Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I am a student and I would like to write about my experience in a club that I am a part of.  Entrepreneurship Cell, the club that I work for, nurture values and creates a start-up culture at my  university. We help start-ups grow and incubate through our club and conduct various sessions,  events, and competitions to spread awareness and help elicit right ideas in minds of many. We host  “Think-Tank” session wherein club members are given an opportunity to present their ideas, discuss  ideas, or talk about any topic relevant in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We have planned to make  these sessions public and give this opportunity to all the students, and faculty of our university.

Selection and Application

We decided to use the tool of Mind Mapping to structure the learning experience of the club  members. Mind Mapping allowed us to look for patterns and gain deeper insights. Before we started  Mind Mapping, we questioned the members for relevant skills and learning goals that could prove  beneficiary while attending or presenting during the Think-Tank session. In the ongoing sessions we  asked for special feedback from the members on relevant topics they encounter during the sessions  and the challenges that they encounter, as in, the topics that they did not understand or had to look  up on the internet or elsewhere post the session. In questionnaires we gathered quantitative and  qualitative data. We asked for topics for discussions, wishes, inspiration, own experiences, etc. After  gathering this data from members, we clustered important topics for our different sessions, wrote  them down on paper. Every one of our club members received sticky notes and were asked to ideate  a little more on this change that we planned to incorporate, individually. Before we dug in, we  created a growth mindset by focusing on the question: “What if anything were possible?”. Many  new ideas had emerged from this Design tool. We also kept a list of the outlier ideas as a source for  future inspiration.

Insight and Approach

The Mind Mapping Tool allowed us to get a greater understanding of the Think-Tank sessions we  offer, how they connect and how a great learning transfer for club members and participants can be  reached. We broadened our repertoire by taking the participants perspective intensely and were  able to extend our program to meet the participants needs. We came up with some new blended  formats in which we added little quizzes and presentation inputs that accompany the students  during the semester or for courses they take on some topics. Another method for knowledge  transfer is that the participants write a reflection a few days after the session to reactivate their  take-away messages from the sessions. They are asked how they plan to use a tool or method of  building a start-up or a skill taught during the session. We also tried out many different online tools  for more methodological mix and online webinars and decided afterwards which ones worked best  (from the club members and the participants experience and feedback). A special challenge was the  change to a completely digital format of our Think-Tank sessions because of Covid19. Despite the  requirement to incorporate this change to our Think-Tank session, we still launched the ideas we  gathered and continuously use feedback rounds in the sessions to keep the iterative process going  and share newly gained knowledge within our team. The possibility of organizing and visualizing  through the Mind Mapping allowed us to connect different stakeholders input and ideas and had a  big impact on our repertoire. For future design challenges I would use the Mind Mapping Tool again.  I would try to include the different stakeholders more intensely though by making them part of the  whole process.

