Design Thinking for Business Innovation

Mind Mapping Reflection

Challenge

I am a new employee in a training and consultation company, one of my new project I  had to handle is to improve the services offered by our company to the targeted  customers by holding a focus group of about 12 people from the target industry –  people were mainly decision makers and people that can actually make the effect, some  were managers and others were in engineering or Human resources. This is done to  know their needs and problems and custom made the services offered by us based on  their wants and problems. The challenge was how to implement the focus group on the  targeted people and get insights from observations to help them help us.

Selection

After going through several meetings with my team and taking the design thinking  course, the mind mapping tool was the best approach for us to handle the focus group  in addition to handling the cluster of ideas and differentiate what is good from the  outliers, and it is a tool that can be implemented to identify the insights and translate  them into a criteria can be executed in our company.

Application

After we decided to hold the focus group and arranged all the logistics,  we prepared an  online invitation letter with a brochure about the focus group session, this was done to  make them understand exactly what are the goals and purposes of the session and have  time to think and review the problems and most critical needs they face.

At the focus group session we arranged several activities before the mind mapping tool  to assure the commitment and the involvement of each individual, we applied the  projective technique, the pinwheel activity with the matrix to pinpoint the main need  and problems.

Afterwards we clustered in teams of three- from different backgrounds to get more  insights- and asked them to pick the most crucial and hard to solve problems based on  their needs and necessities. After 20 minutes each team had a presenter with the main  ideas of problems and what actually works and what not. We have equipped the hall  with a board and each team of the four teams had identified their ideas on the board  (the good and the less suitable) for everyone to see and think about.

By the end of the session we had different ideas, some really good and the others were  not helpful at that time but we placed them in our data for later reconsideration. We

have identified some observations which is the main result for our focus group and thus  the mind mapping tool used was effective.

Insight

This tool made it easier for us to collect that huge amount of data collected from a wide  scope of people and arrange it in a way observations and insights are made to help us  improve the quality and type of services offered by our company. The data collected  were not at all what we expected, we had different views and opinions and some  hidden and deep thoughts were open for us to explore and provide a tailor made  solutions for them. The mind mapping tool made it possible for us and our customers to  transfer the tedious and longsome process of data collection into a fun and interactive  activity.

Approach

There were a lot of ideas and a lot of new perspectives to think about. Our focus group  session encountered 12 people and all contributed in a quantitative and qualitative  ideas, but for next sessions the focus group held should not contain more than 8 people  of 4 teams of 2, firstly, for us for the different and varied themes we have, we need all  data on all of the themes in a time limit of 290 minutes and secondly to get clearer  insights from the observations. Design thinking with the Mind mapping tool and all of its  projective techniques made is easier for us to solve our problems innovatively.

