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.

Designing for Humans: Considerations for Innovators

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Over at our sister site Censemaking we wrapped up a series called Design for Humans. The focus of the series was on different considerations that we must make in the process of designing useful, impactful things for the world around us.

Strangely enough, we often don’t do a good job at designing for humans with our services and products. In the process of innovating, we make many assumptions about how the innovation will be received and the impact it will make.

There are reasons why real substantive change is actually very difficult to generate. Humans are difficult to work with and to influence and the more we can design for how humans actually live, think, work, and play the more likely our change-making efforts will yield positive results.

Deeper Research

One of the ways to do better design for humans is to conduct detailed research. This goes beyond a few focus groups or observations toward more fuller engagement with different audiences. Strangely, many of us actually don’t really know what we want. We think we know what we want or that we know how to articulate what we want.

Research in this context involves the time, care, and attention to who people see themselves and who they act as. This is about our imagined reality and our lived one. (The two intersect and diverge through our days and life).

Many of our purchases are based on decisions that involve aspiration, comfort, fear, convenience, ethics, and utility in different combinations. These are both our own and the ones that we adopt from others depending on our situation. Individual decisions are very often tied to collective ones. If we do not understand the different groups we are affiliated with or aspire toward being a part of, we lose much of what is known about what drives a decision.

If we do not take the time to understand who it is that we are speaking with or seeking to influence — their individual set of values, beliefs, and experiences — then we will create a ‘mass’ for a ‘mass market’ that is unlikely to be receptive.

Luck and Science

A great deal of impactful design is based on a dance between luck and science. Viral marketing campaigns are more brilliant in retrospect than in advance. As Tendayi Viki and Mitch Joel recently spoke about in their conversation on innovation, most great innovations look absurd in advance and clever in retrospect.

This means great design is about framing the ridiculous.

It also means ensuring that, practically speaking, we must consider the very way we humans think, feel, and live — which is often ridiculous to the outsider. Great campaigns and products tap into this.

They also are about luck. Designing for luck through great observation, research, testing (prototyping), and ongoing evaluation ensures that what we put into the world has the potential to succeed in making some positive difference, not necessarily that it will no matter how good it is.

Whether its luck, perception or something else we find ourselves recognizing that the gap between what we think is valuable and useful and what others think (or are willing to consider) is large. The Chasm illustrated above is real and rather than engage in a futile effort to design around it, we need to recognize that there are sharks in those waters.

That’s what they did in the film Jaws. When we design for that, we design for humans (and sharks).

If you’re looking to create something more human in your work and need help, contact us and we can help make sure you don’t get eaten by the sharks you’re swimming with.

Images by Business Illustrator used under license.

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

Surfacing Your Organization’s Identity

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Have you ever asked questions about your organization’s identity before?

Who are you?

What do you stand for?

What kind of things motivate you to action and direct your attention?

The answers to all of these questions shape what we do in our work. Organizations that have a clear sense of what they do, why they do it, and who they do it for tend to succeed. The reason? These organizations have greater alignment between purpose and strategy. In short: they have an identity.

Our identity — who we think we are — is a powerful guide for our behaviour. So how do we answer this question in our work?

Bulls Eye

A simple starting point for finding what matters and moves you is to use a Bull’s Eye diagram. A Bull’s Eye Diagram illustrates priorities through three layers of importance. All that is needed is a diagram of the ‘target’, sticky notes, and a space to organize the notes. The example below is done using the Mural tool and a pre-set template for ease of use..

A Bull’s Eye diagram can be used with individuals or groups. We often use this for a project when a client is struggling to identify what is both important and necessary for their work.

We also recommend that you use the Bull’s Eye diagram at the start of an engagement.

Once the items from the sticky notes are placed, it’s easier to see themes in the ‘data.’ This approach allows organizations to see what their members think are most important. It is the aggregate of these ideas that shape the culture of an organization and when you know what they are it’s easier to design with them.

With this knowledge in hand your organization can better design a purposeful strategy and make your identity aspirations a reality in practice.

We help organizations to design their culture for success. If you want help using this or other tools like it, contact us.