The power of visualization to explain a complex project

Challenge  The principal challenge to overcome was to simplify a very complex and multidisciplinary project that was  finishing its test phase. It was a project regarding the smart city designed to give a holistic answer to the  transformation of the actual city in intelligent city. The themes of the project were very different and  regarding the energy (heat, electricity, gas and water), the safety and security, the smart home, the  environmental conditions, the social conditions, the communication infrastructure and the world of internet  of things.   Because of the length of the project (about 3 years of work), many mangers changed in my company and the  purpose of the project has been lost over time manager after manager.   Luckily, the core management of the project has been the same and the results of the project were extremely  positive. Based on these results it could be possible to realize a new business scaling up the test in an most  engineering way but no one of top management knew the project and its story.  How was it possible to explain such a complex project to the new top management?        Selection  I has decided to engage the top management, not using the results of the project (some initial tentative,  using a standard approach, failed) but, starting from the beginning and using the visualization design thinking  tool merged with the value proposition canvas to answer the first to questions that I have learned from this  course: “what is?” and “what if?”. I wanted “to engrave in the stone” that was necessary a new holistic  solution to transform the city in a smart city and that tests was already executed and that it have been a  success.  As Mia Jordan said in the video of this course, I have needed visualization tool “to align their (top  management in my case) ideas with mine”    Application  I organized an innovation room with white boards, post-it and many colored pens. In the room there were  10 of the top management boss, I divided them in two groups and my colleague and I drew on the two boards  the two parts of Value Proposition Canvas. The first group worked 20 minutes on the “customer segment  map” answering questions to understand jobs, pains and gains of the principal actors (customers for our  business) of the city. I used many trigger questions and many post-it to put together the all thinks. The second  group worked 20 minutes on the “value map” trying to image what happened if the company had products  and services able to create gain and to relieve pains of the customers of the city. In this case, I tried to draw  on the board drawings representatives of possible solutions.   At the end of this section I merged the two groups and I done the fitting between “Customer map” and “Value  map”. During this comparison between the two groups, I attached for each well-done fit between customer  map and value map, a picture representative the results of the test of the project.  After the session, I created a graphic debrief of results of the meeting including the feedbacks.              Insight & Approach  This course gave me the courage to try a new way to work better. Now I can think to transform many of my  standard meeting using design thinking and in this case the power of visualization to enhance the  participation and the interaction and the results of work between colleagues.

