Define explicit connections between concepts.
The connections between things carry as much meaning as the things themselves.
Writing down how two ideas relate prevents assuming a connection that does not exist.
Relationships can be causal, temporal, sequential, hierarchical, associative, and more. Naming the type of a relationship determines what reasoning you can perform across it.
Some relationships have direction — A causes B is different from B causes A.
Not all connections are equally strong — quantifying strength improves your model.
Identifying what must come before what prevents attempting things out of sequence.
Knowing what enables what reveals where small actions create large effects.
When two ideas contradict each other, both cannot be fully true in the same sense — the tension between them is informative, not a problem to suppress.
Ideas supported by multiple independent lines of evidence are more reliable.
Connecting abstract principles to concrete examples makes them usable.
Tracing a chain of causes and effects reveals the full mechanism behind an outcome.
When A affects B and B affects A you have a system that can amplify or stabilize itself.
What is not connected to anything else is either irrelevant or disconnected by mistake.
When you draw all the relationships between elements the system structure becomes visible.
Connections that exist today may not have existed yesterday or may not exist tomorrow.
If A relates to B and B relates to C there may be an implied relationship between A and C.
Multiple paths between important nodes make a system more robust.
When everything must flow through a single connection that connection is a critical vulnerability.
Drawing nodes and edges makes complex relationship structures comprehensible.
The act of mapping relationships generates new insights about the system. You do not map what you already understand — you map in order to understand. The diagram is not a record of finished thinking. It is the medium in which thinking happens.