How Mind Mapping helps me to redesign partnership with a strategic client?

Context and Challenge

Context: I am a Business Owner of a small private limited company, that provides onsite trainings and  workshops, focused on Softskills and Project Management competences development. I am facilitating  trainings myself together with other consultants, which one of us facilitating trainings regarding their  own specializations.

Challenge: One of my biggest clients is an international company. I have been working with this client  for approximately 1 year, and I wanted like to develop business within this company, as I have noticed  that business was actually stagnating with this client, with an increased number of cancelled courses.  I would like to present to my client a creative commercial offer for next year, which is not basically a  list of courses with a price in front but makes us really appear as a preferred partner for talent  development. The first step was to have an in-depth view of my client environment, so called my “what  is”.

Tools and Application

To do that, I selected the Mind Mapping tool as I realized I had to put together a lot of different  information of many kinds:

  Inputs were coming from several sources:

o customers input via emails or conversation  o inputs coming from other consultants facilitating courses for this client:

facilitating trainings gives you a lot of information about employee’s concerns,  challenges and company culture, and these inputs were very precious data to  gather.

o my own perception / feeling of the situation  o information on competition  o financial reports indicating revenue and margin per specific courses  o List of courses confirmed and cancelled  o etc…

  I had also to integrate data regarding the decision-making process that includes many  stakeholders (Team Leaders, Human Resources Business Partners, Learning &  Development manager, etc.)

  I also had to gather data on different locations within Europe each one having  different challenges in term of talent developments

I needed a tool to put together all the above-mentioned data and give sense to them. I also wanted to  leverage on the other consultant insights to co-create a creative commercial proposal that consultants  would be motivated to promote.

Application:  The video of Julian Moore helped me to define how I could conduct effectively a Mind  Mapping session with all the consultants in order to have the best *what is * overview and get useful  insights out of our reflections.

In the example described in the video, I liked the possibility of organizing a complete Mind mapping  session including time people working alone, working in groups, with the objective of gathering and  organizing so many kinds of information.

How did I myself organize the session?

Begore the Mind Mapping session, I myself wrote down a list all relevant inputs I had coming from my  client interactions (no matter if it come from participants to courses, Human Resources Business  Partners, Learning & Development managers, Assistant, etc.).

Then I organized an half day session with all the consultants involved in the workshop delivery as such:

  First step: I decided not to ask any question. I just put the name of the client in the middle of  a page and ask the team to react, that is tell whatever was in their mind. I myself was using a  mindmap visual tool to organize the information as *a tree*. Please find image below as an  example.

  Second step: thanks to the insights that came out during the first step, I plan individual sessions  where consultants had to think about the main action points that came out using post-its (new  courses to suggest, courses to abandon, how to make our offer be know by all stakeholders ?)

  Third step: The objective was to get some design criteria and move on to *what if*, in order  to start the content of or new commercial offer.

Insight and Approach

Concretely for us, it was a very useful way to identify client decision making processes and new training  concepts that we would like to discuss with clients. We realized that we were able to have a precise  overview of clients training organization just by putting together the information we individually had  *on the field* and analyzing this information together.  It gives also to me insights on training needs  presently uncovered by my company or our competitors. I plan to redo this exercise in approximately  a year time from now, but I will schedule more time, probably one day (half day was not enough to  actually explore all the subjects that raise).

I am now investigating the Learning Launch tool. Some of the new themes for courses we suggested  to client were selected. On our side it is time demanding to develop the courses with no guarantee  there will be enrollment for employees. That’s why I decided to adopt the Learning Launch Tool  approach. I want to start small with one or two courses, and then if we notice an increase of  enrollment, we will develop the other courses.

As you can see, using some Design Thinking tools was really useful for me in that case.

