Mind Mapping tool experience

Challenge     Part of a large company, I got the responsibility to renegotiate the Health Insurance contract  mandatory from an employer perspective for all employees. The scope I defined was to find a solution  that would be financially acceptable and bring new benefits to all employees, improving the current  one. The main challenge was to process input coming from interviews and feedbacks from employees,  years of internal data, data provided by the different potential insurances, and define what we could  look for in an uncertain time with multiple unpredictable external factors including Covid-19.

Selection    To align the organization around a common understanding of the current situation and bring  completely different perspectives to be more innovative, I decided to involve the Employees  Representative Committee and organize a mind mapping with them (12 people).

Application    With the 12 participants, I organized the mind mapping session in a large meeting room where all  material, graphs, feedbacks and data were presented around the room on the walls. As a first step, I  asked them to browse the room individually and pick what was relevant for each of them and put it  together: they had 60 minutes to do so.    After this first step, in separate meeting rooms, I divided the team in two groups of 6 to review their  notes and start sharing their observations. As a team, with the sticky notes and material, they grouped  them by theme and clustered them on a wall. They had 90 minutes for it. It created quite some  discussions between them as their observations were often quite similar and sometimes different.  Keeping the outliers on the edge showed them the importance of each of their input during the  exercise but as well potential to be investigate furthermore.     As last step, we opened the room divider between the two-meeting rooms to regroup the 12  participants and started the 2-hour part. Together they shared the outcome each team created and  started to identify the inside statements. They marked them using big sticky notes on top of the notes  and material they had grouped previously. The connection between the clusters took some time and  quite some discussion.    I concluded the afternoon explaining them what the next step with the generation of the design criteria  statement will be, pivoting from the “what is “to the “what if”.

Insights    It was a fun activity and a beneficial experience as the outcome of the mind map tool, the criteria they  identified, were much broader and varied that what I could have foreseen. It opened for more possible  solutions and more creative options.    My learning was that the outcome was offering the organization different observations and criteria  that would never been identified without it. It was as well a fun team exercise, everyone feeling  empowered to be involved with the possibility to have a voice and be involved in a company project.  It also raised a lot of curiosity and questions from the colleagues having seen the material on the wall  prepared for the activity and afterwards, the mind maps created.      Approach    Having experienced and discovered the valuable outcome created by the mind map tool, I would focus  on using and sharing with my team more the design thinking tools to develop better solutions.    What I under evaluated was the power these individuals grouped together developed and the sense  of belonging, proudness and responsibility it created. The benefit to bring together a diverse team was  a success for the project but also raise the inclusive feeling of this team created for this opportunity.   They were the ones after the mapping tool exercise decided that they wanted to share with all  employees their learning, experience and how they made a difference. We created a story out of it,  published it and that improved the inclusion feeling.  On top, several employees showed interest to  take part in future projects.

