Example Reflection-Mind Mapping

By Karina Duque

Challenge and Selection

Mindmapping is a tool I used in my office; however, I was not aware that I was specifically  applying it although with a limited approach. It came to me first by instinct. I mean, I gathered  with my four-member team and we used to brainstorm ideas purposefully to solve an issue.  I  work in an International Organization in the Environment field. I am responsible for the  financial and administrative monitoring of environment projects according to the  organization’s and donor’s rules and regulations. These projects have their management units,  we call them PMU. Sometimes we forget that in those PMU, real people are working. We don’t  see these people we only see financial and administrative processes and requests coming from  them. The challenge we face is that these processes are not smooth and do not represent our  vision of “impeccable administration”. Therefore, project’s targets are delayed due to paper  work, bureaucracy, errors and long time processing.

Application

After learning what mind mapping really is, I decided to get close to my PMU colleagues. I’ve  been generally “judging” what they do from my supervision role rather than having a more  empathetic approach. First, I organized monthly meetings with my team to motivate them to  be more people centered when providing a course of action. Then, we started to interview, to  talk to people. This time, we made it with a different approach, using the invitation to “the  garage sale” event. We offered this time questions: ¿What makes your daily work difficult?  ¿What would you need to improve the processes you send to our Unit? ¿ From 1 to 10, how  empowered do you feel in your position to deliver a high-quality work? What do you want to  share? Well, we got surprised discovering that many of the challenges they have come from a  poor understanding of the reasons behind a regulation.  We understood there was a gap  between theory, the “must do” and the benefits of our policies.

Insight and Approach

Mind mapping facilitates to find patterns. With these questions, we got enough data to  analyze jointly and start to categorize the real needs and possible ways of dealing with them.  First, we discovered that no matter how big or small a project is, people face similar difficulties  such as: lack of a complete briefing when being hired, poor understanding of the processes  from beginning to the end and limitations to implement in the field due to covid restrictions.  Then, we realized that people felt somehow frightened because we are the ones correcting  and checking if their work was well done.

Our mind mapping led us to build on the “so what?” to move on to a different perspective. We  offered what people value the most in this digital era: being trained to grow professionally and  personally. Thus, we offered free nonobligatory training courses on different subjects to help  them strengthen their knowledge and skills and we started to ask a fundamental question:  What can I do for you?

