Reflection Assignment  Design Thinking for Innovation MOOC  July 19th, 2018  Sjoerd Van Der Wal

1.  Challenge

The current Covid-19 pandemic is affecting healthcare, the economy, social and organizational wellbeing  around the world. This is also true for a small Island the one I live on. There is only one hospital with 11 ICU  beds on our Island of about 110.000 citizens, which makes the control of spreading and preventative  measures important. There are currently 9 patients who have tested positive. The government has urged  companies to let employees who have a high risk and employees who can work from home, stay home.  However, my employer, the hospital has not yet followed the advice of the government and let people work  from home, because it does not have experience with this and wants to have certain things like criteria and  policy in order before giving employees permission to work at home, thus minimalizing risk of further spread.  This situation is challenging on a national level, but also for businesses, organizations and individuals.

2.  Selection

The tool I have used to apply to the abovementioned challenge is Mind Mapping, because it provides  visualization and uncovering underlying patterns in a complex challenge/problem (reference lecture video  week 4. Mind Mapping). I have chosen to focus on the “What is” phase of Design Thinking to conceptualize  what the problem for employees are who are not being permitted to work from home and so create a  foundation of the transition to the following phases “What if”, “What wows” and “What works”. Hopefully with  this information my employer will be able to add this perspective to the “solution” and thus the policy that they  are working on to provide their employees safety at work or give them the possibility of working from home.

3.  Application

The Mind Map was applied by listing concepts pertaining to the different categories: Challenges, Risks,  Opportunities and Government Regulations. I listed all concepts which came to mind, which provided a  diverse overview on a sheet of paper and drew arrows to indicate connections in between the categories.  The weakness of this tool is that it lacks input from others, which may mean that there is an incomplete  representation of all factors and connections (reference; course videos). However, the effectiveness and  added value of the Mind Map is exploring what the problem truly is, before exploring an innovative solution.

4.  Insight

The insight gained through this exercise/assignment is that the Mind Map can take a different form depending  on what perspective is taken into account. In my case, I mapped the 4 mentioned categories (see section 3),  and included both the organization and the employees perspectives. In my opinion I have in a way combined  the Mind Mapping with an aspect of the Journey Mapping as it provides an ethnographic aspect. The second  insight I have gained is that multiple tools can be combined in certain phases of the Design process. However,  it is important to go through all the phases in order to really explore the core of the problem, a wide range of  possible solutions and being able to choose the best solutions after application/experimentation.

5.  Approach

What I would have done differently a next time is to go through the whole Design Thinking process in order  to propose a solution. For this assignment I only focused on the beginning phase. I will need to put the theory  to practice, together with coworkers, in order to create an innovative solution. I find it important to include the  Co-creation tool and get input from other during Mind Mapping, but also in the “What wows” and “What works”  phases. In my opinion multidisciplinary teams with diverse perspectives makes brainstorming and  deliberation more fruitful.

