When I joined the Mobility and Design team at ExxonMobil in 2015, I was lucky to have joined a group of forward thinking, experimental folks who weren’t afraid of failure. Teams like this don’t usually exist in fortune 100 corporations like ExxonMobil. Ours thrived.
I remember my first couple of projects. I was collecting insights for complex systems and needed a way to communicate these complexities in a way that adequately surfaced their impact. For the first project, I, along with my design partner, was tasked with learning about, and reporting on, the complexities of the central control unit on the newly built campus in Houston. Through on-site field visits and interviews with control unit technicians, we realized that we were facing the daunting task of trying to easily communicate a complex story. As I was preparing the report, I was reminded of the business’ preference for Powerpoint presentations. I complied, but the story had no impact when viewed slide by slide, so I took a chance and communicated the story in an experience map. Prior to the presentation with stakeholders, I hung the map on the wall and launched the powerpoint presentation on the large monitor. As we got underway, the stakeholders were immediately drawn to the visual story of the map and completely ignored the powerpoint.
In another example, I was tasked with understanding the visitor experience on the new campus. Again, a complex system with many moving parts. Coming off the success the of the experience map, I figured I’d try my luck at communicating in a similar way. So, I mashed up an experience map with a service blueprint. The map allowed me to surface experiences of visitors and employees and highlight the systems they interacted with along with how their experiences overlapped. The design team made several visits around the artifact weekly to inform their designs. I took it a step further and embedded interview audio into the PDF version.
The thing I took away from this is that true leaders empower their team to do the best work they can regardless of established protocols. In these cases, the established protocol diluted the impact of the story. Our leaders gave us the freedom to introduce a new way of thinking about reports and design artifacts.