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 Hot Air Balloon technique. To learn more about how Design a Superhero Team works, go here.

Objective

Structure information gathering, encourage group discussion and identify issues through the Hot Air Balloon tool.

Method

A drawing of hot air balloon in mid-flight was made on a large piece of butcher paper. Stakeholders were told that the hot air balloon represented the central issue of the project.

The strong visual metaphor and storytelling device of a hot air balloon — trying to get somewhere but getting pinned into place — serves as a powerful tool for stakeholders to draw parallels between their own situation and the drawing.

The group was led through the following questions:

Workshop Size Considerations

In larger group sessions, I quickly scribbled post-its capturing stakeholder contributions and organized them around the drawing according to which category they fell into (goals: “X”; constraints and issues; anchor; enablers: wind), as I probed deeper into why they felt the way they did about certain issues.

In smaller group sessions of two or three people, stakeholders wrote key issues, goals, and enablers down on post-its on their own as a quick timed exercise. When they were finished, they led the group through each point as they placed them around the drawing.

The Hot Air Balloon exercise draws key issues (anchors) to the surface in a structured manner. It enables stakeholders to make clear connections between what the problem is, why it is happening and what could help alleviate (wind) the problem in order to achieve customer satisfaction and business objectives (“X”).

Without this tool in earlier (and less successful) sessions, the stakeholders in the room roamed aimlessly from one complaint into the next. The Hot Air Balloon tool allowed stakeholders to slow down, be more introspective and more effective communicators:

Issue C is keeping me from Goal A.

If B were in place instead, I could overcome Issue C and reach Goal A.

The tool, however, only allows stakeholders to briefly touch on what might help alleviate their top-of-mind problems. To encourage stakeholders to build on systems-thinking human-centered design strategies, I paired the hot air balloon exercise with my adaptation of Adaptive Path’s original Design a Superhero: Design a Superhero Team. Go here to learn more about it.