“As I have said many times, it is simple, but not easy.” – Warren Buffett.
Buffett is of course talking about investment, but the same seems to me to be true of mapping (whether of the decision, argument or hypothesis variants).
The principles are simple enough. What for example could be simpler to state and understand than the Rabbit Rule – and yet it is so profound, and has such power.
Mapping is not easy, in large part, because it is just a visual discipline for clarifying our thinking. And clarifying our thinking is not easy, even with visual discipline.
Tim van Gelder 
Tim this a short by nevertheless interesting comment.
If you take people through any of the well-known standard decision making processes you always come down to values and assessing consequences. The standard view of this appears in the now well-known construction of a “consequences table”. The problem here is that the table grows fast and you still end up often artificially constructing and grading unknowns or guessing what they might be.
Interestinly, Argument mapping and or decision mapping forces you in another direction, but it nevertheless requires that you show your reasoning. (This is the same idea behind a mathematical proof etc.) But there is an interesting inductive approach akin to analogy which is as precise as deduction. I think mathematicians call it isomorphism. The question is how do you show it. Sets of relations are understood but rarely easily shown. If relationships were easily shown many more of us would be much better theorists than we are.
To me there are two key questions here. First, how do you further your understand of social consequences in a particular context without getting bogged down in casual or technical complexities and abandoning the entire enterprise or engaging in spreading fear or rampant speculation or forecasting? (Lets face it, that is the state of much social science writing) Alternatively, how can you reasonably think about the future?
(Back to Buffet, you have to imagine he has a fixed framework that is far from obvious, as all sorts of brilliant minds have crunched financial statements seven ways to Sunday yet still are clueless as to what is going on. An obvious area for inquiry are relatively precise indirect methods.)
Second, have you ever gone through any standard decision making process, gathered all the data, clarified unknowns and yet been completely and perhaps even deeply dissatisfied with it? Is there a point were rationale reasoning becomes misdirected or ridiculous? (You have to imagine that many bad decisions were in fact made rationally.) How do you know when you have reached this point? Buffet always reasserts he knows what he knows and knows what he does not.
(Somewhat anecdotally, recently, Buffet was asked what business was about and he responded with one rather surprising word “Pleasure”. Think about it. Pleasure has everything to do with social responses and financial consequences but its completely absent in current business decision-making models.)