STORYTELLING AS A TOOL FOR STRATEGIC CHANGES

Challenge: I work in a training company that offers quality products to produce a transformational  effect in the lives of customers. One of the keys to this success is personalized and continuous  attention, which enhances the intellectual and functional habits of those who choose our products.  In recent years, however, we were seeing a fall of requests and difficulties for personalized and  continuous attention, the axis of which we put on the demand for face-to-face activities. For a few  months now I have been trying to get into the lives of our customers to understand their difficulties  and propose a solution that would provide digital training modules, in addition to the traditional in- person activities.  When discussing my idea with the other members of the management board,  however, I could not easily make them see the importance of applying new solutions and doing so  as soon as possible.

The decisive opportunity came to me when the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to  improve our  digital platforms and diversify our training products. The result was spectacular: visits to our  website  soared from tens of thousands to 6 million. Growth from February to May was  exponential: 2,739,000 in March, 3,292,000 in April, 6,630,000 in May.

Selection and Application: Now I had the appropriate context to return to my colleagues and  boldly present the need for our company to get onboard the digital revolution bandwagon. I needed  them to visualize three important factors: the tension between customer needs and the products  we currently offer; the opportunity for new business ventures that digital modalities would open up,  and complete fidelity to the core mission and values of our company. which seeks a  transformational training of the individual person. This will not be lost but rather maintained and  enhanced through telematic or  virtual modalities that complement the in-person training.

Lucas Saldivar's interview on Storytelling gave me the key to choosing the right tool: storytelling can  be strategic. Starting from relevant data or concepts, you can, give life, color and narrative drama  to the  strategy.  I could argue for the need to develop a new strategy using data from the website  and user feedback. In addition, however, I had to do something else: as A. Martin says, I had to get  the board "to a state of mind in which they want to participate and turn this challenge into a cause  in which to invest."

Reviewing the core values of the company, I realized that what motivates us all is the passion for  training,  for improving individual lives through  up-to-date content. We want to address the women  and men of today , with a contemporary mindset. In applying storytelling to this value, I visualized  the need to use all the channels that technology offers nowadays, in order to better serve our  clients. Rather than excluding certain channels a priori, we should test which ones fit with the  aspirations and circumstances of our customers, all the while maintaining our company´s  trademark plus: one-on one-personalized treatment.

Insight: With numerical data, customer responses and the explanation of our values, I prepared a  presentation in storytelling format that proved very effective: in addition to visualizing tensions and  opportunities, our own commitment as managers to the company was reinforced: we decided to go  for the digital revolution and develop innovative products to satisfy our numerous new customers. I  was reaffirmed in the overwhelming force that the storytelling tool can have.

Approach: The magnitude of the numerical data of web hits gave enough  strength to the story to  quickly visualize the change we need. The pandemic imposed a rapid transition, to telework and

forced us to turn to digital platforms for services that we used to do in person, allowed storytelling  to function as an effective tool in and of itself.

From now on, however in order to create appropriate products, we will have to reconstruct the  stories, using journey mapping, to discover the new reality of our customers and tell it. As well, we  will employ brainstroming, to think about new possibilities and customer-cocreation to reach truly  transformative products, adjusted to different customer profiles. In  the following phases, I will use  different visualization techniques to address leaders and employees, and customers of our  company, in order to unite us all in a common cause: to be present  where the future emerges and  to shape it with our own hands. As Larry Page, founder of Google says, "the main cause that has  led companies to fail is that they have lost the future. Visualization in the “What If” phase of design  thinking is precisely the opposite: to look forward and facing the future, head on.

