Teresa’s Reflection- Mind Mapping  Challenge  I work as an intern in the human resources department of a startup company. Our  team plans to implement a project that would improve employer branding strategies.  Employer branding is how the company is viewed by employees, in other words, it is  about how to market the company to desired job seekers. A positive employer brand  is very critical in the increasingly competitive job market nowadays because hiring  and retaining the best employees could be challenging and costly. Our team wants to  attract senior talents in specific fields through this project to improve the  recruitment difficulties in these specific departments, and we decided to mind  mapping for clarifying the design criteria before brainstorming the “how-to” ideas.  The challenge of mind mapping is that we do not have much budget to invite lots of  stakeholders. Moreover, this is also our team’s first time trying mind mapping and  none of us has experience of it, so we might encounter some problems due to  unfamiliarity.     Selection  Our team has gained much information including company values and culture,  location and facilities, overall compensation, management style, and so on.  Therefore, we need to organize the data properly and find out the crucial design  criteria before brainstorming, that is why I chose mind mapping tool. At this point,  my team decided to invite 15 senior talents of specific fields from inside or outside  the company to a meeting, and all of them are our target audience for recruitment.  Our team decided to mind mapping with post-it notes. We explained the data we  have first, and gave each participant a stack of sticky posts, and ask everyone to note  on separate sticky posts any item they believe could inform ideas. The reason why I  chose post-it notes for mind mapping is that participants are able to classify ideas by  different colors notes, moreover, everyone can see each other’s posts easily and  stimulate more ideas. I will explain more about how we apply it in the next part.    Application  Our team conducted mind mapping step by step. As mentioned above, we first  illustrated our data and then asked the participants to write down their thoughts on  sticky posts. In particular, this activity was limited in time for promoting senses of  urgency in order to encourage sharing every thought rather than carefully measure  each idea. After that, participants started with only one theme at a time, presenting  related sticky posts on a board while others who had thoughts related to the theme  could stick the posts nearby. Then moved on to another theme, and so forth, until

everyone stuck their posts on the board. Next, we led the participants to identify the  meaningful insights behind their observations by discussing and asking questions.  They were also asked to note the connections between each theme or insight to find  the core insights. Last, it is our team's work to grasp the design criteria, and we did  understand some important conditions that our method for improving employer  branding must satisfy. For instance, our method will have to be shown on websites  that most of our target talents constantly review rather than popular social media.    Insight & Approach  What I learned from mind mapping with my team is that this really allows us to stay  on the “what is” and clarify before generating innovative ideas, and we could listen  to different perspectives of participants from diverse backgrounds. Mind mapping  also avoids us from starting the solution-generating process and judging others' ideas  at the beginning, which often clutters the entire discussion.   Although it is an effective tool to use on looking for design criteria for startup  companies, we do come across some messy situations while mind mapping, perhaps  teams who try to mind map have the same problems at first. Since the participants  are senior talents, some of them are managements, I found that they usually rush to  draw conclusions and possible solutions. Another relative situation I found was that  some interesting thoughts were not expressed at first because participants thought  they were not 100% related to the theme, and they were afraid that people might  question their abilities. These conditions might be due to the negative experience of  traditional meetings, people just jump to conclusions and start looking for direct  solutions, which makes it hard to see other possibilities.   To solve the problems, I tried to encourage everyone to stay on mind mapping, and  don’t rush to generate solutions and draw conclusions. This also made me realize  that mind mapping is easier said than done, and it needs lots of practice to subvert  the traditional thinking mode.

