Creating a Strategy: Week 4
Decide Where You Want to Go: Synthesis and Mapping
Post 4 in our 12-week series on Creating Your Strategy.
We are 1/3 of the way through your 12-week series in Creating a Strategy. So far, you’ve looked at your current customers and market, you’ve narrowed to what makes you unique, you’ve identified your current competition and challenges, and your initial ideas and aspirations.
Last week we began to build on this, shifting to explore what could be. You talked to current customers, potential customers, and other stakeholders. You’ve observed individuals, groups, or situations and reviewed existing data and analytics to create empathy and connect with your market. You’ve also begun to open your mind to new ideas and new thinking through analogous examples, you’ve looked at your competitors for inspiration, and you’ve looked to the future to consider what might be.
This week we dive into synthesis and mapping, using tools of design thinking to help understand what we’ve learned and seen. These will serve as a springboard to create what could be.
Synthesis
Using all of the information and learning from the exploration phase, you must now distill it into the key takeaways of what you learned and saw. When you synthesize, you take inputs and create your own theories, beliefs, or ideas.
Synthesis is a key moment in your journey to determining your strategy, and how you want to grow or evolve. The primary method of synthesis is Creating Insights. When you create insights, you look across many pieces of information, identify key trends and takeaways, and then translate them into relevant insights.
To create insights:
- Start with data, information, notes, observations- all the individual pieces you’ve collected. Transfer the most relevant ones to notecards, post-its, or on digital notes.
- Sort and Cluster them into groups and label them with a theme. These are the themes of your research.
- Review your themes- what patterns do you see? What trends did you observe? If you had to tell someone the three most interesting things you’ve learned, what would they be?
- Write them out in statements that summarize what you believe. (These are your insights.)
You may also create Personas, Empathy Maps, Journey Maps, Ecosystem Maps, or 2x2 Comparisons of key attributes or learnings to help you synthesize and understand your information:
- Personas — A Persona is a fictional representation of a target audience or user segment. A Snapshot Persona is a shortened version of a persona and often can be represented on one page or in a smaller, singular view. Learn more about Snapshot Personas.
- Empathy Maps — Empathy Maps are a visual tool that helps one understand and empathize with the thoughts, feelings, needs, and behaviors of a particular user or target audience. Learn more about Empathy Maps.
- Journey Maps- Journey Maps document the steps, activities, events, or a timeline in the order of when they occur. It may be steps in a process or activities that happen, documented over time. Learn more about Journey Maps.
- Ecosystem Maps — Ecosystem maps are used to understand how an organization or group works. It’s a visual representation that shows components (groups or individuals) and their relationship to one another. Learn more about Ecosystem Maps.
- 2x2 Comparisons- 2x2 Comparisons are used to evaluate something against two key attributes: for example, small vs. large and hard vs. easy. Learn more about 2x2 Comparisons.
All of these will help you take what you have learned and understand are the most interesting and the most relevant, based on your unique point of view.
Once you have synthesized your exploration learnings into insights, you’re ready to dive into ideation. Ideation builds upon what you’ve learned and what you think about it to create something new. This will be the next week’s focus.
If you’ve missed any of the posts in this series, check out the previous weeks:
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