Conceptual diagrams are important, but do they also limit our thinking -- and can we use this as a creativity tool?

What conceptual diagram has influenced your thinking?

Conceptual diagrams in ecology (image made in leonardo.ai)

I am a huge fan of great conceptual diagrams. I think they can say way more than words, and for most people, who are very visual thinkers, they can be hugely influential. For this reason, it is no surprise that recent years have seen a surge in efforts to produce ever more impressive state-of-the-art concept diagrams.

Certainly, these conceptual diagrams, when they are well made, guide our thinking in a certain direction, they influence the way we think about a certain topic, concept or process. A paper on soil aggregates we recently read in our lab (Garland et al. 2023; preprint) explores this for this particular topic: soil aggregates have typically been depicted as individual objects, thus suggesting that this is the way the occur in soil, where they most likely occur in a way that is more of a continuum with neighboring aggregates. This representation of aggregates is of course for ease of depiction, but it could certainly influence the way you think about aggregates in soil, especially when you see this sort of diagrams everywhere. You will tend to think of them as individual, independent items, rather than as an integral building block of soil architecture. And this could lead you astray.

Maybe another example is a plant with a mycorrhizal fungus. Most commonly this depicted in a standard way using one plant and one mycorrhizal fungus, when in reality this symbiosis involves a community of fungi and also several plants that are linked by the fungal network. This certainly changes the perspective.

This all made me wonder if there more cases like this. Are there conceptual diagrams that have influences the way I think about a certain topic, without me even being actively aware of this? And, more importantly, if so, has this perhaps limited my thinking?

The latter point seems pretty clear. Of course a conceptual diagram, when you find it convincing, invites you to think about a topic with a certain emphasis and from a certain vantage point, and this will by necessity channel and thus limit your thinking. It seems thus inevitable that while these diagrams are incredibly important and useful, they will potentially limit your thinking; maybe unduly so. Especially if these depictions are everywhere, getting perpetuated in textbooks, review papers and talks.

Can we turn this around and use this as a tool for creativity and discovery? Can we systematically re-examine popular conceptual diagram in ecology or other fields and see how they might have guided and limited thinking in the respective field? Could this exercise be useful in terms of actively calling into question the basic promise of these diagrams, and try to force a change in perspective? I wonder what we might find.

What do you think?
Do you have examples of concept diagrams that you found convincing and that have determined how you think about something? Did this occur at the cost of considering other ways to think about this topic?