Mind Mapping (Not Traditional Drawing One) - Important Tool in Design Thinking

In a typical design thinking approach, it includes four stages viz. WHAT IS, WHAT IF, WHAT WOWS and WHAT WORKS. WHAT IS stage involves collecting data about AS IS state (current state) and pain points from multiple perspectives like end user’s perspective of the existing offerings, challenges with existing IT landscape. That represents one of the important steps in WHAT IS part of Design Thinking. Despite having done all the ground work, solution choices were sometimes hijacked by most influential stakeholders and those options in good % of the cases are very biased and preconceived options without looking into collected data which represent the ground realities.

I believe above challenge would have been avoided if design criteria are defined properly for WHAT IF stage and then using the design criteria to act as governance mechanism. This process should be agreed upon upfront during the beginning of the engagement. I have seen one technique, Mind Mapping, which I have picked up during my Coursera course on Design Thinking from Darden University. It is simple and elegant technique. Following section covers the application of the tool in brief using a fictitious scenario. I have added my own flavor to the approach.

Let’s assume that one of your customers is facing higher customer attrition. Things like long time required to fulfill the customer order, rude behavior of the customer service professionals and other factors are perceived to be the reasons. Now you are engaged to analyze the situation and provide the solution to address the same. Obviously you will start with the groundwork in terms of collecting the details by talking directly to end customers, various stakeholders like customer service personnel in the client’s organization whose actions directly or indirectly impact the end customers. Once the data collection is completed, it is time to apply mind mapping technique in the following manner to define the design criteria for WHAT IF stage.

1.  Organize & structure the collected data into following forms: Power Points, Visual representation of Customer Journeys, Value Chain, Pain Points and related ones. Bring in UI experts to create visual representations of customer journey maps, paint points and other related ones. The intent is to create simple representation of the data collected.
2. Now take large conference room at customer location and arrange those elements in four sides of room in logical flow say from marketing to order to after sales customer support.
3. Identify stakeholder groups who would be participating in the session. Include stakeholders Business Side, IT Side, Support Functions like Customer Support Services, and representatives from end customers. Form four to five teams each having representation from each stakeholder group. The team with almost equal representation from various stakeholder groups will bring in different perspectives to the table which will help in bringing the right balance in terms of defining solution criteria.
4. Invite twenty-thirty people from various stakeholder groups for one-day session. At the beginning of the session, explain rules of the session and how the process will be carried out. All of them should be asked to go through the set of data captured in four sides of the room and to note down minimum five important data points per participant. This could go for one-two hours depending on the amount of the data provided.
5. Once done, each one should be asked to sit with their team and go through their list.
6. Each team should be asked to name key themes from the data points they collected. As a moderator, you should note those themes and supporting data points in the main board.
7. Once it’s done, each team should be asked to analyze the data points in each theme to identify any pattern and also those across the themes.
8. Now ask individual team to use those themes and patterns to define the design criteria as if anything were possible.
9. Once design criteria is defined by individual team, ask them to look at other’s options, discuss and then as a single team to create master list of design criteria for WHAT IF stage.

During this exercise you will observe that participants have a tendency to get directly into solution without properly analyzing the data in hand.  As a moderator, you should ensure that nobody to discuss solution options during the mind mapping session.