Cense

Innovation to Impact

Mind Maps For Complex Projects

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A mind map is a powerful, simple organizing tool that features a lot of information on a single page. We use mind maps and other visual tools to communicate relationships between ideas, people, project components and topics with our clients and partners. We present a short introduction to how and why you might want to use mind maps in your work.

A mind map is a visual representation of a project that links actors and actions together. This article focuses on using mind maps, not creating them.

Below is an example from software provider Lucidspark (which is a tool for creating mindmaps) that illustrates what a mind map is and how it can connect ideas and actions together.

Visualizing our Relationships

A search of Google (or any other search engine) will find thousands of visual examples of what a mind map is. There are few ‘essentials’ for mind mapping, which is among its most attractive features.

A complex project is one where there are many things happening at the same time, at different time scales, and involving many interdependencies and actors. That’s just a way of saying: there’s a lot going on.

It doesn’t matter how you organize your mind map only that it is useful. That means it provides information that you can make decisions with and act on. If it does that, it’s a good mind map.

Once we have that in place, the mind map allows us to examine the relationships between the nodes and topics to assess their fit. The expression ‘getting on the same page‘ reflects an ability for all of those looking at the document to have a similar representation of what’s on that page. The mind map allows us to verify relationships between entities, determine gaps or inaccuracies, and explore different ways of connecting things together.

There may not be a single ‘master’ map that is better than all, but there may be a map that is more useful than others.

How to Use Mind Maps

When we use this with clients and partners on projects we aim for the following:

  • To examine the assumptions involved in the project
  • To explore alternative relationships of fit and see if the map is the best representation of what we are looking at
  • To guide the project and keep the topics on track
  • To provide a building block for connecting ideas together (in ways that weren’t done previously)
  • To map out a system of relationships
  • To use colour and visuals to surface feelings, thoughts, and other emotional aspects of the project that might influence the strategy or outcomes

By creating a visual representation we see the whole project and the relationship context. Relationships are the key in any complex system. When we visualize these relationships it allows us to see how the actions in one relationship can affect others. Visual maps can aid us in anticipating possible effects.

(Note: We don’t use the term ‘unintended effects’ – just effects because in complex systems it’s too hard to predict cause and effect with any degree of accuracy).

We continually refer back to our maps to help ensure we are accounting for all relationships of importance throughout the project and not just those that have the most amount of activity within them. It’s incredibly difficult to track this in our heads or in something like a spreadsheet or text document.

Mind maps can be great tools to visualize a lot of information and get you and your collaborators on the same page when it comes to understanding what is going on in a complex system and program. Try it out — they are easy to create and simple to use.

If you want to use this approach to visualizing your programs and using this to help you innovate, contact us – we’d love to hear from you.

Knowing Thyself: Colleagues, Coaches and Consultants

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Self-knowledge is a great asset, however the reason we often hire an external consultant is because we know a part of ourself so well that it becomes difficult to see other parts of who we are.

We obviously have a bias toward the role of external consultants because that’s what we do, but we also recognize that part of role that we are often asked to play can be filled by different people or sometimes the same person playing many of them.

We refer to three C’s: Colleagues, coaches, and consultants. These are not mutually exclusive from one another and can be separate or combined. In each case, however, the role is focused on specific tasks that we want to highlight in helping you identify what best serves the particular situation or problem set you face.

Colleagues

Perhaps the most neglected role of the three are colleagues (or peers). A colleague is someone who works within the same field, department, team or organization as you and can provide feedback and perspective on the work you do and your performance. Because they know the work, they can speak to technical issues very well. However, because they are close to the work (and maybe you) they may include the same biases and limits to perspective as you do, too.

Colleagues offer the following:

  • Deep knowledge of the situation, context, and circumstances of the work. They know what you know and experience what you experience. There is little need to spend extra time empathizing with your situation.
  • This familiarity allows for more quick-to-start and nuanced conversations about issues.
  • Familiarity also allows for great compassion: it’s easy to talk with your peers about issues that might seem too far removed from others.
  • This familiarity also brings the same ‘blind spots’ and potential prejudices around actions, behaviours, policies, and possible outcomes. This can limit what is ‘seen’ and what is proposed.

Coaches

When you think of the highest performing athletes do you think about their coach? They all have one.

Athletes know the value of coaches because it’s only through that blend of expertise, motivational energy, and shared commitment through feedback that they can improve. The same is often true for organizations and individuals.

A good coach provides:

  • Someone on your team who is committed to the same project as you. Their success is yours.
  • Expertise in performance and how it relates to your specific industry or context.
  • A more intimate relationship in that they are focused on you (or your organization) and thus is more sensitive to its ‘moods’ and rhythms than someone who is more distant.
  • A coach has a separate role from who they support so, unlike with colleagues, there is less confusion and more clarity about what specific benefits a coach can and will provide without the potential for it to be conflated.

Consultants

A consultant is like a coach in that they bring an outside perspective – even more so.

A consultant is someone who is freed from the specific demands associated with the role, outcomes, and processes associated with your work and offers expertise and a different perspective on what you do. Many times we are so engrossed or familiar with what we are doing that we are unable to see new possibilities or consider alternative pathways for working.

Consultants provide many distinct benefits:

  • A consultant may not have specific domain expertise as your organization.
  • Alternatively, a consultant may have deep expertise in the domain you work in, but less in specific processes. They might also possess both. In every case, their value is in separation from the day-to-day activities of your work. This provides a more dispassionate view of your work. (Note: we don’t believe it’s necessarily more objective, just different — we all have biases).
  • Consultants can provide tactical and strategic advice much like a coach but without the closeness to their client and the same investment in the work. This isn’t to say that consultants care any less for the success of their clients, rather they are not part of the team and thus are not affected by the same fears of failure or concerns as a coach is.
  • Because consultants work at a distance they also are more likely to be versed in methods, tools, knowledge and practice skills that allow them to work well with groups who are unfamiliar to them (yet are similar in need or content expertise). This allows them to be bridge-builders within and across organizations and networks more easily.

Having others help us to know who we are, support our work, and provide expert advice is invaluable. Whether you are seeking to “level up” or simply maintain your focus and performance consider bringing in someone who can help you go further and cheer you on.

Whether its your peers, a coach, or a consultant you’ll find that long journey to excellence and innovation is far less lonely.

If you work with human services and systems and want someone who might serve to motivate you and help you to learn, we might be able to help. Contact us and let’s talk about coaching, consulting, and community.

Innovation Case Studies

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If you’ve ever taught a course on an applied subject matter you’ve probably considered introducing case studies.

Case studies are systematic accounts of an activity and aim to provide evidence to illustrate or support an example of something. This might be to show a problem-solving approach, an introduction of a new technology, or demonstrate a particular implementation success or failure.

The case study approach is a core of what Harvard Business School uses and has been replicated in the Harvard Business Review and many other business journals. Harvard even has a structured method that has been adopted by business schools (and other faculties) worldwide.

Case studies are meant to provide us with guides based on practice to help us think through things, follow, or avoid. While this might be true in the abstract, our experience is that they are far better at stimulating discussion in class settings, but lousy at providing innovators with real guidance on what to do.

Partly, this has to do with the stories that are told and partly it’s because of the questions that are asked of the case examples themselves.

A New Case Study Approach

There is another way to approach case studies for innovation.

Innovation is always context-dependent. Complex contexts are those where there is a lot going on at multiple scales, intensities, and connect many different entities like people, organizations and networks. Increasingly, this is what describes the context in which innovators work.

This represents many if not most markets, public policy landscapes, schools, and care institutions today. If you’re involving humans, you’re involving complexity. This requires an approach to understanding and making sense of what happens that accounts for complexity. Consider the Cynefin Framework as a guide in assessment of what kind of situation you’re in.

So it makes sense that case studies — which are designed to take lessons from one context to apply broadly — reflect lessons tied to what’s special about a specific context and not try to reflect too many others.

By understanding what’s special we can better understand what’s general by allowing us to recognize the patterns that make something different and common not one or the other. It sounds simple, but it’s actually something that is lost in the current case study method.

We offer some questions to consider when you look at any case study — including the ones that you write for yourself – to better get value from an case to apply to your own situation. These questions can help you to get to a sense of where an innovation sits within a system and what barriers and facilitators were in place to shape the context, the actors, and the situations that define a case (and are often neglected).

Questions for Cases

For the sake of brevity the term innovator is used to reflect an individual, group, or organization who undertake the design, creation, implementation and ownership of the innovation — which can be a product, service, or policy.

  1. What kind of relationships or ecosystem is the organization/innovator a part of? (Innovation doesn’t exist in a vaccuum — it’s critical to understand what influences were available to shape the culture of innovation creation)
  2. How were these relationships leveraged, connected, or served in the development or execution of the innovation? (Innovations are a culmination of relationships in their creation, growth, and realization into a market to different extents, but never without them so they ought not be ignored).
  3. How was the innovation implemented? (This helps us understand the viable actions that were taken and how much was dependent on other things, what role happenstance (luck) played, and what degree the plan met reality)
  4. How much risk did the innovator assume? (This allows us to gauge how much motivation, fear, and pressure the innovator was under)
  5. What was going on in the immediate environment during the development and implementation of the innovation? (This reflects situational, policy, climate, and local contexts)
  6. What learning processes were put in place? (This speaks to the matter of sustainability and determines if this is likely to be a one-off or something that might be sustained)
  7. What outputs, outcomes, and impact was achieved? (Did the innovators capture what was produced and what effect it had on the world around the innovation, not just whether it was sold or bought)
  8. What evolved? (Scale isn’t about just ‘more’, but whether it evolves to meet the needs)
  9. What is the fit and the purpose? (Innovation is all about fit for purpose and these need to be articulated to assess whether or where it fits and what the purpose(s) are)
  10. Is there a ratchet? (A ratchet is something that gains leverage the more it’s used. Is there something that allows the lessons of the innovation development or the innovation itself to take something — the organization, people, or product/service/policy further with leverage?)

Try asking these of any case study and you might find what’s missing and what you can ask of your own work to learn more, do more, and innovate better. Case studies often reflect ‘one-off’ events that are highly constrained and not always transferable in what can be learned and applied. By asking these questions you might find answers that can help you make more from your own situation.

If you want help asking and answering these, contact us and we’d be happy to help you.

Innovation Like An Epidemiologist

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What if innovation was like epidemiology? What if we wanted to understand the source, scope, scale, and spread of an idea or product?

That’s one way that we think about the innovation process.

Innovation – like a virus — is similar to infectious disease epidemiology. Both of these areas look at the development of something, its effects, its spread, and how it scales over time. Both innovation and epidemiology require evaluation as well.

Viral Innovation

The parallels between infectious disease epidemiology and innovation are many. The first of these parallels is between a virus and an innovation.

A virus develops and mutates as it has more exposure to hosts. A virus ‘learns’ from what it does and adapts to fit a changing context. Innovation does the same thing only with an idea, product, or service. For innovators, the aim is for healthy development and the creation and distribution of the product or service. This is what research and development and marketing is all about.

Innovation and epidemiology are also both interested in the spread and scale of things. If an innovation works well in a context we might want it to spread to other contexts. Innovators often want their products to scale as far and as wide as possible. Sometimes innovations scale and sometimes they don’t.

The way we know this is through conducting detailed, systematic monitoring and evaluation.

Epidemiology, like innovation, is driven by evidence from the laboratory and the real world together.

Stages of Development

At Cense, we also look to another parallel between the two areas: research and development.

Innovation develops in four stages that are similar to phases of research trials.

The role of design and evaluation is different for each stage. At Stages 1 and 2 the emphasis is on working with innovators to align their intentions with their design to explore what it (the innovation) does and how it does it. This is where design thinking and strategy are most prominent.

At Stages 3 and 4, the aim is to build an evidence base and strategy to spread and scale the innovation. At these stages, the focus is on marketing, distribution, and amplification. Evaluation in these stages focuses on the larger impact and the means by which the innovation is implemented and adopted for use across contexts.

Like an epidemiologist, its important to collect data to support moving the innovation from each stage. It’s also important to explore what kind of effects — positive and harmful – are generated at each stage.

At Cense, we work with our clients to design the right evaluation and strategy for each stage of development. There are no ‘one-size fits all’ approaches to innovation. Much like with a virus, an innovator must know what their innovation does and what will change at each stage and scale of its development.

What is key is designing data collection and strategy that is fit for purpose.

Viruses aim to spread and survive just like innovations. By thinking like an epidemiologist you can help your innovation to survive and thrive like the best kind of virus.

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

Evaluating Learning for Innovation

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Learning is at the heart of innovation. Our definition of innovation is contingent upon it:

Learning transformed into value, by design

Traditional approaches to learning tend to focus on two things: recall and performance. Thus, we look at knowledge-based tests (consider most of what we took in grade school and college or university) or performance assessments (reviewed accomplishment on a specific task or problem set).

What is often absent from both of these is a consideration of the context and the learner themselves. It’s one thing to be exposed to information or demonstrations of how to do something, yet it’s entirely another thing to actually learn it.

Assessment of Learning: Questions to Ask

Our assessment of learning is inspired by this approach and informs the questions we ask about learning:

  • Exposure. What level of exposure did we have to the material or experience? How did this exposure treat our sense of understanding of the problem and the context? What salient information did we attend to during this exposure? How (or were) we attentive to what was presented to us and what was the context in which this was presented?
  • Connection. How is what we are exposed to related to what we’ve already experienced? In what ways does this new material fit with what we have previously learned? Where does this material or experience fit in shaping my goals, intentions, or general direction for myself or my organization?
  • Reinforcement. What activities allow me to apply what I’ve been exposed to in new ways and in practical ways repeatedly (including fitting with what I already know, whether a theory or practice-focused material)? What systems are in place to allow me to integrate what I’ve been exposed to into my current understanding of the situation? What activities have been set out to enable recall and re-visiting materials in the near and longer-term?
  • Application. What opportunities do I have to apply what I’ve learned into shaping a new understanding of a problem or steps toward addressing it? What opportunities are present to reflect and integrate this application of knowledge or skill into my existing repertoire of practice or understanding?

Without these, there is a decent chance we will undergo some form of performative learning — doing activities that look like learning but aren’t really effective. Taking workshops on topics that are not relevant to your work or set up too distant from the problems you’re seeking to tackle is one way. Filling your days with reading articles, watching webinars, taking courses, listening to podcasts, and viewing videos on some material without a means to organize and integrate that into your experience.

You will retain some, but probably not enough to warrant your time and energy. Furthermore, this kind of ‘filling’ of your attention actually serves to decrease the likelihood that you’re able to use this because of the sapping of energy from your brain. The more we expose ourselves to, the more energy is required and eventually we’ll be depleted enough that things won’t stick.

Ask yourself these questions above next time you’re looking to really, truly learn as an individual, team, or organization.

If you’re looking to learn more, do more with what you have, please contact us and we’d be happy to discuss ways we can help you be a better learner and innovator.

Better learning comes from better systems, by design. we can help you build them.