Challenge  In my line of work my primary goal is to listen in to what the customer really wants, and then  provide them with the best possible technical solution. As we are a company developing  software we help our customers in their digital transformation of products and services. The  task might for example be to come up with a completely new idea that will complement and  further enhance the current business model. A few weeks ago I was assigned to a customer  project where we were expected to come up with new ideas on how to attract new members  and retain current members. A challenge with quite an open question.    Selection  Being inspired by the Mind Mapping tool as presented by Jessica Leiva in part three of this  course, I decided I wanted to try my own version of it when I was to facilitate a workshop  session together with the customer who had hired us, and with some colleagues who didn’t  know very much about the client’s domain. We had a situation where most of the participants  from the customer thought they knew pretty much everything there was to know about their  business and the end user. Me and my colleagues were at the other hand in desperate need  of knowing a lot more about the customer, the domain, and the end user. Choosing the art  gallery form of a Mind Mapping seemed like a pretty good choice to gain more insight at this  phase.    Application  Before the workshop we collected as much facts and information we could about the client’s  domain. We conducted interviews and visited the client’s working environment. All this  information was then summed up into articles, personas or "fact sheets” and printed out. We  normally just hand out this information, collected in folders, to the participants. This time we  put it all up on the surrounding walls and windows for everyone to see, and it was really  radiating out all the information. We formed groups and gave them post-its to right their  learnings on, and we put up a blank sheet for each group to stick their post-its on. They were  given about 30 minutes to just walk around and read, discuss and write notes. After these 30  minutes the groups were discussing wildly and all the sheets were full of post-its. It was very  effective. And so, while we presented the next step - to talk about and cluster their findings -  they were all already there and immediately started to move around the post-its. After just a  few minutes they were all ready to dive deeper into the meaning of all these learnings, now  formed into named clusters. They were now given yet another 20 minutes to identify the  insights form each cluster, write it down on new post-its and put on the cluster.    Insight  I do recognize myself from earlier projects when i listen to Tahir Haubold - in part four of this  course - when he talks about how we sometimes make too many assumptions based on our  own judgement. On what we believe is correct. Those assumptions might be right and lead  us forward, though if we really want to get into those more wicked ideas leading us to more  disruptive concepts, we need to look far outside our own garden, and we need to get more  knowledge about what both the customer and the end user really thinks before we even get  into the ideation phase. Before going too far into the unknown. As Tahir Haubold says we make  assumptions based on guessing, and when it doesn’t work we just tweak it. And so it’s still

the same guesses, and instead of either throwing it away or do some early experimenting  with it, we add even more guessing into it. Not leading us anywhere.     When listening to Dan Pink - in the first part of this course - when he talks about the  difference between the left- and right-brain characteristics I can see why the Mind mapping  is so important, as is appeals to firstly the left-sided "logical and linear way" of just reading  in, and then secondly to the right-sided "context and synthesis" way of defining the bigger  picture.     I can’t emphasize enough the importance of doing a more thorough work in the beginning of  the design thinking process by not making to many assumptions of our own, and not feel  content with the facts and information we’ve collected so far. By adding the Mind Mapping  approach all the participants get a mutual understanding of the situation, and they gain  valuable insights that they’d never get if they were to just quitly read in all the information  themselves and then jump into an ideation session.    Approach  If I was to do this again I might change the way to present the information. Use a lot more  posters, visual graphs and pictures instead of papers with a lot of texts. More like a  newspaper approach, and maybe also include some fun gadgets for the participants to  interact with to get information. If there is time for it.     The art gallery approach is definately something I will use a lot more beacuse of its beautiful  way of radiating out the information throughout the whole workshop. The better presented it  brings out people’s curiousity and can also be an icebreaker when they start to discuss with  each other what they see and learn.

