Having now attempted to complete my first environmental scan, I appreciate that conducting research takes practice and have uncovered some missteps in my design decisions that I can leverage to improve future research attempts. In designing my approach I first chose the tool that I would use to display results from my data collection, selecting Piktochart, and then worked to create questions that would result in data that could be easily translated into an infographic. This design decision did result in my ability to share data visually, but narrowed the opportunity to dig deeper to further explore the network participants’ specific examples of effective change management experiences.

In selecting my network, I chose to gather perspectives from those who I knew had relevant experiences to share. With scheduling, including time zone and availability differences as a recurrent challenge, most of my contact with participants was via text or email. Although I did work to describe the purpose of this research, in future I will ensure that synchronous options to connect are prioritized so participants can ask questions and I can provide clarity as needed.

Finally, in an effort to honour confidentiality, I committed to amalgamating results into trends. In future, I will spend more time with my network by building in multiple contact points so I can dig deeper and explore each participant’s level of comfort with sharing examples from their experiences. Overall, input from my network participants does echo key findings from established change management models and theories. I am left wondering what else I could have uncovered if I had made different design decisions throughout this exercise, but am excited to leverage this learning in the future.