The journey maps pictured above are one of my favorite examples of collaborative mapping to date.

A large cross-organizational team at the University of New England in Australia gathered for a day, divided into groups, and mapped a series of adjacent student and applicant journeys (the rectangular maps shown at right).

The best part is that they didn’t stop there. A smaller team, working in parallel and continuing after the initial session, painstakingly remapped copies of these journeys onto a single, cohesive and connected student life cycle (shown at left). Incredible.

I particularly like how they chose to use the infinity-loop form of a customer lifecycle to visualize this. Not only is this form effective, it’s also visually stunning (more later about leveraging this to attract attention in your organization).

Best of all: according to the folks that we have been working with there, the work produced a lot of “low hanging fruit” — opportunities to improve the student experience that they simply hadn’t seen before when working inside-out, in their departmental silos. Moreover, the teams left aligned and motivated to act on the opportunities they discovered.

Amazing what a bias towards action produces.