Social Leaders Challenge: Reflection

Challenge:     In my company we develop technology solutions for everyday challenges in different business  sectors. This time we were contacted by an NGO concerned about a critical problem regarding  the security of social leaders (leaders from communities in my country that help their members  to defend their rights) who were threatened by dangerous people and in worst cases killed. The  NGO has been trying to solve that problem for the last 10 months with no luck and this time was  interested in seeing if technology could help addressing and solving the problem. The challenge  was to create a technological solution for teaching social leaders all the security protocols the  NGO had designed.      Selection:    We had heard about the problem before in the news but we didn’t have a deep understanding of  it. As Angela Meyer says in the “Visualization Tool” video lecture, when we are dealing with very  complex problems we need to bring in more than just logic, we are doing extrapolation and  inductive reasoning. We needed to use our imagination to see possibilities that we haven’t seen  yet. To address the problem in a better way we decided to use Visualization tools that could  help us understand the problem beyond the statistics and numbers that were available for us.       Application:     We invited all the stakeholders (NGO members,  four social leaders and government  representatives in charge of the social leaders security) to an all day meeting where we did a  couple of exercises using Visualization tools to get more insights regarding the problem.    First we created four groups, each one with one leader, one NGO member, one government  representative and one of our team members. Then we asked the social leaders to describe  everyday situations where they felt insecured or vulnerable and to draw those situations in a  board with help from the rest of the group, trying to show what they were feeling, thinking and  doing in every step, and giving as much detail as possible of the environment and people  around them. The main idea of the first exercise was trying to be in the shoes of the social  leader and see what they saw.    For the second exercise we asked all the groups to point out what was done wrong in those  situations, that made the social leader more vulnerable. Then to think on ways to improve the  security in those situations and to draw the solution.

Insight & Approach    After finishing the exercises it was really clear to us that most of the social leaders knew the  security protocols, at least theoretically, but once it was required to use that knowledge in real  life, in practice, they didn’t know what to do and usually made wrong decisions being more  vulnerable to the threads. It was really helpful to make them draw those situations where they  were vulnerable so we could have a clearer view of the dimension of the problems they were  facing everyday. And thanks to that insight we decided that technology was not required to  teach them the security protocols, but to help them feel and live the situations so they would be  better prepared and make better decisions if the real thing happens.     I’m totally sure now that Visualization tools could come handy for those problems that are  complex and required to be in the shoes of the users. An image always gives more information  than a thousand words, helping understand what is living the user, what is thinking, what  experience is having.

