Most families and small teams have two versions of themselves. One is the version everybody describes: who is in charge, who does what, how decisions get made. The other is the version everybody lives: who actually gets listened to, who avoids whom, who carries the emotional weight when something goes wrong. The gap between the two is where a great deal of frustration comes from.
Relationship mapping is a way of drawing the second version so that it can be discussed. I have used it with extended families in Lagos, with diaspora households in London, with founders in Abuja and with charity teams in the Midlands. The format changes a little each time. The effect is usually the same. People see something on paper that they had felt for years and never named.
Where the idea comes from
The tool has its roots in family therapy. Monica McGoldrick, Randy Gerson and Sueli Petry set out the method in Genograms: Assessment and intervention, which has been a standard text for clinicians for decades. A genogram is a family tree with extra information. Alongside births, marriages and deaths, it records the quality of relationships: close, distant, conflicted, cut off. It usually covers at least three generations, because that is where the most useful patterns show up.
McGoldrick and her colleagues found that families often repeat relational patterns without realising it. A grandmother who cut off contact with her sister, a mother who did the same, a daughter who now finds herself not speaking to her own sibling. Each generation experiences its conflict as personal and unique. On the page, the family can see that it is also inherited.
Salvador Minuchin, who developed structural family therapy, added another layer. In Families and family therapy he described the boundaries that separate parts of a family, such as the parents, the children and the grandparents. Some families have boundaries so loose that everyone is involved in everything and nobody has privacy, which Minuchin called enmeshed. Others have boundaries so rigid that members hardly affect each other at all, which he called disengaged. Most families have a mix, and a map makes that mix visible.
The same thinking applies at work. Rob Cross and Andrew Parker, in The hidden power of social networks, showed that the informal networks inside organisations often bear little resemblance to the organisation chart. The people others rely on for information, advice and energy may sit two or three levels down. Some of them are overloaded because so much flows through them.
A story from London
I know of a mother in Peckham who came to a session because she felt she was losing her teenage sons. She had raised them largely alone after moving from Lagos, and her own mother still lived in Surulere.
When she drew her map, she put herself in the centre with thick lines to both boys. Then she added her mother, and something became obvious. Every major decision about the boys, from school choices to curfews, was discussed first on the phone with her mother, often in Yoruba, often late at night. The boys had never been part of those conversations. They experienced the decisions as sudden and imposed, and they had started to resist all of them.
Nobody in the family was doing anything wrong. The grandmother was offering wisdom. The mother was seeking support. The boys were asking, in the only way they knew, to be included. The map showed a boundary drawn around the adults that shut the teenagers out at exactly the age when they needed to start taking part.
She did not stop calling her mother. She did start holding a short family conversation every Sunday evening where decisions for the week were talked through with the boys before they were made. Within a few months, she described the house as quieter.
How to draw your own map
You need a large sheet of paper, a pencil and about an hour.
Start by writing your name in the centre. Around it, add the people who most affect your daily life. In a family, that usually means everyone in the household and the relatives who have real influence, even if they live in another city or another country. In a team, it means your colleagues, your manager and anyone outside the team whose decisions shape your work.
Next, draw the lines. A solid line for a relationship that feels close and reliable. A dotted line for one that feels distant. A jagged line where there is ongoing tension. A line with a break in it where contact has stopped altogether.
Then add movement. Draw arrows to show where information travels, where decisions are made, and where difficult news tends to go first. Mark with a small star the people others lean on when things go wrong.
If it is a family, go back one generation and add your parents’ and grandparents’ relationships as best you know them. Some people discover patterns here that surprise them.
Finally, sit with the page and ask a few questions. Where is there a lot of traffic running through one person? Who is at the edge, and do they want to be? Which relationships appear to be carried by someone in between? Which patterns seem to repeat?
Doing it as a group
Mapping alone is useful. Mapping together is where things shift. When I run this with a family or team, each person draws their own map first, and then we lay them side by side.
The one rule is that nobody defends their lines. If your colleague draws a dotted line to you and you had drawn a solid one back, the task is to get curious about the difference. Arguing over whose map is correct defeats the purpose.
What usually emerges is a shared picture that nobody could have drawn on their own. A family in Abuja discovered that the youngest daughter was the only person every other member had drawn a solid line to. She was twenty two, and she had been quietly holding the family together through her parents’ separation. A team in Leeds found that their manager had drawn herself close to everyone, while half the team had drawn her as distant. Both findings were painful and both were useful.
What to do with what you find
The map is a starting point. What matters is the conversation it opens and the small changes that follow.
I ask each person to choose one line they want to change over the next month and one small action that would begin to change it. It might be a weekly call with a sibling, a direct conversation that has been avoided, or handing a decision back to the people it actually concerns. Small actions are easier to sustain, and a changed relationship tends to shift the ones around it.
Mapping also helps with planning. Families preparing for a wedding, a funeral or the care of an elderly parent can see in advance where tension is likely and who might need support. Teams facing a restructure can see which informal connections are about to be broken.
A family or team is a living system. It is shaped by history, by habit and by relationships that nobody chose on purpose. Drawing it will not solve every difficulty, but it gives you something better than the next argument to work from, and it lets everyone see the same picture at the same time.
Relationship mapping: seeing your family or team as it actually is
