Mar 01

Maps for Gaps: Using Maps to Improve Communication and Understanding

Best Practices, Global Teams, Idea Mapping Example, Multi-Cultural Teams, Virtual Teams, Visualization No Comments »

As a global team, most of our collaboration happens remotely.  Over the years, we’ve implemented good communication practices, enhanced business processes and strengthened culture of collaboration.  All of this, we’ve realized in the last few months, hasn’t been enough for achieving desired results in a timely fashion. Maturing as a team, we’ve come to conclusion that one of the big issues for us is communication quality, primarily the goal of achieving understanding and preventing misunderstanding. 

Physical act and volume of communication don’t automatically mean true understanding.  And identifying hidden spots of misunderstanding among team members is not easy but critical to the team’s success.  Team members confirming that they understood concepts, tasks or assignments may genuinely believe that they are on the same page with others.  Later, the final results, being less than expected, make everybody wonder how things could go off the desired track, in spite of the best communication practices used in the process.  If you work on a virtual and multi-cultural team, this scenario happens quite often and can lead to loss of productivity, diminishing trust between team members and drop in service quality.

To identify and, ultimately prevent, misunderstanding, we started to use maps. For example, at the recent managers’ meeting, we shared ideas about emerging opportunities for the library during this worst recession in history.  The one-and-a-half hour meeting was set up as a teleconference, with one manager calling from Mumbai, India.  After the meeting, using MindManager, I created a map summarizing key concepts of our discussion, provided additional comments that I hadn’t had time to offer during the meeting, and invited meeting participants to insert comments or questions within the map.  The managers reviewed the map and added a few callouts with questions and comments (see the attached map).  There were about half-a-dozen questions in the map that were not asked during the meeting (either because of time constraints or other reasons) – showing to me that those areas needed further clarification.  It is possible that if I hadn’t sent the post-meeting map, those questions might have never been asked, leading to misunderstanding and all unpleasant consequences that misunderstanding entails.

 

[blinklist] [BlogMarks] [Blogsvine] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [diigo] [Facebook] [Jeqq] [Ma.gnolia] [Mister Wong] [Netvouz] [Newsvine] [Propeller] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphinn] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »
Jan 10

Library Marketing: Part 1

Best Practices, Idea Mapping Example, Library Marketing, Visualization 3 Comments »

Marketing is a combination of art and science. Or shall I say ‘right brain and left brain’?  2008 was marked by deep economic downturn, recession, fear and financial losses.  In the environment of cost cutting and downsizing, marketing becomes a powerful tool many managers use to communicate value their departments bring to organizations.  A corporate library is a service business.  Like in any service business, quantifying its impact is a difficult task.  How do you, for instance, put a price tag on information that leads to a profitable investment decision or saves from bad investment choices?  In this series, I’ll share some marketing ideas and best practices implemented in my library.

Season’s Greetings Post Card

We have a client-focused culture, putting our clients first. In fact, if you ask librarians, many will tell you that they enjoy working with their clients and go extra mile to satisfy and exceed their expectation.  To wish our clients a happy holiday season, we’ve created an electronic post card (for quick and easy delivery around the globe) with a giant snowflake and a look and feel of a traditional winter holidays card.  Except, we used the snowflake to convey key concepts and ideas that represent library services and values.  We wanted to highlight areas where we make impact in our clients’ lives, but do it indirectly, in a subtle way.  The card turned out to be a hit.

 Click to Enlarge

It is worth mentioning, that I used MindManager to conceptualize the snowflake’s branches and key word/key phrases.  I was working remotely and couldn’t talk face-to-face with Miroslava Litwak, who created a graphic design and did a great job turning the concept into a product.  Sending Miroslava a map (see below) reduced the need for multiple phone discussions and saved us a lot of production time.

Click to Enlarge

[blinklist] [BlogMarks] [Blogsvine] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [diigo] [Facebook] [Jeqq] [Ma.gnolia] [Mister Wong] [Netvouz] [Newsvine] [Propeller] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphinn] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »
WordPress Theme & Icons by N.Design Studio. WPMU Theme pack by WPMU-DEV.
Entries RSS Comments RSS Log in