Mind Mapping

Challenge & Selection  The challenge faced was exploring a complex and uncertain issue for which there are no good analogues  and we were unable to go directly to the customer to gather data. Because of this several methods  needed to explore the “What is.”     The team I led through this process used this approach to seek to understand the world of a physician  who is now having to treat patients via telemedicine in response to COVID-19, determine pain points in  this process and position us to generate potential solutions.     The tool selected was Mind Mapping which,  from the course , we know is a process to generate insights  from exploration and use those insights to created design criteria.     Mind Mapping was selected because it allowed for data collected through several design thinking  approaches to be combined in a way that would detect patterns to inform our next steps. Additionally, it  allowed us to leverage input from both a small agile team and a broader team in this process. This   allowed for both refinement of the data as well as the creation of organizational alignment around the  output.       Application   To execute this process, I enlisted a small group of stakeholders and leveraged the Mural platform so  that we could simulate being in a room together and utilize divergent and convergent thinking  techniques. The team executed several design thinking approaches to generate a robust data set. These  included persona generation, empathy mapping and journey mapping.     Once the small team had generated all this data, it was time to share with a broader team who also  serves this customer. For this, I applied the Mind Mapping process outlined in the course and in  “Designing for Growth, “ by Liedtka and Olgivie.     This was done by inviting the broader team to take a curated tour of the small team's work and walk  through each area of the gallery/Mural first as individuals and then in collective synthesis.    The team was first asked to browse the sections of the gallery, collect their thoughts and observations,  and then post these in a common area on the Mural. This process took roughly 30 min of individual  work.    Once this was completed, everyone was summoned to the common posting space on the Mural, where  they then worked collectively to group and theme the post-its and created insights based upon these  groupings. The entire group then leverage the dot voting methodology to narrow the insights to those  the felt would be most relevant in informing the design criteria that inform the creation of how might  we ideas in the next phase of this project.

Through this process the group was able to effectively synthesize a large amount of data from different  sources into a refined group of prioritized data points to inform our design criteria.         Insight  What I learned from this exercise was the effectiveness of leveraging mind mapping to take large  amounts of data generated from various design approaches and refining it into a usable form.  Additionally, this was also a useful approach to increase the quality of the data, create transparency  around the process and build organizational buy-in.    From this approach the group was able to identify several pain points where the doctor currently has to  manually merge both digital and analogue resources in service of the patient. Additionally they were  able to detect a point of convergence that if addressed could solve for multiple pain points. The next  step in the process will to be to explore how this might occur.     One alternate approach, given access and time, would be to enlist actual customers in this mapping  process. While leveraging a highly experienced cross-functional team provided a wealth of data, going  straight to the customer and co-creating in the process would most likely be even more beneficial.        .

