Visualization

Challenge: As an HR consultant, I routinely work on a variety of assignments. One such  assignment involved discovering, defining and implementing the Employee Value Proposition  (EVP) for an organization. As a part of the discovery process, my team and I are required to  interview employees in groups, through Focus Group Discussions. While the questions used in  the process are elaborate and help uncover both breadth and depth of information, I realized  that the visualization technique could help us uncover some of the unstated needs of our target  audience. So our team decided to also include a visualization tool as a part of the Focus Group  Discussion process.

Selection: Visualization is not so much about drawing but about ‘visual thinking’. It gets better  with practice and one can incorporate a variety of artfacts including colour, symbols, logos etc.  in the process. It involves imagining people, places, situations and actions or movements to  communicate a thought or an idea.

As taught in Video 6 of Week 1 of the Design Thinking for Business Innovation class, my team  and I decided to incorporate the visualization tool as it would help us in the pattern finding  process and also help evolve concepts that might not immediately seem apparent.

Application: Towards the end of the Focus Group Discussion, we split the participants into  groups of 4-5 each and each group was given one large chart paper and multi-colored sketch  pens. Using projective techniques, we then asked each group to ‘visualize’ their organization as  a vehicle. We prompted people with questions such as – if your organization were a car, what  car would it be? What features would it have? What would the passengers look like? What kind  of road is this car on? Where is it coming from and where is it going to?

The participants, in their respective groups, then drew their versions of this vehicle on the large  piece of paper that was given to them and included vivid descriptions of how they visualized  each of the above components. Some sample images have been reproduced below:

Insights: Through the course of the discovery phase, our objective was to gauge the ‘as-is’  current state of the organizational culture, and gain a deeper understanding of the strengths  and weaknesses, in terms of how the employees perceived the culture of their firm.

The projective technique gave us additional firepower to validate some of our assumptions that  we had about what the employees were telling us. We could identify patterns in the visuals –  upward sloping roads showcasing tough times ahead, robust vehicles that signified the fact that  the organization was financially stable, cues with respect to the passengers that helps us  identify the kind of people who succeeded in the organization, and so on.

From the perspective of design thinking, it also helped me personally get a better hold of some  of the concepts that were explained through this tool, particularly pattern recognition. When  we put together about 15 such drawings across a cross-section of the employee population,  clear trends were visible in terms of what employees were trying to communicate. The  leadership was blown away when some of these findings were presented back to them.

Approach: If I were to use another tool in my next such exercise, I would likely pick the journey  mapping technique. This is because, as explained in the ‘MeYouHealth’ story and ‘The Good  Kitchen’ case study, it would help me and my team gain a better understanding of the ‘what is’  stage, thereby helping firm up both the problem statement and design criteria better.

