Challenge  I work in a team whose leader loves helping people, organizations, and communities in achieving  their fullest potential. One day, he decided to tackle the problem of productivity, or the lack  thereof, and how we are losing so much potential from too much procrastinating. Thus, our  journey began in discovering ​why ​do​ ​people tend to procrastinate (or tend to be unproductive)  and ​what ​are the unproductive activities they engage themselves with in lieu of the productive  ones.    The challenge in this endeavour is that we do not have a lot of people in our team to do  participant observation nor do we have the resources to do a launch in an instant. And that we  want to know the reasons behind our audience’s actions and we need to get personal in order to  know them and understand their reasons.    Selection  Thus, we decided to employ storytelling as our tool to get to know our audience and to unearth  relevant information that will help us in determining how we would help them solve the infamous  problem of procrastination.    According to ​Storytelling Tool - Preparing Your Mind for Innovation​, a good story is designed for  the audience. It is about the audience. It connects the audience to the product, to the company,  to the ​cause​. This tool was chosen because we want to know the reasons behind people’s  unproductivity and how people perceive productivity and lack thereof. We want to understand if it  is human nature to become procrastinators or were there reasons behind them being one. I  believe that in using Storytelling, people will be more comfortable talking about a “negative” part  of themselves.    Application  We put up a form online which was shared through multiple channels. The form helped us in  determining the “subjects” of our storytelling. To our surprise, there were a lot of responses from  individuals willing to tell us their side of the coin.     In the end, we chose three respondents each team member (we are 5 in the team). The  respondents we chose varied from students, employed professionals, self-employed individuals,  freelancers, and housewives/house husbands.    It was up to the discretion of the team member if he/she would conduct an interview or a focused  group discussion. What we have agreed upon however was we would let our respondents do the  story telling, we would not be telling ​our ​story.    “​What do you do in a day?​” was our primary question that helped trigger the respondents to  share varying answers and stories about their everyday lives.  We learned about what each of our  respondents do everyday, from waking up to sleeping. We learned about how they structured

their day, what they feel when things do not go according to plan. They shared what they usually  do to fight off boredom or sleepiness. They also shared what makes certain tasks boring for  them. Different answers but they all have two common points: a) if it would be that easy, then  they wish to be productive everyday, and b) too many unorganized tasks/repetitive tasks is what  causes them to stray away from track.    Insight  What I learned from what happened is that people are not being unproductive because they want  to. They do not want to waste their time being distracted too. That there are several reasons (one  of them is that they have too many tasks to do that they do not know how to organize them) why  they seem to become unproductive. The whole process helped us in re-thinking about the  solution that we had first thought of (just constant reminders to do daily tasks). Because of our  findings, we are now trying to think of ways to help people be more organized    This also helped me in appreciating the Storytelling tool. We sometimes take our audience’s  opinions for granted, thinking that previous reviews and feedbacks about similar solutions were  already enough information. It served as a great reminder that our customers are human beings  with various, ever-changing experiences and needs that we need to take into consideration if we  want to address their problems.    Approach  Lastly, if we were ever to re-do this again, I think applying the Storytelling tool will still be the best  approach to take. It helped and will help us to gain insights to real-world problems from the  perspective of real human beings whose experiences and needs are communicated if only we let  them share their stories. We are creating solutions for them, not us, so we must hear them again  and again if needed.

