Cognitive Webbing

After witnessing people struggle to present their thoughts in clearly written form, I finally figured out a way to help right-brain people get their ideas onto the page quickly. I call it "cognitive webbing." It's a nonlinear process of capturing what you know, what you believe, key points you want to emphasize, examples and illustrations you want to include, so that you have a writing plan.

Cognitive webbing is different from another process often used to develop proposals, called storyboarding. Storyboarding is a technique borrowed from the film industry, in which each scene in a movie is represented by an image with the key points of action or dialogue noted below the image. Directors use storyboards to lay out a film (or TV ad or music video) so that they don't waste a lot of time and tape shooting footage they won't need or can't use. Some proposal processes have adapted the storyboarding approach to laying out a complex proposal document. Key sections or subsections of the proposal are represented by an image or two, with the critical content in bullet point format below those images. Often the pages containing these sketches and notes are taped to a long wall so that everyone can "see" the flow of the document.

Personally, I've never been a fan of storyboarding for proposals. The reason it works for a movie is that you already have a script before you start creating the storyboard. The storyboard is an integral step in moving from text to visualization, an obviously important process since movies are visual media.

But when it is used to create a proposal, the storyboarding process actually precedes the creation of the text. So the proposal team spends a lot of time putting pages up and taking them down, rearranging the sequence, adding and deleting content points, and so on. What seems even odder to me is the fact that in trying to use storyboarding processes to create the proposal outline, the team is using a technique designed for visualization to produce what is primarily textual output. Every time I've been involved in a storyboarding conference for a major proposal, I felt that we were trying to hammer nails with a shovel—in other words, using a perfectly good tool to do a job it was basically unsuited for.

The goal of the cognitive webbing process is to create a writing plan as quickly as possible. It can jump start the process, leaping over the writer's block that is so often characteristic of the first stages of a writing task.

A couple of other advantages of cognitive webbing: First, you can do it by yourself or you can do it as a team exercise. It's particularly effective when the entire proposal team participates in building the web, so I recommend doing it during the kick-off meeting.

Second, you can use the process to create a writing plan for the entire proposal or just for a section, such as the executive summary.