Mind mapping

Challenge

I direct a country chapter of an international NGO with six sub-national sister companies. As our  mission lies in enabling youth mobility around the globe, our operations have been severely affected  by the current Covid-19 pandemic. As such, all busines functions, from finance, HR, marketing, BDev  and operations are differently affected. Each local management team and each function has their  own opinion and supposed solution ideas to their individual issue. Our challenge is to consolidate  these insights into solution design criteria that are viable, desired by clients and economically  sustainable, as described throughout the course.

Selection

This status quo puts us into the second “what if” stage and suggests mind mapping as an alternative  technique to reduce the options available and to identify the ‘sweet spot’ of a harmonized business  recovery design. Mind mapping can visualize patterns among the collected data and insights of the  regional VPs, particularly as each function has a way of presenting evidence and arguments that may  not be conductive to the others. Additionally, as Moran points out, mind mapping is a creative  way of organizing insights, which should help us draw connections that we would not have  anticipated.

Application

The idea is to bring relevant internal and external stakeholders together and share their previously  gathered insights and perspectives. Each regional business function has done market research for  their area. Marketing and business development have interviewed clients for pains, gains and  current outlooks. Finance has built best and worst case scenarios. HR brings in observations and  interviews from how staff in faring under Covid-19. Additionally, industry and client insights are  supplied by the presence of board of trustees members and dedicated staff. A former HR staff is  invited to facilitate the session.

Headquarters provide a large space, where the evidence of the different group is hung on walls and  flipcharts. An engaging and comfortable atmosphere is prepared, as suggested by the IBM example.  After an introduction by the CEO to address the urgency of the situation, the facilitator introduces  the core design thinking principles to create an open-minded and creative vibe. Tables are  designated for each product category and participants are asked to wander around and select  evidence that gives them new insights and ideas for product development, or that triangulate  existing observations.

At each product table, participants present the observations they made and these are subsequently  grouped on a flipchart. As Moor explains, this follows the ‘What if anything were possible’ guiding  question. The task is to produce a ‘wild and radical’ idea from the given evidence in the form of a  mind map. The table groups are thereafter asked to mix, with only one original member from the  table remaining to explain the co-created idea to new listeners. These listeners shall then ‘challenge’  the idea, based on the evidence and discussion they had.

Insights

The atmosphere of this event was highly constructive and participants enjoyed being creative  beyond their usual functional scope. In particular, the external insights from how other NGOs and  companies address their clients during the current crisis has seemingly given many managers new

perspectives on what is possible. Together with the various local insights from the marketing  departments, we were able to identify very distinct and novel customer pains and needs across our  customer segments. This could provide a basis for persona-building, as in the social network  example of the Coursera course. Conducting this alternative approach has certainly sensitivized  management for a more customer-centric way of planning and doing operations.

Approach

On the other hand, the instructions to the participants may have been too much forward pushing, as  most table groups ended up producing a solution idea that they did not want to see challenged any  more. This however, is what would happen in the now subsequent third design thinking stage. We  thus failed to use mind mapping as a tool for creating design criteria. This could hinder the open and  iterative further process of eliciting how viable, demanded and economically sustainable each  product development idea really is.

