EducaSTEM: Company General Use

Challenge & Selection

Buzzwords have great impact on businesses, but could confuse people sometimes. One among the  biggest buzzwords nowadays is the 4th Industrial Revolution. It happen that I work in a pioneering team  implementing a new technology in Oil & Gas industry, and it is considered as an enabler for the 4th  Industrial Revolution technologies. Let’s call it “WHEEL” for the sake of this exercise.

During WHEEL implementation, a user adoption program was running to increase workers’ awareness  about WHEEL and its added values, however, there were still some people asking, what is it, and how is  it related to 4IR? I took this relative vagueness as a challenge, and I wanted to demystify and make the  idea easy to grasp.

I use visualization almost every day, it helps me simplifying concepts and ideas, clarifying relationships,  and increase memorability. Most people tend to learn from visualization. It gives space for the recipient  to observe, analyze, infer, and confirm the message. So I decided visualization to be the main tool to  tackle this challenge.

Application

I draw four connected circles, each circle represents a stage of industrial revolution (1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th),  ordered from left to right to represent the time line. Each stage has an icons (representing the main  character of revolution), the year it began in, and main technologies that it introduces. You might have  seen something similar to this visual if you are exposed to this subject.

There were two elements I added to it. First, two circles above the 3rd and 4th industrial revolutions’  circles showing games. This aimed to activate certain parts of the audience minds to relate two tangible  applications resulted from the evolving technologies during the two eras. You may give it a shot, and  compare computer-based Pong or Super Mario games with the virtual and augmented reality games.  Can you tell what moved us from there to here? Here was the key message, the second element I added  is the WHEEL driving the transition from 3rd to 4th stage, showing its position across the stages, and  distinguishing its core functions among other technologies.

Insights & Approach

The drawing was shown to small group of people to test whether it demystifies WHEEL idea effectively,  and it turned out that it did. It was used to introduce WHEEL in an international conference, and  currently considered in the new user’s onboarding materials.

I never imagined that I would take a course that talks deeply about this kind of things. I have always  believed in visual thinking, and this course opened my eyes to an exciting set of tools that I will surely  consider to tackle business challenges.

