New Space Opening - Mind Mapping

Challenge and Selection

A client of mine is a New York based arts organisation, that has grown exponentially over the past  ten years. In the fall of 2013, they secured a new location and activity was signiﬁcantly increased  over the course of the year to prepare for the launch of the space, augment existing programming,  and ensure that all relevant stakeholders were actively participating in this new chapter. A  combination of the organisation’s exponential growth, the pressure of opening a new physical  space, and the fact that both administrative and artistic staﬀ are based in New York, Berlin, and  Vienna meant that often relevant team members felt out of the loop, or work was being performed  in strict silos as opposed to thinking through how all activity connected together. In order to  condense the ideas and executions created by this diverse team I have used mind mapping as  one tool to record their creative outputs and eﬀorts eﬃciently in one place, when going through  the planning process for their holistic communications in 2018.

Application

I started the process by making sure that there was a time that all relevant stakeholders could get  together. With a geographically diverse team, it was important to get all relevant minds together in  one place to break down the silos and get everyone on the same page. In preparation for the  combined exercises, I gathered together all relevant data from our diﬀerent departments. This  included previous sales reports, survey data, qualitative results from small focus groups,  advertising report data and house reports from those working directly in the venues. Gathering all  of this data together meant we would be able to look for patterns more clearly.

Thankfully, having just secured a new space, we were able to utilise multiple rooms to break out  between our “yard sale” with our data on display, and our workshop areas. While attendees were  allowed to browse the data prior to the oﬃcial commencement of the mind mapping process, we  also had key individuals from relevant departments to take the group through the results and give  further context to the ﬁndings. After this, all attendees were allowed to once again browse the  space at their leisure. However, this time, they were provided with sticky notes and pens and  encouraged to write down anything they saw that they felt was particularly important or might  inform our planning.

Now moving into our workshop rooms, the attendees were split up into multidisciplinary groups  and encouraged to talk about what they had seen and heard. It was important to let all those  involved feel heard so we could create one common mind from which to move forward. I  deliberately involved many stakeholders in this process so we could get both information and buy  in from all sorts of sources.

It was now time to take the sticky notes from each of the groups and collate them into key themes  and content areas, all grouped around our design problem. Teams were encouraged to come to  the large whiteboard in the room and cluster their notes into diﬀerent topic areas. Not all topic  areas were completely homogenous, but rather some had one, or several, sub topics. All sticky  notes were attached to the board, even the outliers. As a group, we discussed the insights we had  discovered related to each topic cluster and further investigated potential connections between  diﬀerent clusters.

This then allowed us to begin discussing design criteria, or how exactly we would measure  success of the project. This would then be a starting point for working out what our next steps  were. Following the in person workshop, photographic records of the clusters were taken and  then all relevant information was digitised. This ﬁnal, digital pack included the clusters from our  mind mapping workshop, along with the insights discovered from the workshop, our overall  design problem, design criteria and next steps. This pack was distributed to all relevant  stakeholders and used as our concrete, agreed upon planning guideline.

Insight & Approach

While it was always understood that having staﬀ members in multiple countries was challenging, I  couldn’t have imagined how helpful it was to get all relevant stakeholders in one place and allow  their voices to be heard as part of this process. We were able to, both ﬁguratively and literally, get  various diﬀerent departments on the same page about our design problem and criteria through  this shared workshop and exercise. Not only was the process enjoyable, but it also felt eﬃcient -  what would have normally taken weeks of emails back and forth was able to be achieved in one  focused day of work together.

In the future, I am aware that I am not going to regularly have the chance to have all of these  international team members together in one place. However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t still  use mind mapping to improve my client’s internal communication and collaboration. Helping to  visualise the wide range of thoughts and data, and seeing the connections between them could  be used in a variety of smaller, more regular meetings. In order to help these teams to simplify  some of their more complex problems, I will be using mind mapping in a variety of brainstorming  and creative projects moving forward, allowing us to analyse the information that we have in a  more active and group oriented way.

