Eva Rivera  Design Thinking for Innovation  Simona Gamal  April 5th, 2021

Course Reflection

1) Challenge & Selection

At my current job, I was approached by a UX manager for whom I provided administrative support; he  had heard that I was passionate about the environment and asked if I would help him in standing up a  Green Team in our office. He and I connected with the Green Team leads in the Philadelphia office, and  we learned that the local office teams that already existed were the result of grassroots organizing. For  our office in Princeton, this meant that developing a team wouldn’t be as simple as getting buy-in from  our Office Manager and Office Managing Principal (OMP). The real challenge was understanding the  needs and priorities specific to the individuals in our office and figuring out how we could get maximum  engagement by catering our group’s sustainability efforts to suit those needs.

Our core team (me, the manager, and two other folks in the office) chose to use Mind Mapping for this  challenge. According to the guest video lecture from Eva Rivera, mind-mapping is a  strategy where you take the data you amassed during the “what is?” phase and look for patterns and  themes that emerge, as these patterns and themes can help inform the “what if?” phase. We chose  this tool because we wanted to see if any of the reasons people cited for wanting to participate in the  Green Team could be grouped into themes that could then inform how our core team planned events,  allocated time and resources, and recruited more team members moving forward.

2) Application

Our core team presented a slide deck for our office forum, introducing the idea of a Princeton Green  Team and asking people to help make it a reality. After the forum, we connected with several potential  participants and organized a brainstorming session/kick-off. During this meeting, we opened a MURAL  canvas (a web-based service similar to a virtual whiteboard), and asked people to add post-its to the  canvas to answer the question: “If we as a Green Team could accomplish one thing before the end of  2017, what would you like that thing to be?”

We wanted to understand why the people who joined the call cared about sustainability and what  made them want to be a part of the team. We tried to keep the question broad and hoped that we  could tap into folks’ unarticulated needs by establishing a concrete action that they wanted to pursue.  By including the end-of-year deadline, we could determine what the priority was for each respondent.

People began adding their post-its, and there were a variety of different reasons why everyone felt  passionate about the company getting involved in Green efforts. They ranged from “my daughter says  it’s important to care about climate change” to “I want to focus on the accessibility of sustainable living  practices for every socioeconomic status,” with several reasons in between. It was motivating to see so  many people sharing their Whys, but our core team knew that in order to make progress and develop a  game plan, we would need to assess the post-its we had gathered and tease out any patterns we could.

In another meeting, this time just with the core team, we all looked at the MURAL canvas and, one by  one, we started to move the post-its around when we noticed that they had things in common. Soon,  four distinct groups of post-its emerged, and we decided to label them as follows:

•  Community Involvement – Organize and participate in trail or park clean-ups, offer pro-bono  consulting, work on local government outreach, etc.

•  Awareness and Learning –  Conduct/find research on sustainability concepts and find engaging  ways to share this info with the office (lunch-and-learns, newsletters/email blasts, etc.)

•  Team Building – Engage in fun, social activities like sustainable facility tours or Green Bingo

•  Sustainable Practices –  Establish and reinforce Green habits at work and in our personal lives

These categories were all connected to each other but parsing them out helped tremendously when we  needed to figure out the best places to put our energy. Now that we had an idea of how others wanted  to spend their time engaging with the Green Team, and some concept of the ratio of people interested  in each area, we could begin to test events catered to each of these categories with the office.

3) Insight & Approach

It was actually through reflecting on this challenge after taking this course that I gained insight on how  we could have done things better. Applying the tools of design thinking more intentionally would have  saved us a lot of time and a lot of headaches during the process of standing up a Green Team.

In the beginning, both I and the manager came in with assumptions. Other offices within our company  had already started Green Teams, and I assumed that it would be easy to simply replicate what they had  done. Despite using design thinking tools for almost all his client work, I think this manager also  assumed that creating a local team would be a plug-and-play situation that wouldn’t require much in the  ways of time or effort. However, we discovered shortly after starting that we had underestimated the  scope of the problem by assuming “what is?” instead of being curious and finding out “what is?”.

Like in the story of the Good Kitchen, where the government assumed that the issue was as simple as a  menu change, we assumed that our office had no existing team because someone just hadn’t started  one. Once Hatch and Bloom did journey mapping and conducted ethnographic research of the seniors,  they discovered the problem was more complex, and required a more innovative solution.

If I were to do this again, I wouldn’t necessarily choose a different tool; I think that mind-mapping did  serve our team well once we arrived at that stage. What I would do differently is use the 4-question  framework (what is, what if, what wows, what works). I would do some ethnographic research of a  small sample of stakeholders in our office and use that research to inform the entire design process. It  would have been helpful to know more about the people we were trying to engage, to really take the  time to research the “what is?” for our office, before we put any time or effort into creating a slide deck  and trying to get buy-in from our Office Manager and OMP. I think our team jumped the gun, and in  doing so, limited ourselves from doing something innovative and made things harder on ourselves.

