Process 14-15: Creating a rich scenario and ideas
At this stage, it was important to create a rich story about our persona’s work (Siobhan) so that we could identify challenges or moments in that story that needed change. The story covered a typical situation in Shioban’s workday that included contact with a young person and highlighted to her struggles, support or lack of it in relation to being herself at work. We soon realise that we were not looking at Language but at Mindset – one of our identified lens to look at our theme.
As a group we’ve identified five key moments of our story and using a journey map, we detailed that same story in three layers: Frontstage, Backstage and In-between. The Front stage focused on what happened between our Siobhan and the young person. The backstage focused on the interactions between Siobhan and her line manager and the system, and the In-Between focused on what happened between Siobhan and her colleagues. For each layer of the story, we have included fictional quotes from Siobhan reflecting her thoughts, an emoji to illustrate her emotion in parts of the narrative, and a description of what was happening.
Having detailed this scenario, which was done over two work sessions, the group identified needs or challenges in that story for which we could think of solutions. Red rectangles overlaid the journey map to highlight these moments that sit in the backstage and in-between layers of our story. These were moments where Siobhan wasn’t being supported to be herself in the way she related to the young person and conducted her work.
What followed was a session focused on generating ideas to solve all the identified needs, and a closing discussion to further explore the group’s contributions and choose key ideas to take forward in the process. To fuel this process, we paused before the start to remind ourselves of the Barriers and, most importantly, the Enablers to this project’s vision generated from the earlier stages of Relationships First. Our focus was on changing an established Mindset to support the workforce to ‘Be Yourself at Work’, and, interestingly, Language emerged from our ideas loosely focused on stories. I have also populated the first line of ideas before our ideation to encourage creative ideas and a different perspective. These ideas were mere tools and were not found useful by the group to be voted forward into a final idea.
From all the generated ideas, we have voted on the ones with more potential to become one final idea. Because a choice was hard and due to a sense of loss with making a choice, we distilled the essence of our chosen ideas in the mindmap, below. This map was then used as a conversation starter for our next discussion to find our final idea.
