In the last section, we talked about the five W's, which is basically the logic we use to capture the information and structure it. Now we're moving on to visualizing and a little bit more detail. And we've already started introduce some of the visualization constructs in the five W's section. But let's just submit it here. On this first slide, you see, again, the visual, we started to introduce, and this is really the cabbie mapping language. And if it seems to you that it seems simple, that's good, because that's the point, it should be very simple.

A lot of times people are afraid of mapping processes or drawing them because there's 500 shapes, and they have different conventions, and they have different colors. The cabbie mapping language, or the CML for short, is just this, it's using the five W's. And it's putting them in a structured sequence on the page. So that can be consistent, and you can actually communicate it very well. The three shapes and a little more detail that you're seeing here, you've got squares, which is an uninterrupted action or step in the workflow. So that might be a little confusing.

What We're talking about here as it doesn't always have to be, I click this button, it could be a number of things like, click this and send to user or whatever you want to do, or draw this and put it in an envelope. You could separate draw this and put it in an envelope. But if they never separated in reality, it can be one interrupted action step in the workflow. A lot of this is going to be depending on how you feel most best, communicating your process. There's no hard and fast rules. But as long as you stick to these shapes and the five W's, you're going to have an understandable document.

The second shape that we use is diamonds which represent decisions. There should always be a question and the decision, but essentially you have an action and it may action may lead to a very variety of options or actions depending on what the previous Action Produced, which is, is it green, or blue, and if it's a green unit, it could go into different paths and a blue unit. So those decisions are so you can draw where the process might fork or have alternate paths. And then ovals represent Process start and stop or start endpoints, they actually function the exact same way the square there is visually a bit different. So you can quickly look at a page and see where things are starting and stopping. But that's it, the CML, I just taught you all the shapes in the entire mapping language.

And I can tell you from the last decade of doing this work, I'd never ever run into a process no matter how complicated or how many times the client tells me Oh, you know, there's a lot of detail here. I've always been on a map it with these three shapes and with the five W's because we're focusing on the physical process world. So in visualizing just a few other things you should see here, lines with arrows, which you saw, those are called connectors. And those are what helped you sequence the shapes. We, in the cabbie mapping language, also encourage people to use commentary. That's where you can add your why if you think it really helps tell the process story.

And comments are usually made with what we call a line call out so like, here's a box it's like a little line with an arrow and then you can write comments in it. And then the swim lane which you see the swim lane is in the left hand side which has the who so you assume That anything, any box inside of a swim lane is done by that actor. And that puts the whole five w story together. And on this slide, you actually see what this looks like in practice. So here you see a sample of a map where you actually read, you can see the five W's at work. And you can see also some comments here about how the shapes are used properly in a regular process sequence.

And this is what all process maps will look like in the cabbie mapping language. One last point on actually starting to do your own maps, because we're leading into some sample demos and some exercises is detailers process is an infinitely complex thing. You could take one step and break it into a million boxes of nuance, and what separates the complexity versus the simple representations is the level of detail you want. So what we always tell people is be consistent and use your intuition for level of detail. You want to map the process in typically, it ends up being about at the same level because we're all human and we all have this Census. So I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here but on this you can kind of take a look on your own and see that one step at a higher level can be broken down into multiple steps that have lower detail level or more granular detail level and etc, etc.

You can break it down to as much extent as you need to get your communication across your process story across. And that's really visualization In brief, and once we practice I think you'll be able to get it under your fingers a little bit better.