Understanding the Structural Mapping Process

Intro: Welcome to Ripples of Radical Generosity. In this space, we trace the human stories inside systemic change, conversations about belonging, leadership, and the evolving systems that shape our shared future. Here, we follow the ripples and the people creating them.

Danielle: Okay, welcome back to Ripples of Radical Generosity. This is Danielle with a special guest Penelope Fridman today. Can you introduce yourself, Penelope?

Penelope: Hi. Happy to do so. My name is Penelope and I have actually been involved with Coralus before it actually became anything. So I had the fortune of meeting Vicki many, many, many years ago, and we sort of hit it off and clicked.

And when Vicki was sort of in a turning point in her life and career, we used the methodology that we’re gonna talk about a bit to uncover what was possible for Vicki and around an idea she had that ended up becoming. The seeds of what is now known as Coralyus. And for the last 20 plus years, I have been an independent consultant working with this very unique methodology with clients all around the world.

Everything from corporate work to organizations to personal work. And on top of that, during COVID, I became an executive coach, a personal coach. So I’ve also integrated the methodologies that I’ve always used in my consulting practice now into my coaching practice as well. So had the privilege of been working with many types of individuals and organizations for a number of years on every type of issue, problem, or opportunity that one could imagine.

And it’s been a great ride.

Danielle: Thanks, Penelope. So tell us what drew you to this methodology that we call the structural mapping process, and how did you happen upon it?

Penelope: Okay, so about, oh gosh, it’s gotta be like 24, 25 years ago. I had just finished a particular job that was not particularly fulfilling and was trying to figure out what my next move was.

And in one of my, let’s say corporate gigs, I had met someone who we started having a conversation about maybe starting a unique kind of consulting practice together. So as we were building out this idea, we were introduced to a brilliant man, a guy called Syd Kessler, who was very well known in the advertising world back in the day, and who was a completely spiritual, holistic thinker, not of this world, an amazing guy.

And as we were building out our consulting concept, we met with him to bounce this off, the idea off him. We got halfway through our presentation and he stopped us and he said, I’ve been waiting for you two. We went, okay, what does that mean? And he said, so I met a guy who has a thing. This is how Syd talked, met a guy who had a thing and he is asked me to take this thing out into the world and I’ve been waiting for the right people and I think you’re it.

Are you interested? So we were totally intrigued and said, yeah. So Syd introduced us to the person who actually developed the beta version of what we now call the structural mapping process. A fascinating guy in Winnipeg, a total genius, and we spent two years studying with him.

And then he said, you are the right people. I want you to take this out into the world. And we started our first company at that time with Syd, built around this methodology as our foundational tool that we always use when we’re working with clients. So that’s how we sort of got introduced to this whole thing. Total fluke.

Danielle: I love the origin story here and the lore. This is actually the first time that I’m hearing it too, because as a participant of one of the latest processes, it really has this definatory oracular kind of feeling to it. And so how does that translate into the consulting work and how you bring this into any kind of client that you’re working with?

Penelope: So when we first learned this methodology, which blew us away as it had blown Syd away, I thought, okay, this is so… I’ll use the word woo-woo-ey and unique and right-brained and intuitive driven. If we’re gonna work with this, our clients are obviously going to be more right brain, more creative, more entrepreneurial.

That’s what I truly thought. We went out there in the world, and this has now been over 20 years that we’ve been doing this, and to my surprise, most of our clients are Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies around the world. So we made a decision, once we had seen and learned this methodology that this gave us something revealed something that no other methodology any of us had ever used could do.

We all came from a marketing and advertising strategic background. So I had worked with many, many, sort of more traditional, let’s call them research tools, including focus groups and interviews and so on, and you realize that there were always issues with that.

And as we studied with the creator of the methodology, he was an econometrician and chief statistician of Manitoba for 10 years. So this man knew research and I’m gonna bore you a little bit, if that’s okay. In 1972, a man named Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel Prize in economics for something called the Impossibility Theorem or Arrows Paradox, and what Kenneth Arrow proved is that when you aggregate individual preference data, you forfeit logical consistency. So if I put that into sort of layman’s terms, much of our research methodology is based on going out, asking a whole bunch of people, here’s option A, option B, option C, what’s your first choice, your second choice, your third choice.

Collecting all that information, adding it up, seeing which one wins. In fact, many things like including our voting methodology, is based on this concept. What Kenneth Arrow proved is that when you do that, there is a logical flaw that you cannot bypass. You might as well flip coin. So if you think about it, that means that the great majority of our research methodologies that we’ve relied on to make huge decisions is flawed.

It’s meaningless. So Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel Prize and the world ignored the problem. Our predecessor and mentor, Understanding Econometrics, was probably one of the few people who could read the original proof and understand it said, that is why every piece of research I’ve ever seen in the province for the last 10 years, there’s a problem with it. We’ve always just sort of rationalized it away, said, I need to find a solution.

So over 20 years, he started testing and building and he ended up creating the beta version of what we use. So for us, when we learn this, we all of a sudden went, well, that is why all this stuff we’ve traditionally used, why it’s always been problematic, and now we know this, we can’t ignore it.

So we’re gonna put aside that other stuff. It has a a different role to play, but we are going to build our practice out using the SMP, the structural mapping process. Because it is the only tool we know that actually can reveal what it is the marketplace or the culture truly wants. It’s the only thing that can reveal that we know of, that can reveal what is it that we have permission to do.

Where is that space, that opportunity to do things, to get people to behave in a certain way, to purchase something, to choose something. It’s the only tool we know that can reveal. First of all, is this possible? And if it is possible, what are the emotional drivers that make that possible? So for us, traditional research is something that is fabulous to use with a map, once a map has been revealed to validate, to dig deeper into what’s the insights, but it is not the methodology to use to reveal what is it that the marketplace truly wants. And if you use traditional methodologies to do that, you’re gonna run into the logical flaw that you cannot bypass. So we made that decision.

That this is what we’re always going to use at the beginning of our consulting practice. And like I said, I really thought this was gonna be a hard sell for people, a little too out there for most people. And yet we’ve discovered that our clients understand. Well, they may not understand it, but there’s something about it that resonates with them and they buy into it.

So we use the methodology for ourselves to uncover what were the emotional drivers of success for our business, so we know what the attract are and who the audiences are. That makes sense for us to go after. And we’ve worked with some of the biggest companies and organizations around the world, which again was a very happy surprise for me.

Does that make a little bit of sense?

Danielle: Yeah, absolutely. I think something that you kept saying that was probably my favorite line in your piece is that we’re not creating the maps. The maps are being revealed. And before we get a little into the process itself, ’cause I know it can be really hard to understand exactly how this works is, you began our session by talking about the meme, the self-replicating loop, and I think if we’re talking about something that feels divinatory or woo-woo, this is really a concept that stems from science and nature. So talk a little bit about what that meme is and how it’s being revealed.

Penelope: Absolutely. And in fact, I’m glad you said that there is science behind this, and I think if there’s anything that I’ve realized for many, many years, I’ve always felt that that science and spirituality are two sides of the same coin.

And I think that the SMP is another example of that being true. So when we say a map is revealed, this is gonna sound strange, but it turns out that we actually all live in an infrastructure that is incredibly stable. And I think if Carl Jung was alive today, he would be so excited because he talked a lot about the collective unconscious.

What the map is revealing is the collective unconscious. There is something that we are all part of, and this is very much, I know part of the Coralus’ understanding. We are part of something so much bigger than just each unique individual. We are all connected and interconnected in ways that we don’t even fully understand.

So when we do the SMP process, we are actually using participants almost like portals into that collective shared space, and we are downloading through those individuals. They are not revealing, it’s being downloaded through them, and it emerges in the shape of a map. So in the same way that when you want to go on the internet, which if you think about it, the perfect analogy is the internet.

It’s everywhere and it’s nowhere. You cannot download all of the internet. You cannot see the internet. It doesn’t matter what computer you use to get onto the internet because you are bypassing the personal drives. And what you’re doing is you are inputting into a computer what is the territory of the space that I want to see downloading it through the computer terminal.

In the same way, when we do an SMP, we are developing what we call a desired outcome statement as simple statement of what success could look like. We are using that to identify which part of that shared collective space do we want to see. And then downloading it through the individuals in the room and it emerges in the shape of a map.

And you talked about one of the components on a map. So a map often looks a little bit like a transit map. There are places that start the system and then there are arrows that show the emotional journeys that people need to take. And what we look for in a map is there a space where all of those pathways converge into a self-replicating self-perpetuating loop?

A sequence that just repeats and repeats and repeats and goes around and around and around. We call that a meme. And if there is a meme map, it means that that desired outcome statement as it is expressed, there is permission in the marketplace for, or the culture for that to happen. So it’s good news if you see at least one meme in a map. And if you’re interested, the word meme itself is really interesting.

When we started this work 20 plus years ago, nobody had heard of the term meme. No one knew what that was. Then it’s become a very, very popular term in pop culture. You know, there’s internet memes and cat memes and fashion memes, and there is a, I think the pop culture definition is pretty lightweight.

Where the term meme originally came from was from Richard Dawkins in the 70s when he wrote a book called The Selfish Gene. And he was talking about the interplay of genes in the world today, and he did a little bit of a thought experiment in that book where he said, we have always been conditioned to believe that there is only one replicator on our planet.

A genetic replicator called DNA and a very simple definition of a gene or DNA is a self-replicating, self-perpetuating sequence of biological information. That’s how everything on this planet replicates stays alive, right? We know that. We know what DNA does. We know our bodies are reproducing DNA trillions of times a day.

That’s what keeps us going. But he said there is a second replicator with the advent of culture. And he called it a meme using the Greek word esis, which means to copy or to replicate. And he said a meme is a self-replicating, self perpetuating sequence of information, and it replicates. Again, and again.

And I love that because if you think about this from a marketing perspective and the concept of a brand, to me, a brand is a perfect example of why memes exist. Because if memes didn’t exist, you couldn’t have something such as a brand. If you think about it, a brand is a shared understanding of what something represents in the world.

Anywhere you go in the world, if you ask, what does Volvo represent? People are going to say…

Danielle: Safety.

Penelope: Safety, exactly. So doesn’t matter where you go, doesn’t matter who you talk to, no one knows where that even came from. They just know that Volvo represents safety. That is the perfect example of a meme, that there is a series of emotions that are connected to something that everybody intuitively understands and recognizes and shares.

And with the advent of the internet, we actually can now see replication in real time. So when you share a link, when you like something, those are measures of replication. When you are loyal to something that’s replication, when you buy something again and again, that’s replication. When you talk about something that’s replication, right?

So we have had examples of memes all around us. We just didn’t know until Richard Dawkins recognized it and gave it a name that it is something real, a meme. So when we look at a map, when we do a map, what we’re really doing is downloading the memetic structure against a desired outcome. And the first thing we look for, is there a meme in that map?

And there may be more than one, but that means that that desired outcome is possible.

Danielle: Yes, definitely. I think one thing that I’d love to unpack is the process for doing this mapping and what is being revealed ’cause I think it’s quite unique, and you touched on it a little bit earlier, saying that you’re removing this layer of rationality and logic, and so tell us a little bit about how we produce those memes or the map that is becoming revealed.

Penelope: Sure. If you think about it, whenever we do traditional research, we ask people what they think, feel, want, like about something. You are tapping into people’s personal biases and beliefs, right? You cannot prevent that. You’re getting into that more logical, linear thinking of people, and there are psychological issues that emerge.

Because people sometimes don’t even know what they know or they don’t even, they certainly don’t know what they don’t know. And people may have hidden agendas. They may have biases. That all comes out when you consciously ask someone what they think, feel, believe, or know about something. You can’t avoid that about when we do the structural mapping process, we are never asking those questions.

We don’t even care whether you like something, hate something. I always joke and I say, if we want to do a map on how to sell more peanut butter, the only thing the participants in the room need to know or be aware of is what is peanut butter? They need to have a baseline understanding of peanut butter.

They may hate it. They may want to do everything in their power to prevent peanut butter ever being sold, but it will not make a difference because we’re bypassing those personal filters and beliefs. So what we do in a mapping session, and this is gonna sound very strange, and I often use the analogy that it’s like asking someone who has never seen the color red.

If you’re describing red, you can spend hours trying to talk about red, but until you experience red and see it, it’s probably not gonna make a hundred percent worth of sense. A little bit about when we talk about the structural mapping process, but what we do is we bring a group of people together who again, have a baseline understanding of the subject matter.

They don’t like if we’re doing it with a corporation. The CEO could be there and the most junior person does not matter, and each person is equally valid and has the same access to the information as anyone else, so it’s a great equalizer when you’re in the session. We have prediscussed and landed on a simple desired outcome before the session, and a desired outcome needs to be obviously aspirational.

Simple, straightforward, easy to understand, and most important, have no presuppositions as to how you’re gonna get there built in. So for example, we’ve worked with a lot of banks and they always start with, they want to use the desired outcome of I trust Bank X. And we always say to them, we could do a map on that and it will reveal the map to trusting Bank X.

But you have made a presupposition that trust is the most important driver. And you know what? That may be true, it may not be true, but let’s do the map to truly reveal what’s important. So we’ll say, perhaps it would be better to do something like, I choose Bank X and let’s let the map reveal what those drivers are.

Okay, so we have our desired outcome, and then in the session we have two very tightly facilitated exercises. And the first exercise is when we use random words to help us reveal what the 10 most important themes are around that desired outcome. And again, we don’t ask your your opinions. We have 10 pairs of words.

And we use each word pair as stimuli to rub against each other and the desired outcome statement. We triangulate these things to reveal these various themes. That’s how we reveal the 10 key themes. Then the second exercise is where, again, using a very, very carefully facilitated exercise, we determine the relationship between these, themes.

And again, it’s not, what do you like? What do you think? What do you know? It’s very, very, very different. So we identify the linkages between the themes and then. All we do is draw those linkages. There’s no interpretation here. We draw the linkages and a map will emerge.

Danielle: Just to give everybody a sense of what we mean by random words and nouns.

When I was sitting here doing the SMP with Penelope and a few people last Fall, there was literally a bag of nouns. Kind of like when you’re playing Scrabble and you’re pulling out of the bag. And this is kind of the divinatory process that I was relating to because it’s similar to the way in which we pull Oracle card decks.

There’s something in there. Something in the seemingly nonsensical. You might receive two pairs of words that seem completely random and totally opposite spectrum. For example, one of the pairs that really stood out for us, we had the word tattoo with the word bum. And so what do people do with these words when they come up as pairs?

Penelope: So to describe that a little bit more, we have randomly selected a hundred simple nouns that we’ve written on poker chips and put in a bag and we use the same bag of words irrespective of the subject matter of the client ’cause sometimes people will think that you’ve preselected words that make sense for the business.

I always love, ’cause we know synchronicity is synchronicity, and it’s always amazing which words get pulled. There’s obviously some connection there. When we have our 10 pairs of words. We have two very, very random words, and what we’re asking people to do is, let’s say you said tattoo and bum. We’ll say bummed is something to tattoo. Tattoo does something to bum.

When you put those two words together, an idea, a thought, a memory, and experience, it doesn’t matter what. Something comes to mind. Take whatever’s coming to your mind, whatever it may be, and then rub it against our desired outcome. And that’s gonna take you somewhere else. And that’s what we want to know.

So it is amazing how doing this, triangulation, these neurolinguistic exercises, what gets revealed our mentor and predecessor used to say it’s like doing a brass rubbing. And I don’t know if anyone now remembers what a brass rubbing is, but it’s when you would take like tissue paper and let’s say you’re in an old cathedral and there is something that’s etched or a plaque and you wanna have a memory of that and you put the tissue paper over it and take a pencil and rub it back and forth across, and the pencil will make an impression in the tissue paper of that plaque and you can walk away with it.

That’s kind of what we’re doing. We’re doing a brass rubbing of the collective consciousness and seeing what emerges. And the truth is, it does not matter what words you use, you would get the same basic information in a map revealed again and again and again so we could use the same 10 pairs of words over and over and over again and it wouldn’t make a difference to the mapping, which kind of blows people away when you say that.

And we’ve actually tested that ’cause when we first learned that we went, nah, that can’t be true. So we tested it. We tested it ourselves, doing three different sessions with three different groups of people with three different sets of random words on the same desired outcome. And it was fascinating that the same ideas emerged again and again and again.

And then we actually had a client, Live Nation, the concert people, we did a mapping with them with their head office in Los Angeles and they loved it so much and they had just been on an on an acquisition spree around the world and they said, okay, we’re gonna go around the world. We’re going to use the same desired outcome.

We’re gonna go to eight different offices around the world. And then we’ll get you to take all the maps and just sort of put them together and give us a giant overview. And we said, you don’t need to do that ’cause the map is the map. And they went, no, it won’t be. Plus we need to do this. So we traveled around the world.

It was a great project and the head of strategy traveled with us and by the third session he was sitting at the back looking at the original map going, yep, there’s that idea, there’s that idea, there’s that idea because the same themes emerge again and again. So it was lovely to be able to be paid to prove that the map is the map.

Danielle: I love that analogy. And I also am thinking about the three maps. You’ve done a series of three maps for Coralus now. One, as you were saying before Coralus was even born before it became SheEP. It was actually referenced as org X in the first desired outcome statement, and that was pre-SheEO. And then we did another pivot map before SheEO became Coralus.m And then we did a third map just recently before the reset.

So you were just saying how Live Nation did the same map, same desired outcome three times, landed on pretty much the same thing. How does it shift over time when you do this exercise at the right pivot points?

Penelope: What we have discovered and learned is that the infrastructure in which we all live, and I sometimes refer to people as being like iPods.

We’re constantly downloading and uploading with a culture all the time. We don’t even know how much cultural information we carry with us, but we do that. Infrastructure is incredibly stable. So I wouldn’t say that things shift over time, per se, ’cause it’s such a stable infrastructure. But what we did with Coralus, it was three completely different yet related, desired outcomes, which means you’re going to get a different map depending on that desired outcome.

But what’s fascinating when I look at the maps. Which I actually have in front of me from the first one 12 years ago to the one we recently did, what, six months ago or so. There are key themes that irrespective of the desired outcome statement come up again and again and again, which reinforces that idea of the stability of the infrastructure.

So the first map we did which became the seeds for what is now Coralus, which was about must having this organization to be a successful social entrepreneur. What the map revealed is that, yes, there’s permission in the marketplace space for that, and what’s fascinating is concepts like wisdom from the ages.

Think of Coralus today. This was a core theme that emerged this integral truth with a capital T. This going back to rediscover what has always been there and have faith in what we know at our deepest levels, what we’re so connected to. That was there from the get go. This idea of redefine winning was in one of the memes of the original map.

Again, so fundamental to everything we talk about at Coralus, these old systems don’t work for us. Maybe they never really did, but we got very used to them. That now is the time that we had to start thinking differently. And also the idea of meaningful connections emerged. It was in its infancy in the first map.

It wasn’t ready yet to be realized, but it was recognized as something that for the future was gonna be really important. Right? And this idea of new model, all of those were there at the beginning and they were all pulled from in the creation of the original version of Coralus when we did the second map.

During COVID, which was such a pivotal time for so many people and organizations, we used the world needs at that time, SheEO 2.0. That was a question of what do we need to evolve into? How do we need to reinvent or revised, be relevant? And again, what emerged there is re-envisioning the future. That idea of needing to think differently or emerging, the idea feels of resonance again, a concept that’s really big right now emerged, which one could almost say is a bit of an evolution or a bit of a deeper understanding of what we meant by wisdom from the ages.

Now it’s getting a little bit more specific with fields of resident of resonance. The recognizing that people need to be freed at their core, that we need to go back to the basics. We need to go back to what’s foundational and allow that to reemerge, and yet it was possible to transform to change. That became really, really important in that second map.

And also reinforcing the idea of on your own terms while we’re. A group and a community. There’s also the need to recognize and understand that everybody’s in a different place on the journey. Everyone has their own path to walk, and it isn’t about making everyone conform to one way of being or one way of doing.

It’s recognizing that people need to have that freedom to be who they are and to be their authentic selves. Again, stuff that has been very core to what is now Coralus and the idea of being radically generous again, became very, very, very clear in that second map, engage, generosity, see the abundance, engage generosity.

So really starting to reinforce and concretize almost some of these fundamental beliefs about Coralus. And then in our third map, our most recent map where again, slightly different desired outcome. Coralus creates the conditions for thriving to occur. So now we’ve gone beyond just what do we need to be, but more the intention of what it is we want to have, you know, what is the impact that we wanna make?

Very interesting desired outcome. Reinforcing yet again, this idea of cycles. Feels of resonance. Deep wisdom with the idea of sinking with cycles and collective intelligence that sparks recognizing and understanding that so much of what we need to build on and draw from is fundamental and core to who we are as humans, as beings on the planet.

And also, the importance of being able to meet people on their own journeys, on their own way, and supporting and nurturing those individual journeys. And the idea of safe space, which we’ve seen again in both the previous maps, that this is a safe space for this to happen. the final, the beauty of all wisdoms.

Again, reinforcing the importance of not just individuals and what individuals bring to the table, but also the past different cultures, different understanding, different belief systems, all of which is very much part of where Coralus is going and what they build on.

Danielle: Thank you for that overview, Penelope. I would say that I personally joined right after the second map, and I remember looking at the SheEO 2.0 map and feeling like I was reading hieroglyphics. And how do I, you know, take these concepts translated into this map, but it really does have a particular sequencing.

So if you’re looking at these maps on the page and wondering how to read them, can you talk a little bit about the triangles as entry points, the squares and the circles into that meme, and how you might read a map like this?

Penelope: No, thank you for the question. If you think of a map, almost like reading it like a transit map, like if you’re at a subway and you’re looking at stuff and you’re, you know, you’re looking at how the trains operate.

The first thing, as I said, we always look for is, is there a meme which emerges as if you follow the arrows. Something that goes around and around a self-replicating, a self-sustaining loop. So we always look for that first. That’s always at the heart and the core of a map.

Then we look at we draw them as triangles. These are the starting points or the attract or motivational types that are going to be attracted to what it is we’re trying to achieve. And think of those like when you’re looking at a transit map, those are the beginning stations, right? So if you are in, let’s say Toronto, I guess Kennedy would be one of those triangles.

It’s the starting point of the journey, the initiation point. We look at those and we go think of those as really, very, very high level psychographics or segmentation. This is the low hanging fruit. These are the people who are going to be easily attracted, who want what it is you’re offering, and it’s important to know that because put your time and energy into those who are seeking an open to what it is you’re offering.

If you’re trying to convince people of the rightness of your way, or your product or your way forward or policy or whatever it might be. You can keep trying to push water up a hill, but it’s not gonna get very far. So understand what is going to be the passive of least resistance, what attracts them?

Then if you follow the arrows from each of those triangles or starting points, that shows the emotional hot buttons that you need to hit. And even though some of those pathways might seem longer than others, they have more stops along the way. These aren’t temporal, so it doesn’t mean that a longer pathway is gonna take longer or be more difficult.

It could happen in a split second, but these are all the emotions that need to get hit to get people into that meme space. And then the meme itself is at the heart, the core of what it is that people want to experience as a result of what it is you’re offering. So I kind of like to talk about the outermost points as being almost the talk.

The meme itself is the walk. That’s the experience and it’s important. Thank you for bringing up the idea of sequence. Sequence is really important. These show you those paths of least resistance. You cannot just arbitrarily move things around because people aren’t necessarily open or ready yet for whatever message or whatever experience you’re offering them.

Honor the sequence ’cause in many ways, sequence is more important than the content. Understand that this is the way that it needs to go to make it easy. And I don’t know if you remember, if you’re in a car and it’s raining and you’re watching water come down a windshield, the raindrops don’t go straight down a windshield.

They always take sort of a convoluted pathway, and the raindrops take the exact same pathway each time over and over and over again. It’s because the water will look for the easiest path down to follow. Even though to our naked eye, you wouldn’t think that there is reason to deviate like that the Raindrop knows.

That is what we call the path of least resistance. And that is what the map is revealing to us. What are the attract, what are the emotional journeys need to people to take in order to get them into that meme space, which is where then they are ready to hear and experience what it is that we’re doing.

And if we can keep delivering on that meme, people will not leave us. Which is why I often think of a meme as like a loyalty loop that is the source of sustainable success.

Danielle: I love that because there are many concepts as you were revealing, that showed up in all three maps over time, and some of them were entry points into the meme and some of them were already embedded within.

So it really does reveal that permission or where there is an openness to the culture that you’re building. So I really love that piece.

Penelope: Yeah, and it’s also a great way, I always say the nice thing about starting points is people will give you clues all the time as to whether or not they’re on one of your starting points, and if so, which one?

And then you can tailor the conversation into their listening. And you will also learn, you know, you recognize when there are people who you could talk at them for 14 hours, but. This is not something that they’re interested in or open to. And you know, in the same way that that doctors and nurses learn to triage patients, this is a great way to triage who are the people who are potentially going to become part of the Coralus community versus people who just aren’t ready or interested in what it is we have to offer yet let’s put our energy and time where it’s really going to make the greatest impact.

Danielle: And I wanna touch briefly on what you call the dangling memes. So there are places on a couple of the maps where there is no entry point, there’s no triangle but there is a meme that exists. So can you touch a little bit on that and what you might suggest to organizations who are doing this, and how to watch for that or keep that in mind and what to do with such a dangly meme.

Penelope: Okay, great question. So sometimes when we do a map, we see something that we call a dangling meme. It’s a self-replicating, self-perpetuating loop on its own with no triangles, no pathways into it. It’s sitting there looking very, very interesting. There’s no way into it. It would be like, again, using, let’s say Union Station in Toronto.

That’s like building Union station with no doorways, no windows, no way in, but it looks really appealing and really attractive. And when we see a dangling meme, it can mean one of a number of different things. It could be a remnant of the past, something that we’re clinging to, but it’s weighing us down and we need to let it go. It’s holding us back.

Or it may be a glimpse of the future, a glimpse of something that one day may be possible, but right now isn’t viable yet. And often in those situations, if you bring to life the viable structure with the starting points, the pathways in the meme, it will then enable your dangling meme to happen.

And sometimes it’s complete and total red herring. That’s inherently sexy and attractive to us. It’s often the inside talk, but that’s all it is. Stuff that we really love to say about ourselves, but it has no relevance to anyone outside. And we’ve done a lot of work with hospital. And many times we’ve seen a dangling meme that is some iteration of life and death and unconditional care.

And you would look at that and go, well, of course that’s really important to a hospital. But the truth is it’s table stakes. Every hospital deals with life and death situations. That’s just the nature of the beast. There’s nothing unique or differentiating or useful in that. And unconditional in care is something that we like to say, but the truth is we can never give unconditional care.

So it’s that lovely talk that we like to say, but it’s not gonna do anything positive for us, so ignore it. In the case of Coralus, especially with our last map, the Thriving Map, we did have a dangling meme of Reframe the Giant and Reimagining. Really interesting because you think about Coralus in its work, you would think that would be viable.

But what that dangling meme suggested is that it is not the job of Coralus to reframe, rethink, reinvent every system that’s out there and reimagine everything that can be and should be. Tempting, though, that might be, that might have been part of what we thought about ourselves originally, but what the dangling meme revealed is, guess what?

That is a glimpse of the future and if we bring to life the viable structure for Coralus. We will create the conditions for our members, for others, not Coralus, but all those associated and impacted by Coralus. They bring to life that dangling meme, but it’s not the job of Coralus to do that. And I know when I saw that, I went, wow, that is such a huge insight and also such a huge relief.

The onus is not, and the responsibility is not on Coralus to fix, recreate, reimagine everything out there. Our job is to create the opportunities, the conditions, the environment for all of us, any of us, to be able to do that work. And it’s not up to us to decide what that should look like. That’s not the job of Coralus.

Danielle: That was definitely very eyeopening when we revealed the map, and that has continued to be something that has been validated over and over again in our time of sensing together and what’s next for Coralus. So very, very timely. And if I look at the first map where there was a dangling meme about meaningful connections unexpected connections becomes an entry point into the meme of vocational arousal and can collective intelligence that sparks.

So perhaps that was a window or a glimpse into the future. Can you speak a little bit more about that?

Penelope: Yeah, and that’s lovely that you pointed that out. There was a dangling meme in that very first map 12 years ago called Jamboree and Meaningful Connections. Definitely a glimpse of what the future organization could bring to life, but at the time was not yet ready to be realized.

SheEO now Coralus needed to be created and built in order for that to be realized. Then when we go into our second map, we can see that’s starting to come to life. It is now embedded and been brought to life within Coralus. And then when we looked at our final map unexpected connections. We can see it’s fully realized, and even the concept of jamboree, if you think about that, bringing people together, building communities, celebrating together, all part of that original dangling meme.

But of course it would be a dangling meme because Coralus didn’t exist then. The structure hadn’t been built, the community hadn’t been built. You couldn’t have brought that into life. It couldn’t have been viable in the beginning because there was nothing there to realize that. But over the next few years and the next few maps, you can see that it became part of the viable structure.

So lovely. When you can see that living the viable structure enables those glimpses of the future to come into being.

Danielle: Well, thank you Penelope, for helping us to translate all of these maps over time. Is there anything that you wanna share about the evolution of mapping? I know Coralus has been doing several kinds of maps to help people to find one another, and I’m sure many people who either are in organizations or wanna do this for themselves have an inkling for wanting to reveal what’s in the map for them.

Can you share a little bit more about what you’re seeing in, in its evolution?

Penelope: No, absolutely. And one of, I think the biggest personal evolutions with mapping for me is when I became a coach, because the maps, this process, the structural mapping process is issue agnostic. It’s like an MRI machine.

An MRI machine does not care what you stick in it. It’s going to reveal what it reveals. And it is the same with the SMP. And we realized that, and I started coaching, we had done a few, what I call personal maps, more as favors for friends and colleagues in the past, but I realized what a powerful tool it is for people on their own individual learn journey to reveal.

And I always like to do a desired outcome of person X leads a fulfilled life because fulfillment to me is where everything is in flow, everything is in sync. So for me, the evolution now is not just the corporate work and even the association work. But how do we ensure that individuals as well have their own maps and blueprints to understand how they can live the kinds of lives that they want to live from both a, a purpose and an impact way of being.

What’s fascinating to me is when you look at a corporate map or an association map, and especially if you have a personal map, you can very quickly see, is this in alignment? Is this a place where I can be all that I can be? For me, I, I see it as a real privilege to be able to do this work with individuals and organizations.

It’s powerful. It can be difficult. We do not know what a map is gonna reveal. You know, it’s funny ’cause no good consultant ever goes into a room normally without knowing exactly what the outcome is gonna be and where they wanna take you. We are the exact opposite. We go in with absolutely no clue about what’s gonna happen. Or even if what a client wants to do is even possible.

If there was no meme in a map, we would have to turn to that individual or that group of people and say, I’m sorry, that desired outcome is, its phrase isn’t possible. So it’s powerful and things come up in the conversation and in the process people reveal a lot.

It’s emotional, it’s deep, and I never forget what a privilege it is, be it on an individual level or a collective level to do this. I also know how powerful it is. And one of the reasons I love working and being part of Coralus is because it’s a group of people who understand the magnitude of the power of the mapping.

Not everybody gets that. I wish I could use maps and one day I know it will happen. I’d like to be invited to the right tables because I know the answers, the insights to solving all of the world’s problems can be revealed in a map. It doesn’t mean it’s gonna be easy to implement, but we can uncover what’s possible and what we need to do to go about it.

So some days it’s really frustrating that I don’t get to work on some of the issues I would like to. But then if I come back to looking at the Coralus map, maybe I need to take that again personally and go, it’s not my job to solve all of those problems, but on my own and as part of Coralus to create the conditions for those problems to be solved.

Maybe that’s my journey.

Danielle: Exactly. Penelope, actually, as you were saying, all of this, I’m smiling because I just want to mirror and reveal back to you to take the story full circle. As you were sharing about the origin story of how you got into the structural mapping process to begin with, it started with unexpected connections, bringing together the spirituality, the science, somebody sharing with you, was it Syd, that this is the right time, you are the right people to be bringing this into the world. And so you have, you’ve touched upon that vocational arousal portion that then brings us into this meme of collective intelligence that sparks.

And so I really think the timing is right for you to be bringing this more broadly to the Coralus community and experimenting with some maps. So if anyone is interested in experimenting and speaking with Penelope about these maps and potentially doing some for yourselves, we’ll link her contact information below so you can get in touch.

And is there anything else you wanna share, Penelope, with the rest of the community?

Penelope: Really just to say what an honor and a privilege it has been to work with Vicki, with the Coralus community and to have had the opportunity to do this work and to be part of building out and seeing the evolution of something that we know, all of us know is changing the world for the better, and again, creating the conditions, being part of creating the conditions for the kind of future that we all want to see. And it is such a joy to spend time with like-minded people and people who are all here to create that positive impact and make a difference in the world.

So thank you and thank you for the opportunity to talk about it.

Danielle: Thank you, Penelope. Can’t wait to see what else is revealed.

Penelope: Thank you, Danielle.

In this episode, Danielle sits down with Penelope Fridman to explore the Structural Mapping Process (SMP) — the methodology that helped reveal the earliest seeds of what would eventually become Coralus.

Penelope shares how she first encountered SMP, why it became foundational to her consulting and coaching practice, and how it offers a different way of understanding what is possible for individuals, organizations, and communities. Together, Danielle and Penelope unpack how maps are revealed, what memes and dangling memes mean, and how Coralus’ maps have evolved over time.
If you’d like to connect with Penelope to explore maps further, you can reach her at: penelope.fridman@gmail.com

In this conversation:

How Penelope first discovered the Structural Mapping Process
Why SMP became foundational to her consulting and coaching work
How SMP differs from traditional research methods
What it means for a map to be “revealed” rather than created
The meaning of memes as self-replicating emotional structures
How random word pairs help surface themes and relationships
How to read a map: triangles, pathways, sequencing, and loops
What dangling memes can reveal about the past, the future, or red herrings
What Coralus’ three maps have shown at different stages of its evolution
How mapping can be used not only for organizations, but for individuals seeking alignment and fulfillment

Mentioned in this episode: