The Power of Maps

In a digital world, each of us needs new weapons for battling the complexity, navigating volatile change, mastering the rules—and avoiding the risks—that evolve every day. Our daily headlines confirm that we can no longer presume digital information is trustworthy. There is no more urgent need for doing so than assuring that our digital records can be trusted as evidence of the truth. Each of us needs a map that points toward the world we must know to do our jobs, and allows us to see the full horizon of what must be navigated.

Yet the sheer volume of knowledge can be intimidating and overwhelming. IT professionals, lawyers, security and records managers, judges, compliance executives—each of us needs a map to discover the path forward through it all. Each of us needs to be able to navigate the rules and languages of the different stakeholders--business, legal, IT, government, records management, information security.

Instead, professional education providers and publishers continue to offer traditional 20th century resources—sit-down conferences, dense books hundreds of pages in length, online content consisting of text-based slides and poorly shot videos of talking heads at sit-down conferences. We know more, but struggle to know better how to apply that knowledge in our jobs. Now is the time for change.

Maps are the power of the Ritter Academy. For nearly five years, we have been designing, testing, and refining an arsenal of tools that truly work to enable professionals to succeed in measuring whether digital information can be trusted as evidence of the truth. Our RitterMaps™ are those tools. Authoritative, objective, powerful.

RitterMaps™ uniquely assemble into compelling, visual structures the rules, the risks, the questions, and the answers that must be mastered by anyone responsible for assuring the integrity and reliability of electronic information. Our maps give you control of the information you must navigate to work effectively, efficiently, and appropriately.

For those challenging or testing the integrity of digital records, our maps are powerful weapons, structuring and phrasing the questions that must be answered, and demanding responses that can reveal the true integrity of digital information and the systems from which their information is acquired.

On this page, you will explore the power of maps. You will learn their power in professional learning. You will explore how to use mapping in every portion of your work. You will discover new and innovative capabilities that maps provide. Welcome to the Ritter Academy, your guide to harnessing the power of maps!

Why Maps Work

Maps enable us to unfold and explore that with which we are unfamiliar. Maps present structure, context, and relationships visually, rather than through the textual tables of contents and indexes of traditional books. Maps allow information to be layered, and for each layer to serve a different purpose—strategic, tactical or task-oriented—when the need requires.

As tools of communication, maps engage our ability to look at the entire picture-- and zoom in to the level of detail we require--to go where we need to go, perform the task we are required to perform, and avoid the perils we need to avoid. Maps allow us to maintain control of the path we are pursuing. Maps enable us to construct a plan of action. Maps empower us to visually collaborate and work as teams with far more powerful effect than any memorandum or record to the file.

As tools of learning, maps are even more powerful. Across the globe, in all native languages, those born after the first personal computers are learning and living differently—they are “born digital” and are abandoning traditional books, three-ring notebooks, and structured front-to-back learning. Instead, the keyboard and screen are weapons for acquiring knowledge visually. One intuitively clicks to explore, unfold, and discover information, ignoring, and perhaps not even caring, that with each click one might go somewhere else.

In digital form, maps empower the same type of exploration. Links, relationships, structure, understanding—all unfold rapidly and work to transfer the knowledge being sought faster, better, and often at a lower cost. Maps can serve to reinforce information in text form—often side-by-side. There is a reason why virtually any online geographic map service uses that approach—the visual map reinforces and provides structure, context, and awareness.

“Your Maps are Like Gold!”

Those words were the evaluation of a young lawyer when Jeffrey Ritter, the founder of the Ritter Academy, first began to use visual maps to teach. That simple statement transformed our understanding of the value of maps as tools for delivering the knowledge professionals require.

As it turns out, across the globe, from pre-school to graduate school, visual information mapping is exploding as a powerful, effective education resource. While scholars in education continue to research this evolution, many of the reasons may be quite apparent, for anyone of any age.

We learn in pictures. We recall information visually. When we acquire information in pictures, it reinforces the learning effectiveness and accelerates our ability both to recall and apply the information. And, when we need a clue or a stimulus to trigger our recall, a picture can truly speak 1,000 words. So can a map!

In designing the Ritter Academy, we realized it was important not to just create good training, but to transform the relationship between the learning professional and the learning experience. The investment made today by any of us to stay current, to stay up to date, and to remain responsible in our jobs is more and more challenging. But the task is even harder when, following the learning experience, the proverbial barn door is closed behind us, and we try both to remember and figure out what to do with what we have learned.

Each of our RitterMaps™ delivered in a course as downloads, as well as the inventory available in our store, are designed to be used. Each RitterMap™ allows the professional to walk away with something they can use immediately, and continue to use repeatedly.

Dr. Allison Rosett, an e-learning thought leader and scholar, is one of several professionals who advocates that, to be effective, online learning must deliver “sidekicks”—tools that connect the learning to our daily jobs so we can actually have something at our side. Others call for e-learning to deliver “performance support”—tools that can be used when we need them. Whatever the label, our RitterMaps™ serve that purpose.

But, as learning tools themselves, RitterMaps™also are enabling us to teach, and for our enrolled subscribers, to learn—differently! The visual structures allow us to deliver more information with fewer words; in a glance, structure, context, and relationships are apparent.

The maps, when digitally enabled, allow the learner to open and explore the map themselves. This control has a powerful impact on learning effectiveness and recall. When we are in control of our learning, we learn better. In a learning classroom, or in a team meeting, the same process is even more powerful—enabling the group to be in control of how they explore and learn, and in doing so, empowering the group to truly share the same picture of the knowledge they must share in order to do their jobs.

That is the learning effectiveness—and power—of our RitterMaps™.

Maps for Collaboration

In education theory, one of the measures of learning effectiveness is the ability of the learner to then teach the same knowledge to someone else. How often have you attended, or had someone in your office, attend a professional conference, and then found it difficult to have a good dialogue about what was learned? Who has the time to construct a detailed file memorandum on key points learned and suggested action items?

Instead, RitterMaps™ express 1,000 words—or more—for you! We are thrilled by the anecdotes that are shared with us:

• An e-discovery manager prints a full-size copy of a RitterMap™ for his office wall and proudly shows it to people to explain what his job requires.
• A paralegal confides she gave a copy of a RitterMap™ to a lawyer, and suggested he use it to make sure he asked the right questions in a deposition about e-mail preservation.
• A senior IT director says, “Finally, your maps give us a place to begin” in building a litigation readiness program.

So, apparently, our RitterMaps™ are effective at enabling you to transform and share the knowledge you have.

But imagine what happens when there is a process map on the wall. Think about it… whiteboards don’t work because they allow us to write words that could be on a memorandum. They work because we use them to structure, brainstorm, design, revise, and achieve consensus on the path forward! They are no different in their power to communicate than a stick in the hand of an officer drawing in the dirt the plan of attack for his troops—only if there is shared understanding can team success be achieved.

That is what collaboration requires. RitterMaps™, and any information mapping exercise, serve exactly the same function.

It is astonishing to see how fast professionals who speak different languages—employing the vocabularies of IT, law, business, finance, information security, records management, compliance—will be able to join together when they have a map on the wall to focus their attention. Suddenly, rather than emphasizing their differences, or defending their “turf”, people focus on the map, their shared concerns, and their human instinct to ensure the map contains what is true.

That is what maps do—they demand truth, and rarely will a map remain unaltered before a group if it sees inaccuracies, gaps or errors. Maps are expressive and they work to connect the shared knowledge of those involved in their creation.

How We Build RitterMaps™

Cartography—the making of maps of the physical world—is both a science and an art. Technology continues to empower greater precision and enhance factual accuracy, but there is still judgment and discrimination on what goes onto, and is left off, a map.

So too is the manner in which we build RitterMaps™ both science and art. As maps of the rules, risks, costs and strategies for evaluating IT systems, digital information and, potentially, the breadth of cyberspace, our RitterMaps™ are evolving. While we are always learning, we are disciplined in our processes.

RitterMaps™ are research-based. Behind our maps are databases we develop and maintain to better assure that the maps are accurate representations of the sources of the rules and portray the known risks and costs for failing to comply with those rules. We have developed different templates for different types of maps, and those templates evolve as we continue to learn more about how each type of map can be most useful.

Disciplined quality control is used to assure the factual accuracy of our maps. In general, maps that explore rules, technologies, standards, risks, and costs are based on objective, third-party sources. Maps that present strategies or structure examinations or assessments (for depositions, interviews, or compliance audits) are all developed in reliance on the same source materials, but with greater professional license to select the strongest or most appropriate topics for each map, and the manner in which those topics are presented.

But, ultimately, like any geographic map, each RitterMap™ involves human judgment and discretion. So, if you believe something can be improved, if you see an error, or if you think a RitterMap™ fails to include something important—we want to know! Send your comments or suggestions to research@ritteracademy.com.

In human history, maps of our world are ever-changing and dynamic. We hope that digital technology will allow us to be more capable of staying current, and delivering accurate RitterMaps that can be adapted more readily to change. All the same, we expect change, and we welcome your collaboration in building future maps that work for you!