Challenge and selection

I work as a project manager in a small strategy consultancy and we work in different  innovation projects. One of most important aspect in project management is being  able to communicate to different stakeholders and make sure that everyone  understand the same thing – which is almost impossible due to our own personal bias.  We have our own methodology but there are many tools and similarities to design  thinking, one of them is using visualization across the project.

When we start a project, we first need to know our customer and understand its  context. You can do that using different approaches and tools: interviews,  questionnaires, reading business reports... but you can miss spontaneous thoughts or  ideas that could be important or interesting. In order to be efficient and get the most  of it, we prepare a workshop called "abstraction".

In this workshop, we put from 6 to 8 managers  of the customer in front of some pre- selected images so we can extract the essence of the company by answering WH- questions. At the end we want to have an statement that defines that company (its  mission, vision or values).

Application

First of all, we have a preparation phase before the workshop with the customer.

We prepare the workshop in a team (from 2 to 4 people) where we define the theme  to deconstruct (based on the customer's goal) and their main meanings. We use  different tools like http://www.visuwords.com/ to get relationships and different  concepts from some themes to help us understand what is (or might be) behind it. We  then select some images that represent the most relevant concepts or ideas and we  put them in a big poster for the session.

We are ready to start the workshop!

We start answering (without knowing yet the central word) WHAT is the central idea  behind the images... and all of them are going to be related to the central topic (in the  previous example TABOO) if we chose the right images. Afterward, we iterate through  the rest of the WH-questions for each one of the WHATs.

While we are in the process, we are clustering the answers by putting the word into  categories, so at the end we get the most important topics and the relationship  between them. We share that with the customer as the result of the workshop so we  are all aligned and agree on them.

We refine that inputs in a session after the workshop (only the internal team, without  customer) and put the topics in a few sentences or formula that reflects the main  purpose of the company or project. It is generally a very global concept but while we  work on possible solutions and scenarios we always come back to that sentence (that  we printed and have on the wall) to make sure that we are well aligned.

Insight

It is important to have a multidisciplinary team from the customer, to be open minded  and good general culture. We found that it's easier to start with an ice-breaker activity  of 15 minutes so people can warm-up before the real session starts. At the end we  have a global statement that allows us to focus but at the same time it's wide enough  to bring new ideas. We are incorporating other activities to narrow or extend the  statement in the following steps of the process.

Approach

You could use other methods to get an statement of the company, like asking the  marketing department. But their inputs are biased and most of the time their view is  too narrow. If you ask the rest of the departments separately it's difficult that you can  get one statement which all of them agrees because they haven't been in the  discussion. At the end, it is important that they can share their ideas and come with  the answer by themselves.

It is not easy to come up with the perfect statement, but it is not necessary... as far as  it is good enough and reflects the idea behind the project. You know that you have it  right when everybody agrees that somehow they see their idea reflected on that  statement. Keep iterating until you get it right!

