1. The document provides guidance on choosing a topic for a project that is neither too small and trivial nor too large and unwieldy. 2. It advises producing a mind map of areas of interest and drawing boundaries around potential topics to determine an appropriate scope for the project. 3. An example mind map is provided with leadership at the center and related areas like motivation, engagement and teamwork branching off, with only some areas inside the boundaries chosen for focus.

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SHR060–6 Theory into Practice
Choosing a topic for your project
This can be tricky. Choose something too small, and it will be trivial. But choose something too big,
and it will quickly run out of control.
Choose a topic that doesn’t interest you, and you will lose motivation.
So this is what you do ...
• Produce a mind map (spider diagram) of the things that interest you
• Draw a boundary around the things that will form your project
• This will be your “scope”
• Don’t make it too big – the project will be too large and you won’t cope
• Look at the following graphic as an example.
The “thing” that interests you is Leadership. You put it in the centre of you blank map. Now
brainstorm “things” that are associated with leadership. Be as creative as you can. Some “things” will
be connected to “things” that are connected with leadership. For example, in the diagram above,
Motivation and Engagement are associated with Teamwork, which is associated with Leadership.
You should end up with a big bit of paper with lots of ideas on it. If you have only a few ideas, try
harder, much harder, until you fill the paper.

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Now look carefully at your piece of paper. You can’t study all that in your project, but you can study
some of it. Now we are discussing the “scope” of the project. This is very important. The scope
determines what you will look at and what you will ignore. You will look at all the things which are
“in scope” and you will ignore everything that is “out of scope”. Simple, really. So how do we
determine the scope? We draw a boundary around the things we want to study. That’s it. Look at
the graphic again, and you will see that I have drawn a boundary round certain subjects. They are
now “in scope”. I will study them. The subjects outside the boundary are “out of scope”. I will ignore
them.
And that is how you choose a topic.
RAS October 2013