How I used the Mind Mapping tool to select the most appropriate ideas

1. Challenge: what idea(s) to select to resolve a business

problem ?

I work in the Corporate Marketing Department of a large bank. My assignment is to help the consumer retail banking Marketing Department improve their customer relationship. To do that I was provided with a ton of consumer data, some NPS data on various channels (online, mobile, branch…). However, none of this made enough sense to understand what our consumers would like to change or improve in their relationship with the bank. With the whole Marketing department, we decided to do several brainstorming using everything we already know about customers to try to imagine what problems they are facing and what solutions we can bring. After a couple of weeks, we had more consumer data, and we had around 25 ideas/projects that the team came up with as potential solutions. So the challenge is to select a few of them to take them further.

2. Selection: Mind Mapping, how to use collective wisdom

to align people and focus on a smaller portfolio of ideas

I decided to use the Mind Mapping tool, not to display all the data we have to find patterns, we did that already but to organize the 25 ideas that came from brainstorming with their relevant data, for people to discuss around them, pick the one they prefer and let the crowd (small crowd 12 people were involved) decide which of those ideas we should really elaborate on and present to management. All ideas were presented the same way to avoid any bias.

3. Application: an “art gallery” with 25 pieces of art to

choose from

All ideas we presented the exact same way in a very large conference room at the bank. Each idea had a title, the problem it is trying to solve, the data or insights that make it relevant from a customer standpoint and an educated guess on how difficult/costly it would be to implement. It was presented on a single paperboard page pinned to the wall. The names of the people who came up with the idea were never mentioned.

I asked the participants to take 5 stick notes, one was yellow and the value was 10, two were blue with a value of 5 and 3 were orange with a value of 1. I asked them to take a notebook with them as well as they walk in the conference room looking at the boards. The objective was to put one sticky note on the ideas they like the most or seemed doable or any reason they can think of with the value they would give to it. They had to make notes in their notebook on why this idea and why this value. After 45 minutes everybody sat in the middle of the room, all the sticky notes were on the board and discussions already started between the participants as the number of notes and their colors made very clear what ideas looked like the best.

4. Insight: no politics, no BS, no bias, just sticky notes to

show clearly what stands out

The main advantage from that tool, at least in my case, is that the answers revealed themselves to all participants in a very objective way. We just had to count the value of the notes on the board to establish a list of ideas that wowed. Out of 25, 5 were clearly standing out, and 7 were in the same range, the others were out of the picture. It eliminated all useless and endless discussions trying to convince others. It made it clear and simple, the participants were attracted by the same ideas for good reasons. And for me as a facilitator it was easier to try to reduce the 7 to 5 than 25 to 10, as the discussions were very objective. I think that this tool made it easier for the participants to compare, look at the different ideas, different boards, talk about it, think about it, come back and decide to put value on it or not. They were able to do it at their own pace and made their decision as they pass an idea or later, it made the “ideas”, an object that you look at and like or not, not just a concept, ot gives it some reality

5. Approach: Next time I will bring people from outside

the group !

In this case, the Mind Mapping tool, Art Gallery presentation worked beautifully. However, the ideas were created by people from the Marketing Department who work together and may have some bias, and clearly when you are working on ideas to solve customer issues Marketing is not the only function to take part in the project. So next time, I will probably do the same idea phase but will present the ideas with a little bit more detail and bring people from outside Marketing to review them in the same way, bring people from Ops, IT, Sales… it will probably bring new fresh eyes on those ideas and bring a different result.

