Challenge

I am an organizational development professional and working with a progressive global  engineering consulting company.  One of our global business pillars is a commitment to diversity  and inclusion – regionally we are encouraged to have articulated a clear implementation plan for  this, for New Zealand it was relevant to have specific reference to indigenous Maori and honoring  the Treaty of Waitangi (referred to here as Tikanga Maori).  We were finding that across the  organization people were getting involved in a number of piecemeal activities, but we lacked a  common song sheet to sing from to inform any investment, decisions, commitments and  initiatives we got involved with.

The topic of Tikanga Maori is a sensitive and emotionally charged one for many, predominantly  due to our country history of colonization and the events that occurred during that period in NZ.   The challenge was to bring together a diverse group of people from within our organization to  develop a plan for the work our organization does to support Tikanga Maori.

The approach I took involved key steps:

1. Research phase – exploring the eco-system and understanding our current situation  2. Aspirations – What do we aspire to in this space?  Our vision and alignment to

organisational values

3. Strategy - Our objectives and plan to achieve these  4. Execution – key owners, action plan, resourcing and timelines for execution

It is in the aspirations and strategy steps that this workshop occurred, and I chose to use the  visualization tool to support idea generation and articulation in the workshop.

Selection

The tool I used was visualization.  Visualization is a tool that encourages us to use pictures,  visual boards, PPT slides - anything really to get people imagining the spaces, situations and  actions to support understanding of what we are thinking.  Visualization allows us to unlock the  right side of our brain and our creativity.  Visualization can apply across all key parts of an  exploration process from the initial exploration to pattern finding and prototyping.  It can be as  simple as drawing shapes, stick figures, theming post it notes together, linking lines and arrows –  everyone can do it!

Lupita Rodriguez designer, in one of the Coursera videos in the Design Thinking course, encourages  us to have confidence to apply this approach across all parts of a process to unlock the right side  of our brains and creativity.

Application

On the day of the workshop, in the room I had pre-set print outs of other organizations’ corporate  statements and their commitment to Maori and cultural inclusion.  We then highlighted the words  that meant something to us that we wanted to carry forwards for our organization.

From here we developed our own words together and started to build a visual common grouping  of ideas that  we felt was important.  We were able to theme words, bring new ones in,  emphasize others in a visual way which built a very visual and common understanding to our  choices. Image below is an example of individual ideas and how we themed them into groups.

Once we had done this initial exercise, I then prompted the group with a series of questions to  further refine and build our strategy and specific focus:

1. What is important to us?  2. What could we do?  3. What we believe?  4. How can we achieve what we believe?  5. What we promise

Throughout this whole process we used visualization contributing our ideas using colored post its  to a wall and flipcharts, theming and prioritizing them as we progressed.

Insight

Using visualization as a tool during this workshop session enabled creative ideas to be unlocked  and equal participation from individuals, regardless of tenure in the organization or knowledge

they held - helping to reduce any hierarchy (real or perceived).  It enabled the group to establish  swiftly a common set of ideas that were important to everyone, bringing a sense of belonging and  purpose to the group.

The visualization techniques in this session brought to the fore common themes and ideas that  we could then prioritize and translate into promises and practical actions for the company to  undertake.  These outcomes informed a 90 day plan for the Tikanga Maori pillar of our diversity  and inclusion strategy.

Using the visualization tool in this workshop unleashed the right brain contributions from people  and enabled a diverse group of individuals to be equal contributors in forming and articulating  what was important to our organization.

Approach

On reflection of this approach, I would still use visualization as the key tool to encourage and  capture the groups ideas and reflections.    It ensured we had even participation, an energized  group and a great repertoire of ideas and focal points to inform a strategy and action plan after  the session itself.

What I might do differently next time is incorporate early in the group session a ‘fun warm up’  activity to get the group members using visualization.  For example, visually drawing the different  parts of your life and how they knit together, or visually interpreting how you see the organization  working and its energy flows.    This may have warmed people up to interpreting things visually  before we progressed into the topic of our session and reminded them that we can use not only  words to articulate our thoughts, but images, drawings etc. too.

