Visualization

Challenge & Selection

I’m a learning and development specialist in our customer service organisation. Recently five client  facing departments have been merged and my mission was to create a new uniform training landscape  for all the five units. It sounded quite simple at the beginning but as soon as we started to interview  the respective trainers, leaders and employees, we discovered that there was a complexity we didn’t  expect. The existing trainings were conducted differently in each area. Training documents were partly  electronic, digitised or not available at all, in some areas training was very structured and on schedule  and in other areas there were no documents and no schedules in place.  It was a huge challenge since  there are more than 500 employees in total and the departments differed in size, offering, goals and  particularly in corporate culture. One representative from each area was assigned as support for the  project. They were not very keen to contribute solutions since the overall vision was not very clear and  they already had more than enough to do with their respective daily business. The general attitude  was, everything works, why should we change anything? Why should we standardize something? The  resistance was unexpectedly high before we even started our workshops. I decided to proceed slowly  and deliberately and tried to consider the resistance as a gift. I knew that if we did not have the project  members on board, we would not be successful in the long run. I clearly communicated to my superiors  that we were encountering resistance that was in my opinion only marginally related to the training  amendments we wanted to make. I was looking for a new approach to our task since the main  challenge was human-centered. So we needed a deep understanding of the actual people involved and  decided to use visualization and storytelling in our workshops to understand better what really  mattered to the people.

Application

We started the first workshop with building a common understanding on how we would like to work  together in our project group. I brought different coaching cards (A4 photo cards with people,  situations, nature etc.) and everyone could choose one or more images, which represented a mosaic  piece of the desired culture for them. They were also invited to draw what came to their minds. It was  so interesting to see that we found our first common ground. People were suddenly more relaxed,  some were even laughing and opening up. This creative visualization approach was only the start. We  found a working and learning culture that everyone could identify with. A next task was to create a  proposal for a high level training landscape without paying attention to all the details and differences  in each area. We all came up with standard Power Point presentations with the common boxes and  arrows. The whole creativity approach was stifled, we all did what we can do best – creating slides that  correspond with the expectations of the management and the corporate identity. We were under a  lot of time pressure, we had to finally deliver. We definitely needed more time if we wanted to come  up with a better solution. Right from the start we wanted to pack our training landscape into a story.  Something that appeals to the emotions and everyone can connect something with it. In a workshop  we collected, drew and wrote ideas together and then we prioritized the ideas with points. It was so  interesting how many ideas we came up with. There was even space for crazy ideas something we  weren’t used to in a business context. Then we started to draw the main ideas on big posters and  showed them to other stakeholders. The feedbacks were very open and some ideas had to be  amended, to others we had to say goodbye and very few were popular. In the end we decided to  present our training landscape as a globe, the individual areas as countries, everything interconnected  and yet individual.

Insight

We haven't been able to identify many synergies yet (training wise) but we have been able to define a  common culture as a starting point and we found a common image that we also can relate to.  We  have realized that we can come up with great ideas as individuals but also as a team. We can tell our  employees a story and back it up with a meaningful image. The whole process made us strong as a  team and everyone that was involved saw how the idea was created, everyone knows how much work  it took and we are all more than happy with the result. It took much longer than usual – but the extra  time invested was absolutely worth it. During the process the resistance has become smaller as the  members felt that the management and the project leader took their inputs and ideas very seriously.  They were really part of the process and realized that nothing was simply decided without  consideration for the people who are ultimately allowed to implement it.

