Design Thinking Reflection of Visualization

Challenge & Selection

Visualization is a great tool that I quite often actually have used when I quickly want to “tell” a  story or dwell into potential solutions for a tough problem. I work within Business Development  in a major global 3PL and quite often on the IT and Innovation side of the Solution we want to  deliver. I have to say though that I actually only draw simple process diagrams with boxes per  tasks, bubbles for shout-outs and line for the links between the tasks. Many of my colleagues  and (potential) customers & vendors comes from diverse backgrounds, countries and  companies so drawing the story enables me to both explain my story easily while at the same  time understandable for everyone.

My visualizations are mostly drawing on the white board but standing at the white board drawing  allows me to ask the customers questions and engage them in an “open conversation” which  normally actually also allows us to proof our suggested solution. When I work with vendors on  discovering common ground or new innovations we use visualization / the white board to  describe our problem on one side and the vendors to describe their (potential) solution. Using  the open manner of discussion enables us nearly always to have a very open and constructive  discussion for mutual benefit.

Application

I have a story about using visualization. In discussing a major policy & IT landscape change to  support Omnichannel Logistics for a one of our major customers, I was trying to explain them in  a simple manner their own total business landscape to let them understand the ideal “location”  of a certain application / organization. The “customer” actually existed of a group of ~15 people  from various nationalities and operational silo’s and it was clear that they had varying  understanding of the matter. During the strategic discussion I felt that mere words just didn’t cut  it with them so I boldly asked whether I could draw the landscape and let three persona’s orders  “walk” through the overview.

Insight & Approach

It took ~20 minutes but finally everyone fully understood the ramifications of actually handing  over their entire control of the entire logistics and stock keeping to us. It’s actually also not often  that we aren’t selling turnover but purely good advice, but we felt it prudent at that point to be  honest with the customer. The conclusion was that we retained the entire logistics for 3 years  and that a pretty version of my 2014-drawing has now even been used by the customer for the  new contract brief from 2019.

This insight was actually also an eye-opener within our own organization as we realized that we  we’re yet ready yet (with organization and IT) to support these kind of requests. We have shortly  thereafter hired Subject Matter Experts from both eCommerce / Omnichannel Sales, Operation  and IT which has definitely supported us in winning e.g. Amazon operations.

Well, my use of visualization previously was actually only covering bits of the design process  and definitely not as structurally as Professor Liedtka propose but it’s an eye-opener that I  already master 1 of the 10 tools.

This course has though also made me see this as a tool in a new way. When I've done it before  it was really "ad hoc," but now I want to use it more structurally to clarify processes, stories or  ideas that will assist me and my colleagues in articulating and presenting our ideas and best  illustrate them. It is though only one of 10 tools presented in the course so I need to come to  grips with them all. I have always been innovative in looking for solutions – but now realize that I  was actually just asking the What vows and What works questions. I will therefore start defining  a Design Brief next week and use that to test everything I’ve learned so that I will be able to  manage 1 or hopefully more Design Thinking projects.

