Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge & Selection

Mind mapping is a great tool that which we tried with my client in order to  engage the management & the HOD’s in fulfilling the objective of HR  department theme of ‘Ownership”, the organization was struggling with a  culture of ownership. The challenge was management & HOD’s believed that  the employees needed to be more accountable & have ownership. As the  company consultant, we wanted to know what were the ideas of HOD’s about  ownership since ownership moves from top to bottom and to make them work  on this which was a challenge. With ‘what is’ in mind and get to know ‘what if’,  we arranged an Ideation session inviting all the management and HOD’s and  tried mind mapping as it’s not a training session but helps to look for patterns  and themes in data.

Application

The participants were divided into teams and a team leader was assigned to each  team. Each team was given chart paper and a set of sketch pens and pad of  sticky notes each. They were given a word ownership which they had to write in  center and around that they had to draw other circles and draw images of what  were there ideas about it or what reflects as ownership culture. Few questions  were given to them in order to start there thinking process like why ownership  and what are the areas of impact and how can things be improved. Once teams  were done with their charts they had to move around to other charts and write  what could be done to get better on ownership on their individual sticky note  and paste it on another team’s chart. Then teams came back to their respective  charts and discussed the suggestions given by teams.

Insight & Approach

It was time to turn observations into insights now for which we discussed each  chart in detail as the team leader presented and as a facilitator I asked the teams  ‘so what’ one or two times as the HR noted the good points which people had  come up with. Learning happened as way of a healthy discussion and  participants could gauge what was on mind of other HOD’s.

So, with this mapping and suggestions by participants on what ideas could be  implemented to change organizational culture with the HR we later tried to look

for connections in suggestions by various teams.

This course and the mind mapping tool helped me to implement a new way to  gather data for designing further training interventions. Since this was the first  time I tried something like this it consumed more time than I thought. With this  experience in mind may be next time I can execute it in less time by being more  precise.

Next tool I plan to combine or try another tool for them is story telling since  they are already open to explore and know ‘what is’ and want to work out things  in their journey to ‘what if”

