Assignment on Design Thinking    Mickael Richardson

Challenge: As part of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities of our multi-business  organisation, we run a volunteering initiative, whereby employees are encouraged to offer time and  expertise in supporting CSR projects undertaken by the independent companies constituting the group.  While there are large number of employees with the right skill and those who could spare time for  these projects, the number of actual volunteers are very few. It has been our challenge to get more  people to volunteer. The various stakeholders involved in addressing this challenge include: i) Group  level CSR team – responsible for developing the program, ii) Individual company CSR teams – who  identify relevant CSR projects from several requests for help that each company receives, iii) Existing  Volunteers – who have already pledged their time for supporting the projects, iv) Non Volunteers –  employees who could possibly participate, but haven’t yet volunteered, v) Representatives from CSR  projects – who specify their requirement for effort/skills required for successfully completing their  projects.  Even though the present volunteering efforts have surpassed the targets set, since this is an  ongoing initiative, the aspiration is to tap the immense potential amongst those not on board yet.

Tool Selection and application: It my endeavour to apply the Design Thinking approach to address the  above challenge. The 4 stages discussed in this course – What Is? What If? What Wows? And What  Works? are perfectly applicable to the challenge. There are two tools that one could use in my efforts:  mind-maps and story-telling. Both mind-mapping and storytelling may be useful in all four stages, and  for all five stakeholders (as mentioned earlier) albeit with some degree of difference in application. The  reason for selecting mind mapping as a tool is because of its simplicity and ease of understanding by  participants as also mentioned in the video on mind map tool shown in Week 3. While mind mapping is  not very common amongst participants, it is intuitive and easily adopted once explained. Moreover,  there are really no mistakes that one can make in a mind map, at best some of the nodes may not be  considered relevant and ignored. Another consideration for selecting mind-mapping is because of  availability of automated tools such as www.mindmeister.com, www.mindmup.com, https://coggle.it/,  http://wisemapping.com/ etc. which are freely available and make the drawing of mind maps very easy.

Tool Application: The manner in which I intend to leverage power of mind-mapping across four stages  and five stakeholders is as follows:

Group  CSR

Team

Company  CSR

Team

Volunteer  Non Volunteer  Project  Beneficiary

What  Is?

To clearly state the  expectations from  the  group  level

program

To clearly state the  proposed value to  be delivered in the  present  projects

selected.

To  clearly  state

one’s experiences  of in terms of  inspiration,  time

spent,  activities

carried out, and  learning.

Understand  the

reasons for their  lack  of

involvement  and

concerns  that

seem to hold them  back

How  have  the

present  sent  of

volunteers  contributed  to

their projects

What  If?

To explore what  could  be  larger

impact  of  this

program  on

various  stakeholders as far  as the organisation  was concerned

To  specify  how

they could further  improve on the  variety  of  CSR

projects  they

select in order to  attract new people  into volunteering.

To  understand

from them what  more they would  have liked to do if  some  of  the

constraints  were

addressed  or

opportunities were  available

To  help  them

vocalise  what

would  need  to

happen for them  to  join

volunteering,  or

alternately  what

would  they  do

differently if they  were to join.

To  let  them

imagine  what

other  outcomes

and  value

propositions  would  be

achievable  with

the same set of  resources  available.

Assignment on Design Thinking    Mickael Richardson

Group  CSR

Team

Company  CSR

Team

Volunteer  Non Volunteer  Project  Beneficiary

What  Wows?

To identify unique  ways of leveraging  the  program  to

create  hitherto

unimagined value  to all stakeholders.

To let them specify  what would be an  ideal result that  would help them  emphasise  their

importance at the  organisation.

To  make  them

relive some of the  highlights of their  experiences which  could  act  as

inspiration  for

others.

To support them  with articulation of  what they would  consider as a wow  project which they  would  be

compelled  to

volunteer.

To help the project  beneficiaries  identify  superlative  achievement  of

their goals

What  Works?

To shortlist couple  of new programs  from  the  new

ideas.

To help the CSR  teams with a few  novel project ideas  and a completely  unique of doing  those projects.

To help volunteers  pin-point that one  compelling reason  that would make  them come back  to  join  this

initiative

To identify that  one  compelling

argument  which

will reduce their  dissonance  and

turn  them  to

volunteering.

To  establish  a

practice  that

would help them  maximise  their

results.

Insight: The insight one aims to gather from use of mind-mapping activity are the non-obvious, hitherto  unarticulated and sometimes non-connected motivations, inspirations, concerns, and other such  emotional drivers for volunteering. These insights might be leveraged for creating the right appeal for  potential volunteers and reinforcing messages for existing volunteers. One also hopes to generate  insights that might help measure actual impact of volunteering on completion of projects. This will be  very useful for project managers as well as policy creators in an organisation, to assign credit to the  volunteers in order to reward or recognise them meaningfully. Further, insights from this activity could  also help match the nature or diversity of projects with the type of employee skills within the  organisation, so that more people will find volunteering easier. Finally, insights from this exercise could  also be used to identify – i) interesting new project ideas, ii) novel ways of participating in existing or  known projects, iii) filtering out un-intended misconceptions about volunteering etc.

Alternate Approach: As mentioned in the tool selection paragraph, the tool of storytelling could also be  used powerfully for achieving similar results and insights. Program managers could be asked to narrate  stories of how and why they chose to draft the program in a certain manner. These would lead to  exploring what other ways could they have achieved similar result (if they had chosen different  initiatives), or what other results could they have planned for (if the selected initiatives were  maintained as is). Volunteers could have narrated stories of their experiences and helped create  emotionally compelling drivers for others to join the volunteering initiatives. Non-volunteers could have  been requested to tell stories of failed attempts of volunteering that they might have heard from others  and which resulted in they not volunteering themselves. The reason this tool was not considered was  due to the difficulty faced by common folks in converting their experiences into stories that can be  narrated impactfully. Most participants would have to be trained to help them capture their emotions  into stories and make them engaging enough for others. Most importantly my own confidence of  conveying the usefulness of how story-telling might be best used in developing insights was limited.  Hence, this tool was reserved for a later date when one would develop enough expertise and  experience.

