Visualisation

Challenge and Selection:

Being tasked with a project of coming up with a ‘blue ocean’ idea for the company I work for  presented me with an opportunity to apply the design thinking approach for the first time. The  industry I work for is a very price competitive environment where services offered are extremely  difficult to gain a competitive advantage on, this is what is also known as a ‘red ocean’ environment  due to all the ‘blood’ in the water from aggressive price cutting and high level of competition. A blue  ocean idea would bring up something our company could offer that no one else is doing in the  industry hence being referred to as a ‘blue ocean’ idea – where no one else would be competing. I  had been given a young team of 8 members and a timeline of 1 month to come up with some  possible suggestions to present to our directors.

As being in the ‘what is?’ stage of the design thinking process I decided to use the Visualisation tool  with my team to try and get a deeper understanding of the task/challenge presented.  I designed a  chart to allow us to gain a better understanding of what is currently being offered in the industry  and what we are offering in the industry. Each would be put into its respective section of the chart.  This would allow us to know better what it is we are trying to differentiate ourselves from.

Application:

I split the group up into two groups of 4 each with their own chart to fill in their views and insights of  what is currently being done by my company and our competitors in the market. I allowed each  team to come up with as many views as possible for the 1 hour time frame including a 10min break  in the middle to allow a fresh perspective in case things got boring or sluggish after a while. To  further mitigate this risk I also mixed up the groups after the 10min break in the middle. I also  decided to do this in an outdoor environment to try and increase creativity and comfort.

In each section I included some of the most obvious examples in our industry just to kick start the  process.

The activity started with everyone in their groups and then I gave them a short introduction to what  we are doing by recapping the task given (see above in challenge) and then explaining the ‘What Is?’  Stage we are in (see course material for the 4 questions in design thinking process). I then presented  each team with their large prints of the chart divided into the two sections explain above. I gave  them the necessary tools (colour markers and highlighters) and then gave each group 10min to  come up with a way in which they would be going about filling out the decided on information.

After 30min I gave the teams their 10min break and then mixed them up for remainder of the  Visualisation Tool activity. When the tasks were completed I then populated the findings into one  chart and reviewed with the team by going through similarities and differences in their findings.

Insight and Approach:

The first insight I would like to share is referred to the graphic. Upon their investigations into what is  currently offered in the market, both teams had initial opinions on possible ways to create  something ‘blue ocean’ about an existing service in the market. In the future I would like to add

another section to the graphic for early ideas. As is the inherent ability of the design thinking process  to enlighten ideas outside the original problem definition as in the case with the “Good Kitchen”,  example in Week 1 of the course. This is exactly what happened here. We realised that there is more  than enough potential in our exciting services to differentiate to be competing in a ‘blue ocean’  environment and a completely new service/product did not need to be created as initially perceived.

Also splitting up the groups at the half way pointed caused some delay as the groups had slightly  different ways about going about their tasks. The one group had appointed once scribe to fill out  their ideas and the other just shared the role, for example. This needed to be cleared up again  before they could continue when getting back.

The content provided was very uniform between the two groups, as was expected because the  industry has very obvious services which are currently being provided. The most impressive thing  about using this tool was its ability to enlighten us on existing opportunities just by going deeper into  the ‘what is?’ situation and therefor redefining our scope of the challenge by changing it from  coming up with a new ‘blue ocean’ service to changing existing ‘red ocean’ services to ‘blue ocean’  ones.

I will most definitely continue to use the tool of visualisation for my ‘what if?’ stage of the design  thinking process and I look forward to going through the rest of the stages in the process and  utilising the other proposed tools in the material.

