1. Challenge and Selection:

Since I am an event manager in one of exhibition venue, I acts as a representative of the LS  Agency to  clients, I need to work closely with clients in planning, coordinating and advising clients including those  organising exhibition, conferences, seminars and special event. After understanding the clients  expectation and needs, I need to plan and coordinate with my teammates from different department,  and distribute the event order to them according to clients’ needs and requirement; meanwhile, I need  to supervise and monitor my teammate’s work task, to ensure all work order can be completed on time  as committed with organiser, and assure clients satisfaction, and event success. Thus, it can maintain  positive relationship with clients.

Unfortunately, in sometimes, due to poor communicate or misunderstanding issue in between  colleagues, teammates cannot achieve the assigned work task on time or complete the task perfectly, it  causes the result cannot hit the clients’ expectation and needs. Reviewing some constructive feedback  from clients, due to the delay of the completion time of work task, they were dis-satisfied our services,  and commented that our venue was unhelpful and disrespectful to them. Finally, we cannot maintain a  positive relationship with clients, and some of them may think that our venue is no longer to be an  appropriate venue for their event.

In order to solve the above problem, I will use Visualization tool for my challenge, to achieve a shared  understanding of a problem space among a diverse group of our colleagues before attempting to  identify and define possible solutions to the problem.  When we're dealing with very complex problems,  we're enacting a different kind of problem solving that must bring in more than just logic. Visualization  is important for the process of Design Thinking because it's a way of unlocking a different part of our  brain.

2. Application:

I wanted this exercise to be as much eye-opening as only possible. In order to design the solution to  meet with organizer’ needs as what I was encounter as mentioned above. Firstly, I must build a good  understanding of the problem with teammates. I will choose to interview, observations, desk research  and other research techniques that are applied during this phase generate huge amount of information  from the organizer and try to empathy organizer’ concern – all conversation and related technical  information that has to be grouped and analyze. Meanwhile, we invited all our related teammates to  participate the internal meeting after I received all information from clients and encourage them to  share their difficulties and see if there is any possibilities to solve the problem on the table, in avoid any  delay of the completion time of work task.

As a first step we need to understand and analyses the difficulties and limitation about the demand of  clients and decided how we can compatible with their needs. We will work out a clear work schedule,  and get the agreement form all of teammates, and ensure that all work order and requirement are  disseminate to all front-line staff, and thus, it can avoid any late order completion in future. This  approach helps us build connections between different findings and understand the bigger picture from  clients. The discussion can trigger idea generation and enables teammates to better understand  research insights.

At the same time, we knew that it is hard to arrange internal meeting for each event, since we have an  thousand event in a year. So, for the long-term option, we need to develop an online web-based system

to simplify the distribution of work task, and it can provide an immediate information transfer, and  shorten the response rate from front-line staff, and increase the accurate of information to avoid any  delay of completion time of work task. After the innovation of the online web-based system, it can  reduce the labor cost, and reduce the workload of teammates, and it can increase the hit rate of clients’  expectation and needs, and thus raise the clients’ satisfaction on our services, and maintain a positive  relationship with clients. That exercise pushed us to come up with all types of clients that theoretically  might be interested in our services and venue.

3. Insight:

I had an opportunity to learn design thinking from conducting this exercise with our internal work group  is that while the discussion process- especially the consecutive discussion that incorporates their  feedback – is important for reinforcing their understanding and concept of the importance of customer  oriented in event industry, and thus, we can break though the wall of tradition mind set and narrow the  limitation of the rule and regulation, to be more flexibility to fulfill the clients’ need and expectation.  Meanwhile, the more valuable aspect of the internal discussion is the shared insights and shared the  difficulties that occurs while they are working to define their problem space.  The discussion gives a  chance to our internal work group and allows them to share their perspectives and develop insights into  potential difficulties and limitation of their problems.

4. Approach:

After learning form this course, I discovered that the most valuable aspect is the shared insights and  learning, in next time, when I encounter any complex questions, I will still use the visualization tool as a  main approach for a series of design thinking in my daily work. As some authors even calling  visualization tools “the mother of all design tools”. The visualization is a real core component of the way  for design thinking. This approach can help us to build connections between different findings and  understand the bigger picture. The visualization can trigger me about idea generation and enables our  teammate to better understand the root of problem, and thus, it can allow us to easy to deal with  complex question.

