Mind Mapping

Challenge

When I started working as R&D department director at a large hospital, I found there was a big

problem about lack of involvement, commitment and proactivity among employees, which was

already causing a decrease in efficiency and success obtaining positive results from the

department. Therefore, I decided to address the challenge of solving this situation using design

thinking tools, which are proper to be applied across internal projects related to people

management.

Selection

The design thinking tool I selected was mind mapping applied to human resources, which can

bring great value to the organization, employees and the department itself.

Application

A diverse and multidisciplinary team was created with all employees from my department and

also some employees from other areas. In this way, it helped to generate a common language

among different people involved, in order to help to understand magnitude of the challenge and

its implications. The objective was to represent in a graphic, organized and structured way a

series of ideas (mind mapping) around a central question related to the following challenge: How

should internal initiatives be aimed at promoting involvement, creativity and intrapreneurship?

Based on this idea, different characteristics that should be met by the initiatives to be promoted,

and the benefits they should provide both to employees and the hospital. By decomposing the

initial challenge into several sections, the team was better able to understand how to solve it, and

to decide if it is more convenient to focus on some aspects or others.

Insight

Applying mind mapping, team members were able to observe, investigate, listen, generate and

analyze ideas, which at first were not very valuable. However, with the tool used, the ideas could

be filtered to select the most promising ones. From these results I realized that, in order to

achieve the full involvement of employees, it was very important to generate new transparent and

credible ways of working taking into account the proposals of employees, which encourage

participation and communication between departments, which contribute to personal and

professional growth, aligned with the objectives of the organization.

Approach

The applied design thinking tool was very effective to understand employees, their frustrations,

motivations and concerns. It was also very useful to generate and select the best ideas in order

to finish the lack of involvement, commitment and proactivity. In my opinion, this tool offers many

possibilities and should be adopted proactively, as it will not only bring better solutions in the

area of people management, but also in the departments and companies applying it.

