Reflection on Mind Mapping

Challenge  As a Business Consultant in the IT industry it is my constant challenge to engage with clients in the  most productive and expedient way possible. Also, there is no ‘typical’ challenge as customers, their  stories, industries, and topics often change. But I would say it is quite common that clients think they  know what they want and jump into conclusion although, they actually do not know what they really  need. It is just their first, or most obvious, guess. Often this is realized to late in the engagement  when time and money has already been wasted. So, the challenge is how to overcome this and  figure out what really matters to the client beforehand.

Selection  A key takeaway for me from this course is that Design Thinking puts emphasis on the ‘What is?’. And  this is exactly what I often see as being neglected in business. In the lesson on the Mind Mapping  tool from week three, Angelica Martinez showed what Mind Mapping is all about. And I learned that it’s  a great tool take all the information available and collaboratively shape an understanding of the  current reality and, as a team, deep dive into what the essence of the problem is. I believe that Mind  Mapping could help in specifying the current state at the beginning of an engagement and would  therefore solve my challenge.

Application  In the consulting business workshops are commonly used and sometimes you stick to methods that  you have applied before and that have proven successful. But none of these tools I have come across  and applied provides such a good methodology for narrowing down a current situation and even  already think about potential solutions by design criteria. The tools I have used so far, such as  brainstorming, create a pool of insights, but the evaluation and interpretation of the results was up  to an individual or two who organized the workshop. In this way I believe it’s impossible to find  clusters and dependencies as good as you can when doing it collaboratively.

As often, preparation is key. So before conducting workshops I made sure to thoroughly collect the  information, make sure that its well readable and understandable. Also, the workshop location  matters, and it might even be worth it to book an event room depending on how many participants  there are to have enough space. It is a good experience for participants to first take a tour and have  a look at the information provided. In this way they can dive into the situation for themselves before  collaborating in their teams. So, make sure to account for enough time for that.

Insight  The difficulty I would say is that you as a consultant in a way disagree with the client or show that  you do not really believe in what the client tells you his problems are. As you want to focus on the  current situation again. But when the client stands behind the idea of again defining the problem in  a collaborative manner it works out great. Overall the Design Thinking process provides good  guidance on which steps to take and where to put emphasis on. I think it is much more expedient to  first really drill down on the problem, opposed to just jumping to possible solutions and maybe rate  them and move on based on that, which is often done.

Approach  It is crucial and not trivial to positively formulate and make the client understand that problem  definition is essential and that it might be better to again do it properly. Also, it depends on the  problem statement the client approaches you beforehand. Some want to be guided through the  whole process anyway, some might only want consultants to be involved in one step of their own  process.

Going forward I will definitively more often apply Mind Mapping as it is a great tool to create a  common understanding of the situation first and I believe better solutions will result based on that.  The alternative addition I would recommend is to make sure to really get client buy-in before the  workshop. This can be achieved by showing case studies where the initial problem the client  approached us drastically shifted but at the end delivered more customer value. But it is crucial to  get the customer behind and make him understand your thinking.

