Challenge & Selection:     As a leader of a marketing team, the tool that stood out to me during this course was  Storytelling. In marketing, my job is to communicate our brand’s story and make sure that we  are connecting to our customers on a deeper, emotional level. However, I had never really  thought of it from an innovation point of view.  I love connecting with people and Storytelling is  an excellent way to do this that can lead to great innovation.    The challenge that my company faced is that we wanted to make our brand bigger than  ourselves. We recognized a need in our community and were very passionate about finding a  way to do something about it. The need we wanted to address was the issue of homelessness  in our community. Rather than looking at it as a problem of “How should our brand help solve  the issue of homelessness?”, our challenge was “How can we create a cause around helping the  homeless in our city?”. We are a tea company that has a lot of hot tea at our disposal and we  are a small company with less than 20 employees and very little capital resources. Chicago is  freezing in the winter and there are thousands of people who struggle to survive on the  freezing streets of Chicago each winter. How can our tea company create a cause that  addresses this issue?  This is the challenge that I’ve chosen to focus on because the Storytelling  tool can be such an integral part of this challenge to help see the emotional connection and  larger purpose.     Application:     I started first and foremost by knowing my audience. My team is a group of extremely  passionate, energetic and young individuals. Our co-founders are childhood best friends who, at  the time, were in their late 20’s. Our company culture is one that doesn’t require formal  presentations or a lot of hard data. They value doing the right thing and challenging the status  quo when needed. For these reasons, I knew that my storytelling didn’t need to begin with a lot  of data on homelessness or our financials. My story needed to connect with them on an  emotional level and draw on their passion for helping others. To do this, I drew on simple facts  on the number of those struggling with homelessness in Chicago, the average temperatures in  Chicago during the winter (January is the coldest month on average) and the number of fellow  Chicagoans that don’t survive the winter. That was the little bit of data that they needed. From  there, I was able to bridge the issue and ideas with storytelling.     After positioning the issue of homelessness in winter as the main character / antagonist of the  story, I used a clear sequence of events to communicate my story. I further outlined the current  situation by illustrating the need for change by interviewing those who were currently  experiencing homelessness and sharing their true stories with the team. Sharing their names,  their situations and their most pressing needs and wishes. I also shared my own personal  experience volunteering with those in these situations, again bringing to life personal stories  and antidotes. This was to show them the severity of the situation and the opportunity  that  existed. Sharing these experiences through storytelling was extremely effective because it  caught their attention and gave them a visual that brought the challenge to life.

To get everyone excited to take this on, I then outlined the resources that we had available:  relationships with other companies in Chicago, social service agencies like soup kitchens and  shelters, our team,  a lot of hot tea, customers, investors, etc. There was a lot of opportunity for  fellowship and to involve stakeholders and our community.     Next I highlighted the challenges that we were up against: little capital resources, the police had  told me it could be dangerous if we wanted to help these areas, there is a large population that  needs help. These are all challenges that contributed to the tension to start the ideas and  conversation flowing around the main challenge: How do we create a cause? Because our co- founders are extremely passionate and love to take on a challenge, this was extremely effective  to get the juices and ideas flowing.     In the end, we created a cause called Spread the Warmth that went beyond a simple solution  that could have been to donate or serve tea at homeless shelters to one that created an entire  event and night focused on giving back. It involved hundreds of volunteers, donations, tea,  warmth kits and touches the lives of people across our entire city. It has become a cause that  has grown over the years and will celebrate the 5th annual Spread the Warmth event in 2020.    Insight & Approach:     This experience showed me exactly how captivating storytelling can be and how much more  buy-in you get from senior leadership and team members when you use storytelling. Not only  did I receive their immediate buy-in to help with the cause, they became very passionate about  finding a solution and inviting others to help solve the problem. Storytelling took the pressure  off of me to come up with the perfect solution and instead led to a much better and well- rounded solution that included everyone’s ideas. It also made our solution easier to tweak and  refine as we continued. Because more people had gotten behind the cause, they were  passionate about improving it and giving and collecting feedback along the way. Each year  continues to have a greater and greater impact on our community because there are so many  people passionate about the cause. While we may not be able to solve the problem of  homelessness for all of Chicago, we have a cause that is contributing to help and is raising the  awareness of the issue on an even larger scale than we could have imagined.     Reflecting on using the Storytelling tool, I’ve learned a lot and would choose to use this  approach again in this situation and in many other situations. However, if I were to take a do it  again, I would incorporate more stakeholders in the original Storytelling session and process  rather than just the two final decision-makers (co-founders). Because I would eventually need  so many other’s stakeholders to understand and help create the cause, I would have involved  those stakeholders such as other teammates into the process sooner. I initially only involved  senior management and then ended up having to repeat the same process for a couple  different groups of those involved in creating the solution. If I were to do it again, I would have  had everyone together at the beginning so that all initial ideas and conversation would have  been done together. This could have saved time in reaching certain solutions. It also could have

created even more ideas and solutions because more people would have heard each other’s  remarks, questions, concerns, etc.

