George Supreeth

The Tools I use to build Business-Design workshops

Making Sense of Information

I work in the field of Business-Design, a discipline which sits at the nexus of the fields of Business and Design. It involves approaching business problem-solving using design based methods.

This means that I facilitate workshops with diverse and cross-functional groups of people who represent various business functions of the organisations that I work with. To facilitate these sessions, I custom design each workshop, prior to which, I have to digest a fair bit of information on how these various business groups operate and try and understand the problems that they grapple with.

This is what my workshops look like, and that’s me up there, by the screen. These people all belong to the same organisation, but represent different business functions, and they all work together to solve specific business problems.

I have evolved the use of a set of open-source tools to help me work with the information overload that occurs during workshop design. What these tools do, is to help me break down the information into manageable chunks, and interlink these chunks of information in a way that makes them easier to understand, cross-reference and retrieve when I need to.

My Process

A good analogy for this process is winnowing. I start by sorting through my notes from the interviews that I conduct during the early days of the project, as well as the documents that I have collected during this phase.

As I read through all this information, I annotate and make notes. Once I cut the information down into manageable pieces, I map them all out so I can look for patterns and interconnections, which forms the core of my work. Once I am satisfied with what has emerged, I tag this information and store it in a wiki which allows me to interlink related concepts and ideas.

This wiki helps me to decide on the flow of the workshop and decide on the visual tools that I will need to facilitate discussions and workshop activity.

A concept map I created, using Vue. Concept maps help me determine the relationships between concepts. Read about this project here.

  1. Google Docs – The early stages require me to work with other people. Clients who will verify and validate the information that I have collected, and team members who can add to it. Once the information has stabilised, I export the documents into a plain text format. This is important because I don’t want to be bothered with formatting at this stage. I want to focus on the contents of these documents.
  2. Emacs – I use Emacs, a text editor, to store, annotate and interlink text. Emacs is fantastic for working with text, and has a wonderful mode called Org-Mode which is, among other things, a very powerful outliner (which I will get to in a moment.)
  3. Freeplane & Vue – Freeplane is a mind-mapping tool, and Vue is a concept-mapping tool. Mind maps focus on building trees, while concept maps focus on the links between concepts. Both are visual ways of laying out information, looking for patterns and chunking information. This is the most important part of my process, and I spend a fair bit of time, staring at my maps and moving nodes around to see how bits of information fit into each other. When I am satisfied, I export them to an outliner.
  4. Org-mode – Org-mode is an outliner built into Emacs. An outliner is also a tree, except that it is presented as a list, rather than as a visual-spatial map. The advantage of an outliner however, is that I can add arbitrary amounts of text under each node, and move these nodes around. During this stage, I make notes liberally, adding detail on what I expect to do during the workshops, the outcomes that I’m aiming for and so on.
  5. Wiki – The final resting point for all this information is in a wiki. Like Wikipedia, a personal wiki lets you interlink bits and pieces of information and jump around as you explore each concept or idea. I use Zim-wiki if I expect this information to be permanent part of my notes cache. Sometimes I use Tiddly-wiki for stand-alone wikis that I can save inside folders specific to a project.
  6. Inkscape – I use Inkscape, a tool for creating vector graphics, to create visual tools for the workshop. These are basically diagrams, charts and other models that people will use to map out information during the workshop. I export these graphics as a PDF file, and have them printed.

There are a bunch of other tools that I use occasionally.

I use all of these tools on Linux machines, and they are all free and open-source (except for the Google products).

#Workflow #Bizdesign #Tools