Challenge:    I am working as an acting Team Lead in a HR Communications function. Some team  members felt they weren’t being fulfilled and external stakeholders wanted more value  added support. As part creating plans for the coming year we discussed as team the need  add further value to the organization and move towards a new vision of strategic  communications. That was the problem we started with: ‘How might we improve  communications in the department?’.     Selection:    As a precursor towards ideating new innovative ways to enhance communications in the  department, we had a team meeting inviting colleagues and different stakeholders to map  out the current services and experience we offer. We thought before exploring ideas we  need to know where we were. We would then fully map out ideas, and then review which  ones would be high priority. But in our approach we felt it important to be able to  understand the current lay of the land and the mind mapping exercise was going to play an  important role for us in that regard. To ensure I was well equipped to facilitate the session, I  reviewed ‘the Mind Mapping tool’ video from Week 3.     Application:  We began the session outlining design challenge as noted under the challenge heading. Our  diverse stakeholders from within and without the team were invited to review current  communication assets produced by the team in recent months as well as interview notes  with department employees outlining experiences around communications as well as KPI’s  around communications sent and survey data on quality of communications.     When the participants had reviewed the content we met together to initially map out what  the Communications team were producing in terms of communications. We asked  participants to make their own notes of mapping the as is scenario. Since we are working  remotely we used a skype whiteboard to take turns to place on a collective space, making  sure more senior members of the team went last supporting a safe space to share opinions.  I then facilitated a conversation with the team to cluster the groups of ideas listed.     We then took virtual stickers to each place on the clusters where we felt the greatest value  was provided and where we felt we needed to reduce transactional work. Through this  exercise we conducted mapping the ‘As Is’ scenario which then fed into a follow up mind  mapping session of what an ideal future could look like, with the same diverse participant  mapping what they would want to experience from a communications function.     Insight  Through the exercise I learnt about the power of collective wisdom and the richness of  perspectives that bringing together people from diverse outlooks and lenses bring. For  instance in this case we had people from our own team but also ‘customers’ – which made  us think about things from the perspective of the end user. From a personal perspective it  was so useful to switch up and challenge one’s own assumptions.

The insights this experience brought to me was the importance of inclusivity and  accommodating different voices. The importance of creating an environment that  everyone’s voice matters. Actually this process in itself gave various people more skin in the  game by shaping the outcome of the meeting. And finally it helped us really understand the  end user much more.    Approach    I would use this tool next time also. As it allowed for an creative and enjoyable way to map  current services from the perspective of the ‘customer’. However going forward I would  incorporate more storytelling to enable us to empathize more with the human centred  needs of our end user. Furthermore I would like to have our team more of a back seat to  ensure we listen to the customer needs more rather than prescribe. Finally I would diversify  more voices of our customer also.

