About MAPs

To facilitate a child, family, group, team or organisation in thinking together around a given challenge or issue, the person centred, futures planning tool – MAP - is an excellent choice. Marsha Forest, Jack Pearpoint and John O’Brien developed this tool in the 1980s some 5 years prior to their creation of the PATH process.

MAP, like PATH, is a creative planning tool that uses both process and graphic facilitation to create a shared vision of a positive future for individuals and families. MAP draws on people’s ability to visualise different futures and to plan for these using the focus person’s unique gifts, strengths, interests and capacities.

The MAP session will be led by two trained facilitators – a process facilitator who guides people through the stages and ensures that the focus person is at the centre throughout, and a graphic facilitator who creates a large graphic record of each of the steps in the process.

This tool like PATH, uses both process and graphic facilitation to help any group develop a shared vision and then to make a start on working out what they will need to do together to move towards that vision.

MAPs are great for threshold moments.