Challenge:

We wanted to some strategic value add for our Client for quite some time. We had been doing small  improvements here and there in the application in the Environment, Health and Safety Domain area for  the Discrete Manufacturing Giant but were not able to showcase something disruptive and game  changing. Then it occurred to me that we could suggest a solution which would help the Client take  strategic decisions for the future. The only way to do that was do a predictive analysis of environmental  and health-safety data parameters for the next few years to guide the Client to take strategic decisions for  the firm’s success. However the Challenge was to find appropriate environmental and health-safety  parameters on which this predictive analysis experiment could be done.

Selection:

Since I had around 5 Consultants available to work on this initiative, I felt the best tool to solve this  challenge will be Mind Mapping. We felt mapping the minds of 5 Consultants who come from different  domain backgrounds will give us enough common insight to select the best parameters for the predictive  analysis. We gave the Sustainability reports for 5 top firms from different domain areas like Banking,  Power Generation, Insurance, Auto, Telecom to each of these Consultants and asked them to study the  parameters (Environmental and Health-Safety ones) these firms had declared in the report as per the GRI  (Global Reporting Initiative) guidelines.

Application

Each Consultant took the Sustainability Report assigned and studied the parameters declared by the  respective firm and studied them. And each of them shortlisted some of the parameters on Environment  and Health-Safety as per their understanding and analysis of the report and their belief as to which  parameter mattered most to that firm in today’s market scenario and feasibility of implementation. Once  all the Consultants were able to shortlist their parameters, I called a meeting involving all of them and ask  everyone to present to the others their shortlisted parameters and their reasons for doing so. By getting  each Consultant to speak, I was able to achieve a meeting of the minds and we were able to determine 4- 5 commonly agreeable important environmental and health-safety parameters of GRI that could be  utilized for predictive analysis for our Discrete Manufacturing Client

Insight

The insight that I gained from the application of the Mind Mapping Tool was that usually to solve a  problem, you need existing data t understand the current situation and from that data we can determine  what is to be done to arrive at a solution for a better tomorrow. But the existing data usually exists in  different forms and can mean different things to different people based upon the person’s background.  So as to get the best deal, it is always better for a group of people to analyze and collate the existing data.  Then a meeting between those people can lead to the meeting of the minds and can also establish some  common themes and patterns in the data which can then be leveraged to arrive at a solution

Approach

The next time, I am thinking, that we may experiment with the Visualization Tool. I will encourage my  Consultants to start with the problem statement and draw a visual sketch of the Customer pain points and  all the related dependencies pertaining to it through flow diagrams. Then based on the individual sketches  we might again try to do a meeting of the minds through Mind Mapping and try to find a common root  cause and base our solution to address that root cause. Experimentation is a key and I certainly believe  that with a combination of Visualization and Mind Mapping we could get better insights and answers

