Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I work in the Learning and Development team, managing Leaning Technologies in the  company and the extent to which employees go through both mandatory and not, online  trainings, courses, learning materials etc. The projects that we are daily focused on cover  creating or discovering the learning tools for the employees, implementation of such tools and  creation of learning materials based on them. Lately, we’ve been more and more focused on  providing people with some more effective and more user-friendly experiences when it comes  to self-development materials. As we have observed the most of the courses that are provided  for employees are not used properly. People tend to complete only the mandatory compliance  trainings and are less likely to go through not-mandatory ones, as so they do not develop their  skills to the highest possible extent. Moreover, probably most content is just scrolled over and  not actually understood. As so, we have gathered a huge amount of data, reporting the time  spent on different types of online courses by our employees, we have also reported how they  are reacting to different interactions (as f.ex. quizzes or role playing) within the courses and  what tools they are most likely to use and to come back to. Moreover, the qualitative data was  also gathered, as the feedback from different groups of employees using various tools and  solutions that we are using for online learning within the company. The challenge is to see  what tools are really effective and as so, how to improve the quality of solutions we are  providing to people.

Selection

We have managed to gather a huge amount of data reflecting the “what is” stage. However,  just having it does not truly help in understanding the situation. It is difficult to draw  conclusions out of such piles of different reports, excel files or written responses directly from  the employees. Mind mapping will help us to look for patterns and insights in this large  quantity of data, creating a wider picture and as so – enabling us to think about the universal  solution that will reflect the minds, needs and expectations of the majority of the company’s  employees, which is exactly the solution that we are looking for. Mind mapping will help us  to see this “what is” as one, complete picture.

Application

I have decided to directly implement and test the metaphor of the art gallery from the book  “Designing for Growth” by Masoom Musa and Luke Parmar. Firstly I have set up a date and  asked my co-workers from the team and other employees from the company (also those who  are working within different departments, so being the end-users of learning tools and not the  developers) to join me for 3 hours for the “workshop”. At the room we were supposed to meet,  the data we gathered throughout the What is stage was displayed. We have also used some  visualizations techniques (like simple PowerBI dashboards) to present the excel numbers as  diagrams and graphs, for people to see actually the meaning behind the numbers. I have  decided that putting plain excel reports there won’t make any sense, as we had rows and rows  of numbers that people were unable to understand by simply looking at them. Moreover, there  were employee’s feedbacks distributed as flyers. Finally, when the invited people came to the  room, they were quickly introduced to the challenge – that we are searching for some more  effective learning tools to use them within the company. Then, they were given sticky notes  and asked to simply wander around for a while, look at the diagrams, think about what they

see, read the feedbacks and note their instant reflections. Afterwards we all gathered and  discussed the reflections, clustering them into similar groups.

Insight & Approach

During the discussion time we have carefully noted all of the insights that were mentioned  and we gathered the notes from people who participated. We have noticed that after all the  solutions that seemed better and more effective for us as designers, were not as convincing  for all of the people that took part in the experience. As for us “making fireworks”, so using  very advanced technologies and plenty of interactions seemed a good way to go at the  beginning. But, as it turned out the minds of end-users prefer more simple and straight- forward solutions, so the focus would be simply put on the content itself. Moreover, the  interesting observation was seeing various patterns upon employees working within different  departments. For example, people working on taxes had different expectations than those  working in deals or HR. As we observed, probably the solutions that we are searching for  cannot be plainly universal after all, as it occurred there are not coherent needs. Because of  that, I think that next time I will invite even more diversified people, creating a sample of all  of our target audience. What’s more, probably the good improvement would be to firstly  divide them into teams consisting of people with similar job scopes, so they will be able to  discuss their reflections and draw common insights. And only after that make the teams  present their conclusions to one another, comparing them. The good tool for such a  comparison could be the SWOT analysis. Then, each insight can be discussed upon its  strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and treats. Having such analysis made will also help us  further in deciding what solutions are worth exploring and maybe even implementing.

