Fostering Creative Engagement Through the Use of Collaborative Visual Mapping

Collaborative visual mapping is proposed in this chapter as a vehicle for exposing and exchanging individual and culturally engrained assumptions, beliefs, and values as a foundation for self-organizing and negotiating distributed leadership (DL) relationships in diverse groups. Findings gained from a transdisciplinary case study suggest that one should focus on emerging interrelationships between group members (not the people themselves) as well as the interrelationships between the chosen roles members take on (not the roles themselves). It was shown that hierarchies in leadership and followership are constructed and dismantled during creative group engagement, shared and exchanged, and guided by the shifting dynamics in diverse groups (the whole gestalt), not by individual actors (as would be the case in traditional leadership practice). Key findings yield six recommendations for curating DL: using creative engagement to reveal the capacities of all group members, engaging group members creatively to stimulate flow states, expanding from binary to multipositional models of leadership and followership, optimizing group diversity, encouraging the celebration of diverse perspectives, and exposing the patterns of emerging interrelationships among group members through visual mapping.