Relationship mapping

Where relationship mapping is used

Sales and account management. A stakeholder map of a customer: who decides, who influences, who blocks, and who on your side knows whom.
Fundraising and partnerships. Finding a warm path to an investor or partner through people you already know.
Communities and organisations. Seeing who connects groups that otherwise would not talk to each other.
Your own network. Understanding who you rely on, who you have lost touch with, and where an introduction could come from.

How to build a relationship map by hand

Pick a question. "Who can introduce me to this company?" produces a useful map. "Everyone I know" produces a poster.
List the people relevant to that question, including yourself.
Define the relationship types you care about: reports to, works with, introduced, is related to, is a client of.
Draw the connections. A whiteboard, a slide or a spreadsheet with two columns — person and person — is enough to start.
Mark strength and certainty. A connection you saw with your own eyes is different from one you assume.

Why most maps go stale

A relationship map is a snapshot. People change jobs, teams reorganise, and a map made for one deal is rarely updated for the next. The deeper problem is input: you can only map a connection you recorded somewhere. Most of what you know about how people are connected was said in conversation — "she used to work with him", "they're cousins" — and never written down.

So the quality of a relationship map depends less on the diagram tool and more on whether the underlying facts were captured, and whether you can still tell where each one came from.