Reflection

Mind Mapping: A Design Thinking tool applied to a strategic process

Challenge

I am a member of my organization’s Strategy Department and, as a new year starts, our challenge is to  determine and implement the right strategic initiatives for the company that will consider improvements  in processes, ideas that seek for competitive advantage and projects that will help the company to keep  up with the industry trends. As these initiatives or projects are strategic, they must generate value and  growth by creating savings and/or by increasing sales.

Selection

As the strategy team already went through the phase of data gathering (from the company and the  customers) and several brainstorming sessions to spot process improvements, our next step was to gather  all the generated information, to curate it and to structure it in a way that we could identify relations,  themes, segments and insights for easy understanding. For this purpose, I selected the tool of Mind  Mapping. This tool helps to arrange information and thoughts in a visual way to gain understanding and  an accurate picture of the reality allowing the resulting insights to become an input in the “idea  generation” phase, in our case, in the development process of our strategic initiatives.

Application

To proceed with the Mind Mapping process, we designed an activity that included 5 members of the  strategic team and at least 1 representative from the different business units of the company. We were a  group of 11 people. The idea is that the gathered information would be analyzed and treated by a  multidisciplinary group of people with different expertise. As a first step, the participants were handed  with a paper sheet that included the issues and process improvements that the strategic team identified  in the previous phase and they were asked to categorize them into the following 4 categories based on to  which areas these issues or improvements belonged: 1) Sales, 2) Marketing, 3) Operations and 4)  Administrative. Once their time was up, every participant should have had 4 groups written on their paper  sheet with issues and/or process improvements assigned to these groups. Afterwards, they were asked  to share their categorization out loud while their answers were written in a white board. After an enriching  discussion, all the inputs from a live interaction were consolidated in the white board. And finally, within  each of the four groups, the items listed were prioritized based on its impact on the company’s financials.

Once these 4 clusters were created, the second step of the process was to write on the white board the  list of things that we found out that is what the customers want and the list of what the industry trends  currently are. Please note that the strategy team previously limited these lists’ items to the most  important 4 in each one. Then, the group was asked this time to identify how every item from the two  new lists related with each of the clusters and with its correspondent issues and improvements. This part  of the activity consisted in an open but organized conversation to promote a healthy discussion,

expression and a dynamic participation. Participants spoke based on their experiences and business  knowledge. However, to discuss the relation on every item of the lists the group of participants had 5  minutes per item, and they were asked to conclude once their time was up. Arrows were drawn  connecting the clusters’ items with the 2 new lists resulting in something that looks like a network or a  “mind map”.

At the end, the results were very positive exhibiting a big and easy-to-read mind map with all the  important information gathered and discussed. This mind map not only showed organized information  and the relationship between the analyzed items, but also collected the opinion from everyone in the  room.

Insights

One interesting insight is that we noticed that more than one analyzed item related with many other items  at the same time, showing the complexity (or simplicity) in finding a solution for an issue or process  improvement. By grouping items that related between them, it was easier to think on ideas that would  make an impact. We figured out that probably a single great idea could be the intersection of putting  together what the customers want, solving a company’s issue(s) and keeping up with the industry trends.

The Mind Mapping tool helped the strategy team organize and structure all the information gathered but  also, helped us to understand how everything related. During the “idea generation” phase, the result of  the Mind Mapping tool, guided my team to generate unique and out-of-the box ideas or strategic  initiatives that will add value to my organization when implemented.

Approach

One of the most important learnings from this activity is to know how clearer every scenario gets and how  easy the ideas start to flow once all the information is organized and structured. It is important as well to  mention how valuable it is to work with a multidisciplinary team and to watch how the activity enrichens  with different points of view and experiences. Making everything visual, in this case by a mind map, puts  everyone quickly on the same page generating focus and immediate engagement. The next time I apply  this tool, I will follow the same process described above as the results were positive but, I will include a  different exercise in the part when prioritizing the items of the list (i.e. a cumulative voting method; DOT- voting technique, using color post-it notes, etc.).

On the personal note, one of my discoveries is to know now that the Mind Mapping tool can be used at  the design thinking process, at any business project and/or at any personal task. I would use this tool in  the future as I know it would help me identify priorities, allocate resources, find patterns and understand  easily how the different analyzed items relate with each other in order to understand the level of  complexity I’m dealing with.

