THE VISUALIZATION TOOL

Challenge

I’m doing a project at a non-profit organization which involves curriculum developing. In

order to do this, the team must have a same mindset about which process goes first and

what goes next in developing the curriculum. Discussing the topic became quite hard to

do because the idea was abstract – it was something that has yet to be done and each

member has a different idea of the process. Moreover, due to COVID-19, the meeting

wasn’t done in person. It was an online meeting and that makes things even harder

because we weren’t present in front of each other to describe the idea clearly. The

discussion didn’t progress quickly, and we were stuck in this phase for quite a while.

Selection

For this project, my team selected the visualization tool. To be specific, we decided to

create a work flowchart, so there is a clear visualization of what the input is, what type of

process should we do, and what comes out of the process. This tool was selected

because we needed to make each of the team members to understand and align ideas.

It was really hard to do before because the ideas were to abstract to be understood by

each other. The visualization tool helped turning these abstract ideas into something

more concrete and understandable.

Application

As we discussed about the curriculum developing process, we created an online

diagram, so that each member of the team can see how far the discussion had

progressed. The discussion started with one person proposing an idea, which had to

include what the input is, the process, what the output is, and why the person proposes

the idea. That idea is then made into a part of the diagram, and then the team members

discuss it.

Insight

The application of this tool improved the quality of the discussion significantly, because

each member now understand the ideas proposed and had a clear visualization of what

was going on. Even when something was going wrong, we simply deleted it and

replaced it with something else. In the end, our team had a clear diagram about what

need to be done in developing the curriculum.

Approach

I will definitely use this tool for something else next time, because it really helps team

members to understand and align our mindsets together. Besides that, with this tool we

can have a concrete document of what to do even when we forget what the next step

is.

