Example Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

Reflecting the course and tools introduced, I believe I used “Mind Mapping” often in my

business life as a manager of the team (I have retired from business and now teach at a

university in Japan). A particular situation I will describe is formulating actions with my team,

which was managing O2C (Order to Cash) process.  After an annual Employee Survey has

clarified the area that employee satisfaction can be improved of the team, we were asked by

the company to formulate solution to improve. My challenge is not only to create some

solution but also to have employees (my staff) sufficiently involved for executing the solution.

One specific challenge was that a few members of the team were located 100 km apart from

the other. Also, time that we can use for this assignment was very limited as the team were

busy in conducting daily tasks. Problems identified were such as lack of understanding the

corporate strategy, relationship to the internal customer, and balancing of work and private

lives.

Selection

In order to prepare for the challenge (finding solutions and getting involvement), a

brain-storming session using post-it (a sticky paper), common as KJ method, after am

anthropologist Kawakita Jiro, who had introduced a very similar process, including

even a patented label for generating ideas, grouping them, identifying relationship. The

method was a natural choice, as under the name of KJ-method, it has been very

known, and members had done that before for several times, so that there was not

much need to explain to the team.

Application

In order to do it rather efficiently, I took three step approaches. (1) thoroughly brief the

result of the survey in a regular team meeting where every member presents (including

remote participations by telephone); (2) form groups of two members who were asked

to discuss causes and solutions for assigned problems (there are about 5 areas to

improve for 10 members of the team). This also helped to overcome of the physical

separation of the few members; (3) meeting by all (members not in HQ come using

telephone system), to mentally map generated causes and solutions, and do synthesis

and classification; add new ideas and do the process of classification and synthesis

again.

Insight & Approach

With the limitation of the team organization, I took some modified steps for idea

generation. This was quite effective to secure the involvement of members, especially

given the time constraints and physical organization of the team. In looking at the

design approach, this was compromise of using a part of the approach, especially,

design approach is to take time with very open-minded to find very innovative solution.

Also, there was no quick testing to run a PDCA cycle taking the initial solution as

prototype, as in my case, the outcome was assumed to be solutions for at least one

year when the next year employee survey was to be conducted. It would be interesting

to use testing in some future project I would be involved as an interesting part of the

design process.

