Design Thinking for Business Innovation – Peer graded assignment – Mind Mapping

1. Challenge:

I work as a Learning & Development consultant for a global Fortune 500 IT company on various Organizational Development projects mainly supporting Middle Managers and Leaders developing the skills, behaviors and mindsets, they need to lead positive change and transformation. This particular challenge was posed by a Business Unit Manager of a Professional Services business unit. The corporate strategy had been reformulated last year and Customer Focus and Innovation were now new growth drivers. His felt his team could improve both their customer focus and innovation capabilities. Regarding innovation capabilities, the team had a good track record of coming up with a lot of great ideas and they were quite good at assessing the desirability, viability and feasibility of the ideas, however only a few ideas moved into the What wows phase and even fewer made it to the What works phase. According to the Manager they operated with a 1:100 ratio (one idea was turned into an innovation out of the portfolio of ideas). We started out by clarifying root-cause of the desire to increase innovation capabilities and mapping out their current practices (What is). The main insights from this discovery was that the Manager had a business degree in Business Innovation and felt very passionately about innovation. He had a lot of knowledge around Intrapreneurship and it turned out that he had tried to increase the team’s ability to push more ideas through the “system” however felt it was very difficult and felt very frustrated about the Managers on a higher level and the company’s culture around innovation. He described that most managers would rather kill than foster ideas. When diving deeper into the specific actions and behaviors of the Manager and team it became apparent that they had mainly tried to enforce innovation tools, which had proven unsuccessful as they had experience more resistance than collaboration.

2. Selection:

With this clear picture of “What is”, we agreed to move into discovering what options might be desirable, viable and feasible to address the root-cause of the challenge. We elaborated a little bit about which way forward we help us in the most efficient manner. We touched upon a couple of different tool such as the Fishbone tool and the ME-CE tool. We ended up opting for the Mind Mapping tool as a driver for identifying and uncovering options, as we both felt it would be tool that would allow us to think freely but at the same time apply structure and visual overview, we would need. The Manager was comfortable with the Mind-Mapping tool and had used it himself a couple of times, however mainly for technical trouble shooting.

3. Application:

We took four pieces of flip chart paper and put them in a 2x2 box structure and mounted them on the wall using Blue tac. We put the theme “Enablers to increase innovation capabilities as a driver for business growth” in the middle of the matrix. We decided to use three different colored markers, to give us a visual indication of where the majority of the effort could be put – RED for technology, GREEN for people/skills/leadership and BLUE for tools/processes.

We transcribed our main findings from the “What is” phase and put those on a flit chart and put them on the wall next to the Mind map.

We decided to do two rounds of Mind mapping. The first round was done using our individual and collective knowledge of proven corporate innovation practices. For the second round we used desk-research to add findings to our Mind map. We mainly used Google to search for

guiding information such as white papers and case studies on proven corporate innovation practices.

Using the two ideation rounds proved quite powerful as it added valuable insights, however we struggled determining what had been the success factors for other corporations and that made it difficult to initially assess how the practice would work in our company – or what would be needed to be done at the core to make it work.

Using three different colored to categorize the options proved valuable but slightly difficult to manage in the process. We ended up spending some time clarifying which category an option would fit in as well as spending time on elaborating on the dependencies of the options from the other categories.

At the end we both agreed that despite the difficulties categorizing options and diving into the nature of the dependencies, the categorization was valuable and provided a great overview. A reflection is that we could have spent less time on mapping dependencies of the options and going into depth of them.

4. Insight:

I would say that the insight I personally gained from applying the mind mapping tool folds into two categories – one being the discovery of the multitude of possible options and their dependencies and how important the leadership of the Manager would be in changing the situation. Secondly seeing the (positive) effect the mind mapping tool had on the Manager and I observed how this exercise gave new energy and hope.

Reflection upon the insights in retrospect and on Design Thinking in a broader sense, I see more clearly how embedding the Mind Mapping tool into the Design Thinking process gives a richer result – both in terms of quantity and quality of options discovered.

5. Approach:

In terms of what I might do differently next time applying the Mind Mapping tool, the key learning from this exercise is to keep it simple. Adding more complexity to the mapping process might exhaust participants and deep diving too much into the mapped solutions may not at this stage be the most beneficial thing to do. I think I rather stress the importance of mapping a max. of 2-3 additional i. e. dependencies and then move on to the next idea or solution. The desirability, feasibility and viability of the solutions can be scrutinized more at a later stage.

