Reflection - Storytelling

Challenge & Selection

I work for a large company. We have offices in 10 different countries and hundreds of

workers. I am in charge of the development of the tool most of them use for work every

day.

As you may imagine, communication in an environment with so many different people,

languages and different cultural backgrounds is not easy.  We had  problems before

developing the tool in the right direction because of misunderstandings between the

different offices and us, or even between the developers and me.

I decided to try Storytelling as a way to improve the communication. Storytelling would

help everyone understand each other, being more empathic, and bring context at every

stage of communication.

Application

Briefly, my work consist in talking to the countries, gathering their problems and needs,

then, communicating these to developers that will build tools for them.

I used storytelling in 2 different ways:

When I talk to the local offices:

Before, they used to tell me: “Hey Felice, next to the car information, we need a button

that sends an email to the previous owner.”

Now, I ask them more questions, and force them to build a story. They will go for

something like: “When the worker finish the inspection of a car and save the report, he

usually goes to the list. Then he needs to send an email to the previous owner of the car to

confirm the transaction.”

When I define the task for the team of developers:

Before, I will just communicate: “We need a new button next to the car information that

sends an email to the previous owner.”

Now, I will explain the entire story to the developers. We will go through the task together

and, usually, we find better solutions. E.g. In the previous case, one of the developers

proposed to automate the email delivery, as it always needed to happen.

In this case, storytelling improved the communication, brought more context and made

everyone understand each other’s needs.

Insight & Approach

Storytelling helped with the communication, forced us to always think about the context,

and help the programmers think in how a worker is doing his job.

It also brought empathy in the company to these departments. My office is a pure

technical office (we work only with computers developing digital tools). The rest of the

offices have tools, inspectors, cars… For us, it is very easy to lose context and not being

able to relate to who is using our tools. Storytelling helped us to think in each other, to be

more empathic.

There are more people in my company doing my same job. I am trying to make them

understand how well this change worked for me, although, they are quite afraid of

changes.

I think this course gave me a few tools I can use at work. To improve communication, to

bring new ideas to the company and, finally, to get my job done better.

