Design thinking for innovation by UVA DARDEN

Professor: Mari Ahmed                                    Student:  Monica Garcia

Final Assignment

1. Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.

We recently started a project aimed to offer professional services for SMBs in business  management consulting, located in a little region of Spain. This entrepreneurial initiative  coincided with one of the most challenging situation that our society (well, humanity as a  whole!) has faced in decades, mainly because of its sudden and unexpected occurrence,  the Coronavirus´ pandemic.

What it was an initial business management consultancy firm aimed to support customers  to adopt tools based on Data Analytics for improving decision making process, has to be  adapted to the new reality, where most of the people and enterprises interactions became  virtualized in weeks as a consequence of the lockdown measure taken by the Spanish  government, which drove to an urge for accelerating the digital transformation for all sort  of business, from the smaller to corporations.

All changes caused by the pandemic have seriously impacted the survival of most SMBs  here in Spain in a way that shakes their essence, so now their priority is to rethink their  purpose and business model, set new strategic goals, and redesign their organization  leveraged on the right mix of people, processes, and technologies. To overcome this  challenge, SMBs leader has very important support from the European Union Commission  who developed a recovery plan to fund those sorts of initiatives, which is a huge  opportunity for SMBs leaders to accomplish their recovery.

So the funds would not be a problem, but the perception by the SMBs´ owners that this is  kind of impossible task to accomplish, too much uncertainty, many new concepts to  internalize, super-fast changes in the environment. It seems that they would need to  quickly develop new skills to adapt to the new reality.

The challenge as we see it stars by helping SMB´ leaders to recover their confidence,  developing a methodology that can be applied individually or in groups, that triggers  profound behavioral changes in a short time, so they will later be able to face the whole  project of transforming their businesses with a renewed attitude, more positive and  empowered.

2. Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is

and why you selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video  lecture references).

We decided to use, jointly with other tools, Mind Mapping for the exploratory stage of this  project, in order to identify patterns on the SMB´s leaders behavior facing the current  situation, understanding what their really worries, their weaknesses, their strengths and  their motivations to stay in the business.

As we learned in the videos that comprise week 3 of the Design Thinking course, Mind  Mapping is one of the most powerful tools in the search for themes and patterns, and as  professor Melanie Smith explains, it ideal “[…] to capture and represent the minds of our  customers”, which is exactly what we intend in this What-is-stage.

3. Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g.,

what you did and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

The project´s team will be comprised by experts in leadership, psychology, change  management, and IT experts on Digital Transformation.

The design for the exploration and data gathering will has an ethnographic approach,  selecting a sample of 15 SMB´s owners with business in our town.

We will use de Mind mapping in the first session of the ethnographic interviews.

The design of this first session is summarized below:

Previous to the session, the participants will be asked to write a story about a business  challenge they had overcame successful and joyful; and a summary of the feelings they  experienced along the whole process, using an “Emotional” Journey Map.

EMOTIONAL JOURNEY MAP

Problem  Definition  Diagnosis

Solution  Design  Validation  Adjustments Implementation

Gain

Pain

-  A copy of each (anonymized) Emotional Journey Map will be put in the walls of the room  where the session will be taken place (using the Art Gallery analogy that Ahmed  ideated for Mind Mapping process) so the participants will be exposed to other peers  feelings and maybe they will enlarge the variety of feelings they experienced facing a  challenge or redefine their own feelings.     The participants, on their own, will be asked to move around and carefully enter in contact  with each map. The objective is that the participants connect with all kinds of feelings that  naturally surge along a “challenge solving process”, selecting those feelings that better  appeal to him or her; writing each of the chosen feelings down in separated post-it notes.

-  Then in groups of 3 persons, they have to discuss their selection and look for insights  behind those feelings: They have to group the feelings under a category related to the real  reason behind those set of feelings.

-      These results will then be discussed with the participants from the other groups, building a

common Mind Map where the categories that emerged during the discussion in the  smaller group will be the first branches. From these categories, they will have to create  new branches, answering questions from the members of the project team, so that they

can go deeper and deeper in the search to understand the whole process of problem- solving that they naturally apply in their daily bases.

a) The strengths  b) The difficulties  c) Problem solving-process: identifying: pains and gains  d) Finally looking for patterns behind the problem solving-process: there is a main

course of action or there are kind of different profiles that will require different  solutions?

The final objective is to draw a map that gives us a first approach to the strategies applied  by them when facing a Challenge.

4. Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your

challenge (e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and  about design thinking more broadly).

As we are in the first part of the project we have not gotten the stage of the insights, but we  expect to identify different profiles or personalities, that can be approached with  customized methodologies.

As the challenge involves people in an organizational situation, Design Thinking seems to  be an excellent approach that will guide us to find out a proper solution in a very creative,  human-centered, and innovative way.

Even if we fail to validate our initial hypothesis, we are sure that we will achieve a deep  knowledge of SME owners' leadership styles that will help us design better services that  accompany them in the successful management of the Digital Transformation process.

5. Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same

tool you selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why.

The challenge that we handled is complex since there are many variables to be taken into  consideration, many stakeholders to be included in the analysis, many perspectives to be  considered. Given all of these conditions, we keep thinking that Mind mapping is the best  choice when looking for patterns, as it allows organizing important quantity of data,  characterized for its variety and including sundry of stakeholders in the analysis. In  addition, Mind Mapping eases the engagement on the projects and in the search for a  common understanding of the situation (for the project team members).

Certainly is that Mind Mapping alone is insufficient so many other tools have to be  combined, for instance in this project we will use:

a)  Visualization tools

b)  Storytelling

c)  Learning Launches for sure as the challenge to try to ideate methodologies to  impact people's behavior will need to be iterated many times!

