationships as a whole gives participants a “way-in” to redefining those relationships, roles and responsibilities to seeing how changes impact on each other.

A relationship map developed for NESTA

When to use it

We tend to use relationship mapping as part of the discovery stage, where we try to gain as many insights as possible. It is a great starting point for us to identify what changes need to be made in terms of people, roles and responsibilities as well as interactions. The relationship map can evolve from describing the current situation into specifying people’s roles for the new service and can become part of the Service Specification Document.