Reflection: Storytelling

Challenge  The company (let’s call it “X”) I work for faced the challenge that it has missed to establish  contacts and a customer base within the segment of technology startups. X is the national  market leader but the promising customer segment of fastly growing companies (aka tech  startups) almost exclusively sourced their needed services from innovative offshore  providers who positioned themselves as the global segment leaders for tech startups. The  Challenge was crystal clear: How win over a significant share of the national market of tech  startups?     Selection  The tool which was capable of helping me is storytelling. Storytelling describes the art of  including information, stakeholders and call to actions into a narrative that does not only  factually inform people but make them a part of it by leveraging vivid stories and a common  cause. I was sure that this is the useful tool as I had to convince different stakeholders  (internal management and tech startups) that there is a common mission which is worth  investing in it.     Application  To develop a compelling story, I made use of classic elements of stories: heroes, anti-heroes,  a thrilling plot and corresponding emotions. By integrating these elements already known in  Greek drama, I developed a coherent story that also involved the stakeholders (internal  management and tech startups) and placed them as an alliance against an external force  that has to be tackled for the common good. This approach turned out to be really effective  in terms of convincing stakeholders and activating them to join forces. As a result, a new  project was initiated.    Insights  Especially the learning that decisions, regardless of their nature, highly dependent on the  extent of emotional involvement (created by e.g. storytelling) was the greatest insight.  Reducing human decision making and human commitment to mere analytical weighing up of  facts and figures is not enough. As people want not only be informed but get inspired,  storytelling offers great potential to ‘move’ people.      Approach  Although the application storytelling worked, I would modify my approach next time. I  waited too long to really test my story with stakeholders. Next time I would include some  stakeholders right in the beginning of the development of the story to gain insights into their  self-concept earlier to build more adequate characters (heroes/anti-heroes). This would  have made the process faster and more catered to the specific needs, ambitions and pains of  stakeholders.       Thanks for reading :-)

