Design  Thinking for Innovation

Reflection – Visualization

I.  Challenge  My company provides customized energy solutions in the oil sector for National Oil  Companies (NOC) and International Oil Companies (IOC). We have an integrated  Management System certified under ISO 9001, 14001 and OSHAS 18001 which is  permanently audited internally by our Performance Management area as well as  externally by international auditors pertaining to the organizations that renew our  certifications on a yearly basis. During a recent internal audit, we found that our field  personnel in different oil field locations was not consistent in terms of having readily  available for our audits basic information such as maintenance registers of the  equipment under their control, engineering layouts describing the operation in their  respective locations, medical evacuation procedures, emergency procedures,  emergency contacts, standardized reports for shift changes, among others. This, in turn,  has led to some operational inconveniences. In order to mitigate this situation, some of  our associates have resorted to sticking some of this information on the walls of their  working campers. The latter is where they keep this information both physically and  digitally in the different locations. Nevertheless, this practice did not suffice in order to  provide a more consistent behaviour on the part of our associates with respect to their  complying with the work processes they needed to abide with based on our Integrated  Management System policies and procedures. We needed to find a way to quickly solve  this situation and get a more consistent behaviour on the part of our associates.

II.  Selection  When this situation occurred, I had just started to take the Design Thinking course and I  thought that for this challenge the Visualization tool could prove to be a useful  technique to solve our problem. In the course, Visualization was presented as one of the  essential Design Thinking tools, whereby you get to use imagery “to make an abstract  idea more public and more concrete, so that it will be more visible, clear, and  understandable to others.” In the book, Designing for Growth Visualization is explained  as the “transformation of information into images that you see, either literally with your  eyes or figuratively with your mind's eye.” (Ogilvie, Tim; Liedtka, Jeanne. Designing for  Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers (Columbia Business School Publishing)  (Kindle Locations 874-875). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition). Based on the  adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, I figured that Visualization could  definitely lower the risk of multiple interpretations by using pictures or representations  instead of words.

III.  Application  As a result of the above, I requested my team to go out to the field and take pictures of  how the information was posted by our associates in different campers in multiple  locations. I also asked them to design a standardized wall document holder system that  would be identical in all of our campers in our field operations, so that no matter in

which location an associate would be working, the wall document holder system would  be the same. This could facilitate locating important documents and would make it  easier to keep them updated and readily available when needed. At this juncture, we  have proceeded to socialize both our findings as well as our proposals with our field  associates and have gathered very positive feedback. Even though the initial feedback  on this initiative has been favourable, we have decided to undertake its application to a  limited number of locations in order to gain additional insights from this deployment  (Learning Launch).

IV.  Insight  The application of the Visualization tool proved to be extremely useful in order to gain  our teams´ buy in for the initiative. It turned to be very efficient to use graphical  representations of what the problem was and how we wanted to solve it than to convey  it in some other form of communication channel (v.g. in writing via e-mail). Our  associates very quickly identified with the problem and with the proposed solution. This  quick win I experienced with just one of the tools of the Design Thinking process has  convinced me of the power of this methodology and I am currently requesting that all  members of my team take courses to become familiar with the same.

V.  Approach  What I consider is still needed to complement what has been done is to efficiently  include in the process storytelling. I think that this was not done as well as it should in  order to achieve greater levels of engagement than the ones we have obtained thus far.  This is definitely something to be addressed once we receive further insights from our  Learning Launch.

