Family Estate-Visualization

Challenge

When my father passed away in November 2009 in Zambia as a Member of Parliament

which is equivalent to been a Senator in America, my older brother and I became the legal

administrators of the family estate which comprised of a motel with 5 employees, one farm

specializing in cattle ranching and fish farming with 4 employees, another farm specializing

in maize & cattle ranching with 5 employees and some real estate properties run by a

property management company valued at the time about $500 000.

Since my older brother was working in Australia and he wasn’t able to fulfil his fiduciary

duties as been the eldest of the family to run the family estate, he took on the role as an

advisor along with my mother and it was decided that as the second born, I was going to be

the one running the day-to- day operations of the family estate as I was the second person

beside my father to earn a Masters Degree in Business Administration in 2007 and at time I

had been a business lecturer since 2007 with a background of  teaching Economics, Business

Administration courses and running my own business as a Research Consultant.

Ultimately, we found out there wasn’t an accounting system in place on getting financial data

which would have enabled us to make informed decisions on what was happening and which

direction we were going to take to move forward with the motel and the two farms. As such,

there was also a lack of communication between management and the workers.

Selection

The visualization tool was the one we adopted the most because it enabled us to attain a

typical understanding of the matter space before identification and definition of probable

answers to the typical understanding of the matter space before identification and definition

of probable answers to the prevailing problems. By using the visualization tool as learnt in

module 1, employing inductive reasoning, we were able to think about possibilities that we

had not yet seen. The choice of visualization was motivated by the fact that a conclusion to

the problem was already reached therefore it was necessary to open up to new unlimited

possibilities to reach the cause to the problem. Visual thinking gave us a whole room to think

about all possible answers or ideas and minimize the chance of omitting important ideas or

solutions within the problem space.

Application

We had 2 participants from each farm and the motel whom we put into the room with

whiteboard in order to conduct a mind mapping. It was necessary to encourage every

participant to be free from the decision made by management and upon up to design new

ideas or tasks that can be tested. In order to achieve the objectives of the workshop,

storytelling was the tool everyone had to agree no one knew the exact problems and the issue

of lack of communication was contributing to the problem of not reporting financial data to

management. The next step was to use the Stakeholder Mapping Model and it is a process

and visual tool to clarify and categorize the various stakeholders by drawing further pictures

of what the stakeholder groups are, which interests they represent, the amount of power they

possess, whether they represent inhibiting or supporting factors for the organization to realize

its objectives, or methods in which they should be dealt with. It allowed us to understand who

the stakeholders are for the organisation.

This model classifies stakeholders based on their power and interest in the project. It allocates

the stakeholders to one of the categories:

 high power / high interest

 high power / low interest

 low power / high interest

 low power / low interest

This session took about 20 minutes and the behaviours or characteristics of the stakeholders

in the problem space were mapped in relative terms to the business performance of their

business unit.  Then we had a 30 minute session where we used the tool of idea generation

and here were some considerations for our brainstorming session:

 To learn from past and ongoing engagement by looking at each business unit

engagement activities.

 To be forward thinking by considering potential stakeholders from new markets, new

customers and new impending regulations.

 To be social since social media has provided an unparalleled opportunity to identify

and reach lesser-known stakeholder groups.

 To be aware since people tend to focus on formal authorities in the mapping process.

 To be gender sensitive since we had to include women as part of our stakeholder list.

Therefore, the final session about 30 minutes, participants were told to not put their names to

encourage emotional intelligence by answering the questions below from each category and

each stakeholder identified was analysed by using the following criteria:

 Contribution (value): Does the stakeholder have information, counsel, or expertise

on the issue that could be helpful?

 Willingness to engage: How willing is the stakeholder to engage?

 Influence: How much influence does the stakeholder have?

 Necessity of involvement: Is this someone who could derail or delegitimize the

process if they were not included in the engagement?

 Action: We used these five criteria to create and populate a chart with short

descriptions of how stakeholders fulfil them and assign values (low, medium, or high)

to these stakeholders.

Insight & Approach

This exercise was very insightful because it gave us some unpredictable results into some of

the problems we were having even though we had initially started the exercise in the hope of

solving the issue of reporting financial data to management and also lack of communication

among the workers. Instead, the exercise revealed there was a serious issue with the

structure/execution of tasks from top management to the workers and the elements that were

highlighted attributing to the problem space were more of employees’ motivation and

capacity to perform their duties efficiently and effectively. Elements that would have likely

been overlooked in traditional methods to problem solving were uncovered and considered.

Given that implementation of some of the new insights will require prototyping and testing of

new work-flow processes, the best approach would be learning launch.

