Recently, I created my second draft of a current state map regarding my design case with a creative agency here in Chicago. I really enjoyed the discover process, interviewing a wide swath of folks in the agency, bringing together their stories, and determining current state. Ultimately, I was trying to describe what the current state of learning & growing at every stage of your career looks like for this agency.
My first go around of the current state was very complicated – I was addressing every possible variation I heard in the stories and keeping a lot of individualized content. For example, at once point I was describing a point in the feedback cycle between clients and consultants, and I included the “either/or” of “client reaches out to give feedback OR consultant asks for feedback.”
While that moment of who reaches out to whom could be a good spot for analysis, it was just far too detailed for the experience I was trying to describe. So I turned to a piece of advice that will stick with me for sometime.
Teresa Torres, one of our certificate leaders, rephrased some of the stories I spent 5 minutes retelling in 3 short sentences: “Consultant has informal conversation. Other consultant triggers memory. Memory inspires new thinking in project.”
And it was like…yeah. Blam. Cut the story down to its core, its magic, its essential elements. Doing that allowed me to see the connections, overlaps, and themes in the stories so much more than staying at the individual story level with its rich (and important!) details.
Once I had done that with each one of the stories, I saw that each story I collected had some magical moments of collaboration, that often happened informally, that enabled someone’s professional growth.
Moving forward with that insight into opportunity maps will allow me to communicate and solve for what I’m seeing at a higher level, rather than trying to account for each differentiator in the individual experience.
Jenny Nance 