Reflection: Mindmapping tool   Title: Mindmapping the performance journey of an employee       Challenge: In most large organizations, like mine, the performance journey of each  employee can be very complex and different depending on a plethora of elements like  peers, manager, goals, discussions and personal life. We had a challenge to design a  performance journey that caters to all of the employees, and at the same time helps them  thrive everyday while achieving the performance they aim for. The challenge was to be able  to make sense of all the available data about the existing journey in order to have any ideas  to improve this journey in the first place. The key stakeholders in this scenario are the  human resource managers, the managing committee, the employee himself/herself and the  manager of the employee. The added complexity to this challenge comes from the various  cohorts of employees ranging from different business units, to geographies to type of team  and the tenure of the employee.     Selection: I decided to use the mind mapping tool, that takes all the data and simplifies it  for someone to decipher. I specifically chose this tool because it would be imperative to first  figure out “what is happening” in order to come up with insights and a design criteria to  improve the situation.  Another core reason I chose this tool is because the inputs needed  to come from a very wide range of stakeholders, who needed to come together and get  clarity on the performance journey before identifying the barriers and opportunities there.     Application:   Immersion   The very first thing I did was identify a conference room, I then printed out all the data that I  had collected using surveys and in depth interviews and stuck it on the walls in the room. I  then invited a group of participants that came from all the cohorts of employees as well as  the HR managers to go through the data in the room for 1 hour and use yellow post its to  add anything that they feel was missing or anything that they thought was very interesting  to them.     Plotting  After this, I created a wall with the various clear milestones of an employee using green post  its to mark out the key milestone on the wall. I then asked everyone to spend an hour to  look at the milestones and identify any missing milestones. I also asked everyone to plot  who the key actors were in enabling the milestones and journey success points.     Synthesis  After this I asked everyone to plot the clear barriers that they have notices across the  journey using red postits on the wall around and between the key milestones. I then asked  them to add opportunities using green postits to clearly mark out the spaces where we can  intervene.     Insighting

I then asked each participant to think of key insights across the journey based on all the  other postits and create insight statements and write them on large yellow postits around  the key milestones.     Ideation   I then asked each participant to think of ideas using the actors in each milestone that can  enable the performance journey of the employee.     Insight: What I learnt was that every person has a very different and unique understanding  of what is “ideal”, there is no ideal journey and every journey is unique to the employee, the  phase they are in, the manager they report to, their personal goals. This insight revealed  that the performance journey needed to be a nonlinear iterative journey and not a straight  line with milestones.    Approach:

• I believe that the next time I will include the stakeholders in the research process too

as it would really help add a layer of understanding to their thinking.

• Additionally I would make sure that I screen the participants before I select them.

This screening would essentially rule out any key biases that the participant comes  with.

• I would also add external stakeholders and subject matter experts to the process

too.

