A large multinational organization struggled with complex and long-standing challenges that severely impacted the company’s customer experience across multiple customer touch points, leading to deeply dissatisfied customers and missed opportunities for the business.

As part of the kick-off process of the project, my teammate and I needed to first understand the business challenges before moving on to the challenges facing users.

NOTE: The project details are anonymized to respect client confidentiality agreements. 

Due to the far-reaching and deeply felt nature of the challenges the business was facing, the stakeholders initially struggled with articulating the driving forces behind the key issues. In other words, they could speak to the issues in isolation, but had a hard time connecting the dots between “the what,” “the why,” and what to do about it.

45 minute workshops with small groups of cross-functional team members were structured around two visual facilitation techniques: Hot Air Balloon and Design a Superhero Team.

The Hot Air Balloon is effective in targeting the conversation around goals, challenges and constraints. Design a Superhero Team is a nice follow up to this because it encourages stakeholders to piggyback off the issues that were raised during the Hot Air Balloon exercise and think creatively about multiplayer holistic approaches to complex problems.

This post focuses on the Design a Superhero Team technique. To learn more about how the Hot Air Balloon tool works, go here.

Objectives

Achieve the following through the playful, interactive and collaborative drawing exercise, Design a Superhero Team:

Method

One Superhero or a Team of Superheroes?

The Hot Air Balloon exercise draws key issues to the surface in a structured manner. It enables stakeholders to make clear connections between what the problem is, why it is happening and how to alleviate the problem in order to achieve customer satisfaction and business objectives.

The tool, however, only allows stakeholders to briefly consider what might help alleviate their top-of-mind problems. To encourage stakeholders to build a holistic approach to solve complex problems, I paired the hot air balloon exercise with my adaptation of Adaptive Path’s original Design a Superhero: Design a Superhero Team. 

The Design a Superhero is an effective tool to help people express their needs and frustrations in particular areas of their lives; in its original form, it is often used to draw out the design principles for a single pain point.

However, the project’s challenges from a business point of view were richly layered; the root causes of these challenges were widespread and lived in multiple horizontals and verticals internally which profoundly impacted the customer experience. This meant that in order to fully reflect that the intricacies of the challenges were being addressed, the concept of a team of superheroes came into play. In running the facilitation with a team of superheroes, I hoped that this would illuminate the following:

Visual Facilitation

Prepared with a stack of the Lego superheroes on large sheets of paper (found here) and colored markers, the stakeholders gathered around me as we revisited the key pain points that came out of the Hot Air Balloon exercise, and the types of things that would enable the organization to overcome them.

I asked them if they could design an entire team of superheroes to address their pain points: who would be in it and what would their special powers would be? As they spoke, I drew their responses into the superhero team template — drawing and re-drawing alongside them to clarify their meaning and ensure my understanding.

One superhero was designated as the customer. I emphasized that the customer was part of their superhero team and probed them on how the customer fit into their “crime fighting.”

This visual facilitation through the superhero team focuses the conversation around what needs to work together in order the achieve the goals of both the business and customers. It is a simple and playful way to stimulate cross-functional thinking that underscores how problems can be solved through collaboration.

Identifying information has been censored for anonymity.

The Hot Air Balloon facilitation which preceded the Design a Superhero Team focuses the group on pain points and why they exist, persist or are exacerbated. It also allows participants to quickly touch on what might help alleviate their top-of-mind problems.

The Design a Superhero Team tool focuses the conversation around what needs to work together in order the achieve the goals of both the business and customers. It is a simple and playful way to stimulate cross-functional, organization-wide thinking that underscores how problems can be solved through collaboration in a way that keeps the customer central to the discussion.