Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I am a member of my organization’s Customer Insights group, a relatively small group of six people  within a much larger Marketing Department of about 200 people.  The purpose of our group is to  provide our internal clients with actionable customer insights, based on a variety of both qualitative  and quantitative research methods. However, we face many challenges within the Department,  including a lack of resources, little power and influence, poor communication between groups, and  misalignment on project priorities.

Selection

Our Customer Insights group has already spent significant time on defining the current state,  including interviews/ethnographic research and projective state/creative output exercises with our  key stakeholders across the Department.  We also have quantitative data based on internal  satisfaction surveys that we’ve analyzed. We believe we have collected enough data and are ready  to progress on to identifying patterns and insights. Therefore, we decided to try the Mind Mapping  tool.

Application

For our Mind Mapping session, knowing that we had to align our Department to my group’s current  reality, we purposely invited our group’s key stakeholders from each internal group that we support.  We had representation from all groups within the Department, including Digital, Loyalty, Customer  Experience, Product, Brand, Advertising, and Market Strategy, along with our group. In total, we had  cross-functional representation and a group of about 20 people assembled, ready to share their  input.

We started the session by first creating an “art gallery” of all existing data we had collected, and  asked everyone to individually browse. We provided multi-colored sticky notes and asked them to  pull out ideas from the data on our group’s current state and challenges. Next, we broke the group  into 4 groups of 5 people each, and asked that they work together and cluster their thoughts on a  large white board. There were many commonalities between the groups, and the key clusters  revolved around 1) Lack of understanding within the Department about the value Customer Insights  adds; 2) Lack of people resources; while the Department has grown over time the Customer Insights  group has not kept pace; 3) Poor awareness/socialization of successful projects we’ve completed; 4)  Silos and lack of communication in the Department cause research inefficiencies in terms of time  and budget; 5) Often Customer Insights isn’t involved early enough in the process, resulting in  decreased quality of research.

The most challenging part of our Mind Mapping session was definitely the next step, which is looking  for connections and themes between and among clusters. The key stakeholders in the room had a  difficult time grasping the concept at first but eventually got the hang of it. What helped move this  along was having them ask the question, “So what?” for each cluster. What are the implications of  that particular challenge to the Customer Insights’ team?  Having the clusters displayed visually on a  white board certainly helped as well.

Insight

We were able to develop several new insights as a result of our Mind Mapping session – centering  on the topics of education, communication, and socialization.  First, the Customer Insights team

currently does not do a good job of educating our internal clients on the process of conducting  quantitative and qualitative research (contributing to poor knowledge about the value we add, and  when to involve our team). Second, the Customer Insights team does not currently share project  results across the Department (contributing to lack of visibility, power, and influence). Third, the  Customer Insights team does not currently get involved in clients’ ongoing strategy (contributing to  late involvement in projects, and lack of proactiveness).

Approach

The Mind Mapping session was very productive, and we uncovered insights that we wouldn’t have  on our own if we hadn’t involved our internal clients.  If we were to conduct another session, I would  definitely invite Department Leadership along with our key stakeholders, to better align across the  Department. As a next step, we will move on to the “What If” stage of brainstorming on the insights  developed during our Mind Mapping session.

