Challenge

To better and more efficiently meet the needs of our organization, our business, our stakeholders and  our people we recently re-organized our HR (Human Resources) department. The major change we  made was to integrate HR directly into the organization. We physically located ourselves as HR Business  Partners in the various departments. This appears to be a great move, because we have created a  direction towards becoming more business driven rather than business oriented.  However, this move  brought a surprising revelation that our employees had a lack of knowledge of what HR actually does.   Obviously to be able to create value for our organization and our stakeholders a critical need was to  provide knowledge of what HR brings to the table. What is HR? What is our discipline, our value, our  delivery? What does HR do for the employee?

Selection

I pondered the notion of using one of the design thinking tools to best communicate the knowledge I  have of HR, and decided that storytelling would be an appropriate tool.   I believe stories really provide a beneficial context to convey knowledge, and we certainly needed to  create cause. Without cause as in “what does HR do for me? for our business?”, we would very much be  disabled to generate value. As stated by Juan Torres (Storytelling Tool, week 2, lesson 4) “ a cause is  something that ignites people, and unites people” and establishing a cause was essential for a newly re- organized HR.  We were dependent on creating consensus of the value creation of HR to make the new  organization work.

Application

I built a narrative about the lifecycle of an employee in our organization and thereby made it possible to  take my audience on a somewhat familiar journey described from various perspectives; from the HR  perspective, from an employee perspective and from the overall business perspective. I created a real  story describing  HR involvement from A to Z. From being present at a career fair at a university,   catching interest of the promising student, thereby explaining the recruitment process, understanding  the tension of the candidate during the interviews,  how we on boarded the new employee to our  organization, lack of management involvement, the discussions with our hierarchy on personnel  movements, career development etc.

I told a story of an employee, the challenges the employee faced in our organization and how we solved  the challenges. I also went into issues that were not handled well and allowed the audience to intervene  with issues they had faced themselves. Through telling this story I felt I was able to help my audience see  the necessary connections of what HR does, how we are involved with them, what I want to do as an HR  Business Partner for them, and they were able to voice their needs.

Insight

I really got to experience what a powerful and meaningful exercise storytelling can be. By identifying my  audiences’ needs and bringing to their attention a sense of purpose was truly rewarding. I believe when  people were given the opportunity to identify themselves with the characters in my story, it made them

think about their own experiences and maybe even more importantly question their current and future  needs. By allowing myself and the audience to empathize with each other it enabled me to uncover their  needs and aspirations. I thereby was able to better position myself to cooperate and to build solutions  that benefit themselves and our organization. It allowed me to show engagement for my discipline and  for my audience. It allowed me to care and it allowed us all to share.

I experienced that the story activated emotions as the whole audience was familiar with parts of the  story. In fact they were and are the story. I am the story and our organization is the story, and by inviting  audience into my knowledge I am invited by them to envision the future together.

Approach

I am still mesmerized by the positive effect of turning an information session into a compelling story. By  finding a common ground for my audience and thereby capturing their attention has generated trust,  credibility, cooperation, understanding and opportunities.  From being something diffuse and distant  people now see value and support. We better see each other and more importantly we more frequently  work towards a common goal. We want to see each other succeed. At this point I find it difficult to see a  different approach. However, I see a need to flip the coin and invite the audience to tell their story. I also  believe our organization could benefit from recognizing design thinking tools, hence I have turned this  story into a success story to promote and put design thinking on our business agenda.

