Example Reflection-Mind Mapping

Challenge

I am working in the field of management consulting as a consultant and therefore our main  challenge is to improve business activities and processes in order to increase key factors like  sales, total revenue and profit. Our clients usually are from the insurance business and due  to significant changes in this sector, the sustainable improvement of inner-company  processes at all relevant interfaces is a key factor for improving success. The project scope I  am talking about in the following sections includes the claim all department of a big  insurance company. This all department should be totally reorganized. So the main challenge  that we faced was who to structure the new all department in different departments – as  little as possible but so much needed.

Selection

My team and I started this project by arranging several workshops to go through different  design thinking tools. After analysing several options, we decided that mind mapping could  be a very good option for us so we started to use it as our designing tool for our challenge.  Despite of the other tools, mind mapping is a useful tool for the case where you have a lot of  things to demonstrate and you want to extract your goals from it by focusing directly to the  required things to achieve our goals in most efficient, simplest and practical ways.

Application

We started our mind mapping by two sessions divided in a week time, stating all scopes  related to sustainability that each member might think of a stick it to our mapping board.  We collected all approaches off the different points of views. At first there are the costumers  which can use different ways who to get in contact with company in case of a claim (for  example telephone, e-mail, etc.). After that we have different insurance divisions. Moreover,  it can be useful to differ the claim in height. There can be good cases and arguments for  specialists and generalists. After we stated all related topics, we planned 2 days per week  workshops in a three weeks’ time-period. The aim of these workshops was to connect our  ideas with the different people group (e.g. customers, employees from the different parts of  the company, etc.) After this time, we connect all the different maps with a good feeling to  have important inputs. Finally, we ended our mind mapping sessions by looking at where  each member if our team has an interest and in what scope of work each member can do his  best – not only in the project also in the time after for all the people of the claims all  department.

Insight

The Outcome of this mind mapping tool was having 6 different types, how the new  organisation of the claim all Department could be. We decided that each team consist of 2  members working on this specific type, to find a good reasons and arguments, why their  type should be the new form of the organisations. By applying the mind mapping tool, we  created our mind map that we can follow to structure an achieve the different types.

Moreover, it helped us to design different thinking’s of how the new all department can look  like. We considered a path for each type parallel to what we expected to achieve in it. At this  stage, our team become more familiar with the work that should be carried in the different  groups of employee.

Approach

The work done for the first 6 weeks starting with illustrating different design thinking tools  and ended by applying a mind mapping as our design thinking tool. Using this tool presented  a great impact in the work that the team carried within the year and resulted in achieving  more than what expected for a short time of period. My team and I will stick to use this tool  for our future work as we founded out that it suits our type of work which includes a lot of  information, charts, graphs and tables that always need to be linked towards having the  promised outcomes. We agreed to follow the mind mapping we already used for our future  tasks and it always must demonstrate the insight within the work, the progress done, and  focus more toward the impact that we are expecting.

