Challenge

I am a member of an NGO working for environment protection. Our project was to raise awareness  among local people to take charge of maintaining a neat and clean environment in their locality.  Having experience in the field we knew that it was difficult to actually get them to work willingly. The  problem was that local people took it as a burden to actually do something for the environment.  They feel that they are being forced to do so. Our task was to motivate them to work for the  environment and ensure that the motivation was consistent. This problem required deep  understanding of human behavior. With very little relevant data in hand we were required to  explore the unknown to get agreement.

Selection

We chose to use mind mapping technique as we needed to establish a criteria for the what if state  to generate ideas. As we required a deep understanding of the stakeholder’s (in our case the local  people) behavior to extract meaningful insights the mind mapping tool appealed the most.

Application

We started by selecting a single society and organizing an event in the club house of the society with  due permission of the secretary. We designed the journey of the visitor in a systematic way to  motivate the visitors to work for the environment. At the starting the hall had pictures of places  destroyed due to bad environment. Then there were places that felt like paradise. These were  followed by a big question mark. The residents of the society spent about an hour discussing about  the environment. As the experience had told us that people like to do something when they feel to  have authority. So our team members were also scattered among them and were involved in  conversations assuring the resident that we required their help. We had also provide them with  notepads to note the ideas they had.

After an hour we arranged the hall to resemble a conference room as it gave an impression of a  board meeting to the people and they felt more authority. We then presented a video that discussed  how beautiful the environment is and what blunders could happing if we could not save it. We then  asked them to help us to find solutions to the problem by assuring that it could be solved. We were  really happy to see a positive response. We gathered the insights that we needed to and the event  proved to be a great success.

Insights

We came to know that the people actually wanted to take care of the environment but thought that  their lone efforts would not make any difference. Lack of time also emerged as a big problem. Some  said that they thoughts if others are not doing anything then why should they do. A small proportion  also said that they were held by the thought of what others will think.

Approach

With all these insight we along with the society members drafted a plan to tackle the problem. The  members consented to have a meeting every Sunday to discuss plans foe the week among  themselves. Those who had lack of time agreed to work every alternate evening for the cause. We  proposed that they could hold competitions, related to environment protection, among themselves.  The members decided to have a fund foe environment protection.

The mind mapping technique proved very helpful. We now use the same criteria in different  societies and the results are always positive.

