Tool Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge & Selection

I am a student enrolled in a marketing and entrepreneurship course in which I have a final

project that asks me to create a business idea that is sustainable and generates a great value  impact on society. Since the main objective of the project is to create something that actually  helps society, two of the steps of design thinking must comply, empathize with the people and  define the true problem. In order to do so, me and my team are applying the tool of storytelling.  It is very common that people won’t share to you as a researcher their main life problems or  issues, and in the strange case that some of them actually start talking about them, they won’t get  too deep into their problems unless you motivate them to do so, this is where the tool of  storytelling comes in pretty useful. If you empathize with a person by sharing some personal  story about some specific aspect then it is way more plausible that the client, which is hearing to  that story can remember some of his own experience and understand what type of information  you are looking for, after that another challenge is presented, which is focusing on their feedback  and understand their story.

Application

My final project team decided to work with the topic of pollution and the major problems

and causes that are presented with the pollution of the planet, more specifically we wanted to do  something related to recycling in Mexico, which is currently an underdeveloped field in the  country. So we wanted to find out valuable information regarding the major problems of the  recycling process, we wanted to know what was the point of view of the common Mexican  towards recycling and what were their main problems while recycling or trying to recycle.

In order to get this type of information we started to think about a story, so we could use

it as part of the design thinking tool and achieve our research goals. I have a personal story  regarding this subject, in which I try to explain the benefits of recycling and how is it being  solved in first world countries in which I have lived in, like Canada and Germany, I was  constantly trying to connect with the person with whom I was talking by calling out some of my  personal problems towards recycling in Mexico, like not knowing where to take my plastic  bottles to. I also understand and explained to them that all the culture of recycling depends also  on other customs like how much products do you actually buy, because if you buy a lot of stuff  then you will be producing a lot of garbage, but if you don’t then you won’t have a lot of things  to recycle, but it is even better to do so, because you are actually reducing instead of recycling.

Some of the people to whom I talked to, started explaining me that even if they started

separating their trash in categories, one of the main problems is that the whole system of trash  recollection would not make it useful, because they mix all the trash categories and then they go  and throw them into one place. They also tried to explain to me that another problem that they  face is that there are no places to do recycling nearby, and if they want to recycle a couple of  plastic bottles they would need to drive 10 minutes in order to get there, which would be even  worse for the environment.

Insight & Approach

We started to get to know the main problems of recycling in the community, not only the

ones that we were struggling with, but there were many other that we as a team didn’t think  about before. One of the most important insights that we got from many people was that they  didn’t see any benefit of trying to dealing with all the trash separation in their homes, because  they knew that the trash recollection system would not be handling the garbage properly,  therefore they wouldn’t be able to contribute to some change.

We started telling them another story about how they started in other countries, and we

explained that in order to change something, small steps need to be taken. Of course, we tried to  emphasize that there will not be a major change in one week or two, but we could start by doing  something. We started to pitch our business idea with the help of this story, having an app that  helps you with your garbage categorization and that notifies the trash collectors if you have a lot  of plastic, or metals, or organic garbage. In that way they could start handling the waste in a  more appropriate way.

At the end, most of the people felt convinced that they could do something that helps the

environment without having to work that much. Personally, I felt very good because I was able  of empathizing with the people and to define the main problems that they have and with that  information I was able to generate new ideas of possible solutions with my team.

