Reflection: Storytelling

Challenge and Selection

I am a learning consultant and corporate trainer by profession. And as a part of my job, I  conduct Design Thinking workshops for different accounts within my current organization.  Even though my audience is mostly IT employees, they are diverse – in terms of age, gender,  educational backgrounds and ethnicity. Connecting with my audience from the very outset  is important for me. But as you can imagine, connecting to such a diverse audience over a  single thought is not easy.

However, all employees, whenever they are joining a training, they want their experience to  be different from their daily work. Some of them even join to express the side which is  unexplored by their work. And more often than not, it is their human/emotional side which  remains unexplored. This is where storytelling becomes such a powerful tool, as it helps tap  on their human side.

Application

I like to begin my Design Thinking sessions with a story – a human story. The idea is to set  the context for my audience that this is going to be a session on human-centric design –  their behaviors, expectations, thinking, etc. And as I have observed, this kind of a beginning  helps the audience shed the baggage of their functional profiles and reveal who they are  outside their profiles. Simple beginnings like ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘Imagine when we were  kids’ work like a charm no matter how diverse the group is.

To begin with, I choose stories which are generic and have little or no relation to their work;  however, everyone can relate to it – emotionally. This time round, I chose a story on an  Indian village, where women used to travel miles on foot to fetch fresh drinking water. The  local municipality took notice of this and decided to install a deep tube well near their  village, thereby saving these “poor” women from the plight of travelling miles in the sun.  However, to the municipality’s utter dismay, the women happily abandoned the newly built  tube well and continued their daily expedition. Sounds insane, right?

Well, as crazy as it might sound, even though the municipality had good intent, they ignored  the most crucial component while they were designing the solution – the users. Did they  ever bother to check with these women what they want? No! They simply went ahead with  the assumption of the obvious solution.

However, as they learned later that this water-fetching expedition was the most enjoyable  time for these women in the entire day. It allowed them some free time from their  household chores. They could chat, walk, laugh, share – all together. It was their stress  buster.

Insights

The above story harps on the importance of being user-centric while designing a solution.  However, it also helped create an environment for my audience to open up and share their  thoughts/stories. As they say, everyone has a story to share. It actually proved to be right as  many of them voluntarily started sharing their own stories. Some of them were related to  their renewed realizations on client’s expectations; some of them were related to their  personal experiences of where being user-centric helped them, and so on. And this in the  process set up a beautiful platform to discuss Design Thinking.

Approach

In the process of sharing one story with my audience, I am now rich with many more similar  stories which I received from them. As a new approach, I am likely to share some of these  stories that I have received from my audience in my next session and maybe also invite  some of these participants to share their own stories.

