Mind mapping

(sorry for my english if you find some spelling and/or grammar errors)

Challenge & selection  I have not used yet mind mapping, but I have already worked on the design of new commercial offers and would like to reflect on how the mind  mapping tool may have helped me to do a better work.  Indeed, I was once asked by some big monolithic French logistics company to help them to design new commercial offers, some “quick win” that  may help them to enlarge their revenues. A 3-day workshop was conducted with the top management worldwide, but the company had organized.  They just invited the top management for 3-days...  They asked us for help 3 days before the workshop to “save the day”  Which we did, according to the criteria they had, but I remained pretty sure  we could have done a better job and I have now some ideas why. Indeed, even if our job was to be the firefighters for a messy situation (limited  knowledge of the sector beforehand and stressed timing...), we still could have gained more momentum from the c. 20 participants.    Application & approach  What we did was i) to look for “real customer needs” first, ii) to then generate some “new ideas” through brainstorming, iii) assess these new ideas  and iv) develop them. The 3-day workshpo encompasses phases i) and ii).  Here are a few errors we did:

-  for “real customer needs”, we asked the company what they thought the customer needed. We differentiated behavior, want and need,  but we looked only on a theorical way on the “customer journey” and never spoke to one of them

-  for “new ideas” we asked top management for their insights: these were sometimes partial or “out of the field” and, even when they  were good, were generated by people who had a similar mindset

-  and we assessed the ideas instead of trying them

I want to focus on the mind mapping because, even with the constraint we had (3-day time to generate an idea and insights mainly from top  management), I am pretty sure we could have better handled the connection between the “needs” and the “ideas”. Hence the “criteria”.    More specifically, to generate “needs” we separated the 20 participants into 4 groups to discuss about customers’ situations that the logistics  company had to handle. What happened? What was the issue? What was the reaction? And, most importantly, why did this specific situation  occure, what was the core element? For each situation, we tried to highlight the customer point of view and, for instance, the security aspect  emerged for specific products, or the complex storage management of some specific dangerous products.  We also looked at the competition, their actions and why they developed that functionality or that other one.    From there we defined some patterns. But these patterns were developped by groups of 4-5 persons within a room, talking about the specific  issues they already knew. At the end of the process, each group showed its conclusions to the entirety of the workshop (traditional “each group  selects a speaker to show its conclusions” way of doing) and we hoped to generate some discussions between the 4 groups (for instance “oh yeah,  we all agree this is an important need to tackle”.    Insights  Wrong. We missed a lot of things

1-  when the boss speaks, other people remain silent. And nobody contradicts him

2-  people do not think, they speak. And sometimes it is important to take some time for yourself

3-  people did not really have time to discuss about the situations per see, they only had time to discuss the conclusions each group had  reached

4-  we did not generate any link between clusters / topics

5-  we missed the ‘criteria phase’ and directly jumped to the “what do we do?” phase

I think the 1st phase, considering the constraints we had (timing and people), may not have been a bad one (generate 4 small groups to brainstorm  on specific situations). But, after these discussions, it would have been great to just describe on panels or other media the situations that led to our  conclusions. Only the situations and not the conclusions each group reached, to see if other participants who look at the same situations on the  panel would reach the same conclusions. Maybe other “needs” or other insights would have emerged to aliment our ideas. A same situation can be  seen differently according to the point of view. We would have generated more discussion on the 2nd phase and, quite important, some  connections may have emerged between the different situations or insights (whereas we remained limited to a “group” by “group” point of view).     We directly jumped to the 2nd phase without really looking at one of the most important phase, the links and the criteria.     At the end of the process we had something like 10 to 14 ideas, selected 5 of them, developped 3 prototypes and one went into market. It “went  into market”, I am not sure it succeeded

