What computers can't do: hexagonal thinking

I'm working on an advisory project at the moment where the team in charge is largely remote: we're all spread around the world and the people organising things spend too much time in front of Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. The result? Lots of text gets sent back and forth and that text is festooned with bullet points, numbers and linear thinking.

I first came across the antithesis to this from the creator of "the learning organisation" concept Arie de Geus' The Living Company: hexagonal thinking. Hexagonal thinking involves writing down key components of knowledge, observation and understanding on hexagons, not in lists, and then placing them in patterns that show the connections between ideas, and the connections between clusters of those ideas and other clusters. It is complexity made simple.

De Geus had found that when he and executives were trying to help insurance people better understand their complex products, the expensive computer simulations they had developed were not doing the job: staff were too busy trying to "win" the simulation that the more significant, and complex, information about the products was lost. With the introduction of hexagonal thinking those complex connections were made swiftly and deeply.

In the classroom does this work? Of course! And it was my good friend Chris Harte who showed me how it could be done with something as banal, and complex, as French grammar:

Chris has since gone slightly crazy about hexagons, and presented on it in his new home of Melbourne, Australia, at his local TeachMeet:

I only wish bureaucrats also thought in hexagons...

Comments

[monika hardy]

have you seen/used http://www.thebrain.com/ and/or http://www.instagrok.com/ ?

[Reza Bokat]

What is the advantage of hexagons over squares?

[Ewan McIntosh]

Life is more complex than 4? Or that making clear causal links between two ideas and the original idea is easier with a shape like a hexagon than it is with a square (where two ideas connecting might lead to a false connection being made with a third idea?)

[hambudge]

How about a "Wallwisher" type site where various polygons could be linked like jigsaws joining concepts and ideas? I think that would be the cat's pyjamas.

[Chris Harte]

Triptico have developed an excellent hexagon tool here http://www.triptico.co.uk/thinklink.html currently it is only at this link but it will be launched as part of their new app.