Reflection – Mind mapping

Challenge & selection

I am involved in a project rethinking an existing product/service for consumers. To involve all and gather  internal insights we started by inviting all employees to evaluate  how we were seen by our customers the  strengths, weaknesses etc.  Everyone was invited to go online. We wanted to be unbiased and decided to  go with open ended questions resulting with a very rich written material. My challenge was then to analyze  and summarize from a very rich and broad material the results for the management group strategy  meeting. After summarizing the first section by just reading through and grouping similar answers into  categories I discovered the approach of mind mapping in the course. I realized the method would enable  me not only to group similar findings but to discover and understand the relationships between the  different findings and build a richer picture.

Application

When starting on the second section of answers I first read all answers to get “the big picture” and look for  some main themes. Then I started mapping thoughts connected to these themes. My method was very  traditional using pen and paper. I constructed maps of sentences around the initial themes. Several times  going back to the unprocessed long list of answers and iterating my map. Sometimes moving one subtheme  to another category and gradually also renaming, clarifying or expanding the theme. After several iterations  I ended up with my final mind map a structured summary of the results. To make the picture more vivid a  picked some original quotes from each main category.

Insights and approach

What I have learned from this exercise is that mind mapping enabled me to draw deeper and better  insights from the material. I felt that the conclusions from this section gave us more and better insights and  we were able to start understanding also the relationships between the different themes and subthemes.

When comparing the results from the first and second section of answers the insights were richer in the  second one and also better communicated.

The benefits just from this little exercise made me realize how useful this approach could be in  interconnecting data driven from several sources. Also when communicating the results thorough a mind  map it also contains a visualization of some of your insights.

Since I Know discovered the benefits from this approach I will continue to use it my work in processing rich  materials from consumer insights work both in processing the data and in drawing higher level insights  looking for “nuggets of wisdom” & “connecting the dots”.

