Mohd Asim

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

In my role as Customer Experience manager, I consult and support new product launches in our organisation. My role is to be

the advocate for the customer and ensure solutions being delivered result in a positive experience for the customer. Recently I

was brought in to assess a seemingly simple project. It involved working with a partner and leveraging their state of the art

billing platform to provide a seamless and flexible wireless plan (I work for a Telecommunications company). One of those

projects that was labelled a needle mover! After a few meetings it became clear that there were a million concerns from

functions all over the organisation, from Customer Care to Finance to IT. Each person representing their own functional area

only knew one piece of the puzzle. Having worked in the organisation for over 10 years in a multitude of functions I felt that

there were a lot of employee and customer facing impacts that were being missed as most people on the project did not see

the interdependencies of their functions.

Everyone was focused on the “What If” phase of design, while I worried that the cross functional team needed to understand

and align on the current state- “What Is.” As mentioned in Week 2, the story of George and Geoff, my repertoire within the

organisation was allowing me to sense the need for developing customer empathy to drive insights, uncover opportunities and

identify risks.

2. Selection:

I had recently read about the Mind Mapping tool in “Creative Confidence” by Tom & David Kelley. I felt this would be a

great tool at this stage of the project since my goals was to bring about a common understanding of the customer needs,

stakeholder views, identify patterns of opportunity and risk and overall drive insights towards how best to execute this

project. (Week 2: The Me-You-Health Story.)

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).

Although I understood in principle what Mind Mapping was all about, and unconsciously used it many times in my personal

life while doodling and musing on tough problems, I had never used it at work. I decided to book a 3 hour meeting with all

the stakeholders. I made sure I booked a room with multiple white boards and brought with me an assortment of different

colored white board markers. After explaining to everyone the importance of looking at this project holistically, both from an

internal and external lens, I asked everyone to agree upon the goal of the project. This I wrote in the middle of the white

board with a rectangle around it. Afterwards I asked each stakeholder to introduce themselves and tell us what role they

performed within the context of this project, and what concerns they had.

As each person spoke I jotted down these items on the white board, connecting their roles as sub-nodes to the main goal, and

their concerns or ideas as sub-sub-nodes underneath their sub-nodes. Imagine a hub and spoke diagram growing outwards. In

between invariable other members of the group would think of an issue, opportunity or simply fact while they heard their

colleagues speak. I captured these in different colors and drew dotted lines between ideas to signify dependencies, putting

smiley faces next to wins and frowns () next to areas which required more work. As the map expanded there were several

aha moments, especially as people saw positive and negative feedback loops, concerns, etc. All the stakeholders finished the

meeting with a much more grounded understanding of the net new work streams that were required to be scoped and assessed

if we were to meet the objectives of the project.

Since this was my first time, I was improvising as I went along, however everyone appreciated as the complexity of the

situation developed visually for all to see.

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 the map expanded there were several aha moments, especially as people saw positive and negative feedback loops,

concerns, etc. All the stakeholders finished the meeting with a much more grounded understanding of the net new work

streams that were required to be scoped and assessed if we were to meet the objectives of the project. In a subsequent meeting

we reviewed these net new work streams, prioritized them by business impact and started testing/investigating these

scenarios. Half way through the exercise we realized that the cost to implement this project was under-estimated and would

be close to triple the amount originally presented. Ultimately the project was put on hold so the organisation could focus on

other priorities and saved everyone a lot of time, effort and money.

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.

Some key learnings for me after my first mind mapping attempt

  There will always be someone who cannot join in person and will be over the phone – ensure the white board can be

shared via web cam to ensure everyone can participate

  As more items were brought up, in hind-sight, there could have been better ways I could have captured this

information on the white board. For next time I will give some thought in advance to the types of information that

would be captured and plan ahead what that hierarchy would look like

  In this meeting, I was the one facilitating and writing on the board. In the future I would like to co-create better with

the stakeholders by finding creative ways for them to participate more than just giving their opinion e.g., pausing

mid-way and asking teams to go to the white board and put stick notes to provide more feedback, etc.

  Practice, practice, practice!

