Challenge

I was working on an initiative called “lab of the future” for my manufacturing business (Labs). Our  business has Product quality labs across the globe, and each Lab caters to different sorts of  products and therefore has different business processes. The management felt that our labs were  highly inefficient, especially in terms of where we were in our Digitalization journey and the pace  of initiatives we had undertaken. For all these Labs, my ask was to define a Lab of the future  vision and come with clearly defined actions in short to long term that would bring in real value  to our labs and will impact their top or bottom line. The key challenge was to clearly understand  “what did lab of the future mean for my stakeholders” and generate ideas that would bring a  competitive advantage to us.    Selection

The mind mapping tool was a precise fit, especially when I was trying to generate different ideas  and arrive on common, agreed design principles (something we needed before moving to  brainstorm possible solutions or initiatives that the Labs needed to undertake). The lab managers  (key stakeholders) were the key participants as I believed they held all that was out there to be  thought (and done), and it was just a case of trying to bring all those ideas to one platform and  understand the connections.

Application

To prepare for mind mapping workshop, i did a lot of prework – starting with creating the design  brief, resource plan, etc. – to collect all the information through interviews, surveys, etc.  and  prepare an exhaustive source of information (all the feedback).   With all the data now collected, the next step was to start the mind mapping process – the intent  was not to accept or discard any ideas but see the commonalities between these ideas and arrive  on design criteria.    To get the process started, I then arranged for a one-day workshop with all these stakeholders  (13). The workshop was distributed in three parts over the day. To begin with - On the big  workshop room-wall, I had put all the inputs collected from within and external resources for our  stakeholders to see.  Each of the stakeholders was asked to take his or her time to go through all  the propositions that were on that wall and choose ideas they liked or thought would inform  other ideas. Each stakeholder was asked to do this individually.     In the second half, the stakeholders then, in a group of four, started putting their sticky notes to  a board into clustered themes (as they seem fit), and the rest of the members tried to put their  notes around these themes as well. As we progressed further, these themes, after a lot of  deliberations, discussions gave way to critical insights that the group eventually agreed should  be taken as the design criteria for our next exercise of brainstorming the possible solutions.

Insight

The primary purpose of using the mind mapping tool was to generate the design criteria that we  would use to establish our brainstorming sessions. With this exercise, all the observations that  the participants made were turned into insights statements that implied what the conditions that  our plausible solutions (which was part of the second half of the 2nd and 3rd portions of the workshop and

not included here) must satisfy were.

Stakeholders, at the end of the day, confirmed that the mind mapping exercise was a very  effective way to capture all the observations, remove a lot of confirmation biases, and explore a  much broader set of possibilities.

Please note: I have not included the specific insights for the reasons of confidentiality as those were  data that our team eventually used

Approach     Learning launch, I believe, would be another critical tool that I intend to use in the next stage for  launching small prototypes quickly and gather the feedback. I think it could be a highly useful  tool, especially when trying to understand and prioritize initiatives that should be scaled.

