Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge  Currently, we have no established service offering that depicts how design thinking can create more value  or how we can ultimately create better customer value at my organisation.  I am at a technology consulting  firm that focuses more on the delivery of projects than on the discovery of projects. I want my organisation  to start using design thinking to help define the right problem     To ensure that I had support from the business, I had a series of meetings and workshops with senior  stakeholders to engage them and help them conceptualise the benefit. To help these stakeholders  conceptualise the value of adopting design thinking concepts and the value of using them in the work we  do, I brought them on the journey that I had been through in my discovery of design and its benefits.     Through this course I learnt the value of design thinking and how important it is to speak to and understand  your user/customer.  I find the power of empathy invigorating and believe that finding meaning in the work  that you do and sharing my learnings with others is important. As this belief was shared by a few others at  my organisation, we formed a small working group to challenge the above problem.     Selection  I am going to use the mind mapping technique from session 3, idea generation. I am choosing to use this  tool specifically because I am working with a small working group where everyone has different ideas of the  direction we want the organsation to go in. I will use this working group to work towards improving the  service offerings we have for our clients.     In doing the mind mapping I plan to identify patterns and themes. We will use the affinity mapping  technique to group insights that have common themes so we will be able to see outliers. I really like using  mind mapping as a way of brainstorming as it allows me to work collaboratively with others to ideate and  co-create. Each person will have equal opportunity to share their ideas with the group. Once I perform this  exercise I will be able to determine the different personas for the ranging audiences that this will be sold to.  This is very important as each persona will have different motivations and thus, different stated and  unstated needs.     Application  I will run a 1 hour mind mapping workshop. I will start the workshop by introducing a how might we  statement to ensure that everyone is aligned. “How might we incorporate human centred design into our  current service offering so we can provide an end-to-end service to our client that really investigates the  end users’ needs?” I will aim to mind map the ideas and values of the current state of the organsation and  explore where we want to be in the future.     I will have everyone brainstorm their ideas individually for a few minutes. Then they will pair up and share  their ideas with another person. Finally, everyone will come back to the group (8 people) to discuss. This  will give everyone the opportunity to explore different ideas that they might not have thought of. The sharing  of ideas is really powerful as it allows different people to have a voice. Usually a meeting that involves  discussion and brainstorming is overpowered by an extrovert’s agenda or the opinion of the highest paid  person in the room; this can limit diversity of idea generation.     From this we will use affinity mapping to identify common themes and outliers. Once we have done this we  can have an open discussion about how to move forward as a company using the insights we developed in  our mapping. This will help facilitate co-creation so that everyone feels that they have contributed towards  these changes. This will ensure that everyone has a better understanding of the value of design thinking by  applying this to our projects.     Insights  Throughout the brainstorm we were able to share and collaborate our ideas. During the session people  challenged each other and as facilitator, I tried to have a productive brainstorming session by including  every topic mentioned and by not letting anyone shutdown other people’s ideas. If I ran this workshop  again, I would initially place more emphasis on the importance of getting all ideas down and on people  respecting everyone’s ideas. This will help with the discussion and any challenges when people don’t  agree.

After we completed the brainstorm exercise, I provided everyone with a single vote each for what they  believed is highest priority. To do this we used affinity mapping to group together similar insights and  related themes that we believed complimented each other. These are evident by the rainbow outlining  below. In addition to this, relationships between the different ideas grew more and more evident and it  became easier to understand the direction we wanted to go in and what values we would be able to  package as a service offering.     In employing values of stewardship and resilience we want to go forward and make this service  sustainable. As evidenced by the image below, we found that the key element underpinning the different  ideas is to embed and empower our people to have a growth mindset. Going forward if we continue to be  open to learning and accepting uncertainty, we can be far more innovative and learn to fail fast and quick.     At the end of the exercise, everyone in the room acknowledged its effectiveness. We worked together to  understand the problem statement and determine how to address it in a short period of time.

Approach & Next Steps  Going forward, I would split this brainstorming session up to allow for the initial discussion about the  problem so that we define it more clearly before brainstorming. I noticed that people started to mislead the  conversation at points. This resulted in some ideas not being explored in enough detail.    I would like to include a few more senior stakeholders next time. Stakeholders’ will then be able to validate  assumptions early. This will also help drive the initiative and demonstrate top down support within the  organisation.    In future I am excited to use some of these insights to start workshopping how we can share this with our  organisation. It is important for us to bring everyone along on the journey to successfully address the  changes. I hope to continue practicing my learning by introducing visualisation facilitation in coming  workshops to help solve complex problems. This will help highlight the importance of being able to show  and not tell. Each of the different topics learnt in this course are so powerful when used together. As people  become more comfortable with ideation, I will start applying visualisation facilitation and storytelling to help  drive the conversation about benefits for the end user. By pairing our strengths in strategic and analytical  thinking with curiosity using design thinking, I hope to contribute to the ongoing success of my organisation.

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