Reflection: Mind Mapping

Challenge

I work for the Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship of one of Government higher learning

institution in Rwanda. Since mid-March 2020 when the first case of Covid–19 was diagnosed in

Rwanda all schools and universities were immediately closed to avoid a quick and wide spread of

the pandemic. The students went home without any other possible way of continuing their lesson as

the teaching method was mainly face to face. This was a challenge for both the government,

parents, educationists, and students.  So as Responsible for Technology Transfer, I had to help to

find a solution to this problem. The said solution may be, for instance, either improving the university

website to enable the delivery of online courses or creating a platform that would bring together

lecturers and students in our institutions so that teaching and learning activities could be resumed as

soon as possible to avoid dead year. The platform, for example, called Easy Learn, would contain

both e-learning course materials and allow tele- teaching and learning such that a lecture from their

office and students can attend live classes at their respective home. To come up with efficient and

effective tool that would help our university to achieve its goals of delivering quality education and to

satisfy our clients/customers’ (students) needs, I chose to use mind mapping tool to have all

stakeholders have a common understand of the current situation.

Selection

I selected the Mind mapping tool as it is a design thinking technique that enables to collect a lot of

data or big data and to establish a clear relationship between different ideas and show how their

linked to the central idea; the central idea here being helping the university continue delivering

quality education during the covid – 19 era.  This helped me to align my colleagues and my bosses

from the university and the students’ union around a common understanding of the current

situation/reality and to envision a new future together as discussed in the idea generation process

and mind mapping tool videos respectively. Furthermore, mind mapping helped me generate,

visualize, structure and classify ideas to try to find patterns and insights from the big amount data I

had collected in relation with the current reality that allowed me to find appropriate solutions to

problems in light of the big picture as per the mind mapping tool video.

Application

After having thought about the heavy task I had of helping my university resume its core mission,

and given that I could not perform this task alone, I organized a consultative meeting to make sure

that solution to be proposed to the university meets its need. Thus the meeting brought together the

college representatives from all six colleges that constitute the university. These included the

University and College Registrars, Deans of different schools, Quality assurance Director, students’

union representatives and the College Directors Teaching and Learning units. The meeting brought

together 42 people.

In preparing for the meeting I had created a central idea, “Designing a teaching-learning platform

for the University”, that I presented the participants and I asked them to write down on sticky

notes that were given to them how they the platform would look like, what would be the content and

stick them to a pin board in the meeting room. The exercise took about 20 minutes and participants

were requested not to consult each other’s points of view. After the exercise, we offered participants

a coffee break. Then when they came back we allowed them five minutes to review their ideas.

Then we put them into seven groups of six people. Then we had a member of group one to present

their ideas that constituted one theme and participants with similar ideas or ideas related to the

theme would stick their notes around theirs. And then next group does the same until we developed

those clusters.

Thereafter, we had participants to move to the theme cluster that was common for a good number

of participants; and this was “Virtual smart classroom”. We asked participants to turn them into

insights statement and we guided them using interrogative determinants like so what? Then we

could not down generated insights and then move to another cluster and so on. And around the

central idea we could create thread or branches that helped everyone to see clearly the ideas

generated relates to the central idea. There we created branches and sub branches to make

patterns and show insights. This helped us to explore the relationships between generated ideas

and the different elements of opinions and to come up with solutions to the problem our university

had. And this helped us to come with design criteria for the university teaching-learning platform.

Insight

This was another opportunity of learning how to use feedback from other people we interact in our

daily life, be it colleagues, be it customers or clients, be it family members. It opened my eyes to

that no one can hope solve all problems they encounter alone. Thus I noted that mind mapping help

to collect a large number of data or ideas, to explore and exploit them so as to come up with

creative and consulted solutions. This insight helped to have the university teaching platform

developed with the consent of all stakeholders and this avoid complaints as most of end users were

represented during the generation of the design criteria. Furthermore, the insight gained while

applying the mind mapping tool was vital to my thinking as it changed radically way of thinking and

my representation of the current real situation. For instance, this way of collecting and representing

ideas from different and build a relationship between them so as to generate theme clusters around

the central idea in visual way helped me to have clear pictures about the design criterion and the

best way of organizing ideas to create a suitable solution to a given problem. The Mind mapping, for

me is relevant tool to the design thinking as it allows the representation of different ideas in a visual

and analytical way that brings about clarity and creativity.

Approach

As now I have experienced how the mind mapping tool is a good tool that helps to think with clarity

explore the link between ideas and different opinions, and given the fact that these ideas are

collected from different people we requested to cluster those ideas to generate themes and patterns

that enable us to have insights and to generate design criteria, I will often use mind mapping to deal

with my challenges though it can be associated with some other design thinking tool to make more

efficient and effective. What I can do differently next time is to adapt the way I use mind mapping to

every current real situation in order to come up with clear solutions to meet the need linked to the

challenge in question as all challenges are not similar, and thus they may need different solutions.

