DESIGN THINKING REFLECTION

1. Challenge:

I work in a company, where most of the employees do not engage in the strategy  and goals of the company. There are pdf files available to all about it, made by  the leaders, and in anual results presentations the managers talk about it,  applyied in their departament. But, in a recent employee research, we identify  that the team is not feeling engaged and people do not understand how does  this strategies applys in their daily activities. The challenge is to make employees  feel engage in all levels, and more than that, make employees be driven by this  strategies and goals in their daily jobs.

2. Selection:

Looking for engagement, I think the best is taking all levels of employees and  even other stakeholders togheter in the design thinking process to identify best  ways of working this theme. Because of that, we chose to do a workshop with  mind mapping, exposing visually the data, using mind mapping in group activities  (findding patters and themes) and them looking for insights and translating in  design criterias. Mind mapping is an intuitive, criative and engaging process  which helps to look for patterns and drive from the reality analisis to the new  ideas.

3. Application:

Because of that we build a workshop where we expose visually all strategies  concepts, the company goals, the employees research, and some data about our  employees profiles. We invited the managers, the analysts, the specialists, and  some outside guests, as some loyal customers (which know more the company)  and some supliers. We made an exposure with the data and ask the participants  to make a tour, observing and maken sticknotes. We explianed that we want to  extract meaning from data.    Then we divide the audience in groups, where they discuss the best sticknotes  chosen by each one of them. After that we ask them to look for patterns and  themes, to look for connections, and answer the question “So what?”.

4. Insight:

At first, people were unsure about the unusual design thinking process, because  in our company we are used to formal meetings for discussion. But after a while  they were actually feeling confortable and were doing energic discussions about  their point of views. At some groups, there was an insight that employees do not  know how to apply strategy in their daily jobs and do not engage because they  do not really understand the strategy and goals, and also because they do not

know how the strategy was born, and why this is the strategy. There were some  ideas about turning the strategy more visual or even doing a book with a story  telling costumized for each employee profile, according to their background  (finance, marketing, human resources…).   The tool itself make people engaged in the problem, which surprised me.  Because I did not think they would engage so fast. I really believe that design  thinking could help us in many problem solving.

5. Approach:

I think the mind mapping and workshop was a good idea to engage people, but  next time I would think better about which stakeholders invite. It was good to  listen to all levels and profiles, but for example, the costumers were outsider  stakeholders who could bring different perspectives, but the suppliers could not  contribute so much because they did not know the company so well (which is an  other challenge case).

The good thing was that we could approach diferente perspectives and  understand better the questions and the problem, which could lead us to a next  phase where we could create best answers and ideas.

