Reflection - Mind mapping

Challenge

I work at the national agency under Mision del Nayar “Emitter”.  And we have two areas of our activities – foreign direct investment attraction and improvement of the  business conditions in Lithuania. Many projects for improvement business conditions are related to  Education and one project, which I was leading, was about improvement of the quality of studies at  Lithuanian vocational schools. Since our agency is specified in some areas of investment attraction, we  defined more than 20 vocational schools, where actual study programs for manufacturing investors are  implemented and tried to find out, what were the problems in their study quality as well as what  additional programs can be created and introduced to potential students. Our challenge was to make a  deep research of these vocational schools, including their teaching potential, assets, owned equipment,  as well as their relationship with their stakeholders, such as local municipalities, business associations  and business companies. In addition to that, we set a goal to generate ideas (and, of course, implement  them together with the help of our current and potential clients, business companies and government  institutions), how to improve vocational training system, including renewal of the equipment, attracting  professionals from business companies to share their practices with students, develop the improvement  of professional skills of the teachers, reviewing the study programs of the actual engineering programs.

During this project we had a small team from few different functions – one or two members from  Education, Manufacturing Investment Attraction, Regional Development teams.

Selection

During all the projects in my professional job I try to make a detailed research of the particular situation  and generate ideas for better solutions. But from this Design Thinking course, for me it was a real  discovery that there is a process in between the research and ideas generation – Mind mapping – a  pivotal phase, when we break down complex problem and ideas into simpler fractals.

As it was said during the Design Thinking Module 3 lecture, “Mind mapping is looking for patterns and  insights in a large quantity of data you collected during your exploration of what is the current reality.  The goal is to establish criteria for the what-if idea generation phase.”

So, this is what we really needed before generating ideas for the project about vocational schools – we  gathered so much information about the teaching process and methods, equipment, possible  improvement areas, business reviews about the students’ skills quality, etc. and we had structure  information, analyze it and ensure, if we observed it properly.

Application

First of all, our project has started from initial discussion about the project scope. We had to decide –  which of vocational schools and in what locations are necessary to involve in the project and what  exactly study programs are needed for manufacturing investors. By knowing this we had to make a  questionnaire for the deep interviews with vocational schools. We divided our questions in some  bunches, that we could easily compare the information from various vocational schools and different  locations / regions. In addition to that, we asked some business companies to answer some questions  about their needs for employees with vocational education, so it helped us to compare the needs and  expectations from companies to the real situation what education is provided by vocational schools.

During the analysis phase we tried not only gather some data, but see, how this all affects each and  every student at vocational school and what can be his / her path wile studying or after graduating the  studies.

Since Mind mapping is a visual way to represent ideas and information, we took a sheet of paper and  wrote the main overall problem – quality of vocational training study programs – as the main thing in  the middle of the paper. Then we wrote more branches from this one main thing – such as teachers,  study programs, teaching equipment, practicums, collaboration with local businesses, etc. We went  through the pathway of all study process from this moment when student chooses to study particular  program till the finish of his / her study process.

Later on, we have written down gathered data from vocational schools and business companies and  tried to define, what is the pattern of the situation and what do we need to do. We clustered the  learnings into themes and looked for connections among them. We constantly kept asking questions –  what we know about each branch and what we do not know; what we need to know and based on what  we have learned, what ideas we can come up with.

From our initial understanding, we had to work on improvement of study programs of vocational  schools (having in mind the review of the content and teaching methods defined there) and fostering of  new study program creation and implementation in particular regional vocational schools. But during  the mind mapping exercise we understood, that Lithuanian vocational education has some serious  problems, such as lack of qualified teachers, old equipment used for teaching process, lack of experience  in use of modern teaching methods and pretty negative image of vocational training in the society.

This use of the Mind map within our diverse team switched our thinking from a single activity set to a  larger activity set. So constantly rising additional questions about gathered data and what we learnt  from it, let us create more ideas on improving vocational education quality in broader understanding.

Insights and Approach

I have learned from applying Mind mapping tool to the data analysis and idea generation process, that it  helps to avoid linear thinking and fosters creativity withing gathered data. During our exercise we  defined even more topics for our project, than we expected, and it helped us to see the big picture of  the situation in vocational training in Lithuania. This pivotal process in analyzing gathered data let us  create more ideas not only for this project, but as well let us think about broader business conditions  improvement projects within our organization.

Moreover, the putting topics in visual way, helps fostering discussions withing the multi-functional team  and encourages all members to raise their opinion and additional great ideas.

I think, Mind mapping can be applied in all the projects within different sectors – from business, to  education and governmental affairs. It helps in the brainstorming sessions and researching and  consolidating data gathered from various different sources. Also, it helps to better thinking and ensures  effective collaboration between the members of the team.

In addition to that, I really value the thought, which was said during the course, “There has to be time  for reflection and disagreement, since these are core to new ideas”. Diverse and different thoughts are  easily expressed in all multi-functional teams, but it is always difficult to find time for the constructive  reflection. Reflection during the mind mapping gave us more inspiration while sharing the insights on  bigger picture of the project.

Since I discovered the value of the Mind mapping tool, next time during the project creation and  implementation, I will definitely use this tool to foster creativity of the project team.

