The Challenge

I work in the enterprise software industry, where the concepts of Design Thinking can be very  new, and in many ways, uncomfortable. Many enterprise applications that users interact with  on a daily basis are cumbersome, ineﬃcient, and have an overall poor user experience. A lot of  enterprise applications are still not mobile optimized, forcing users to work from a computer. In  addition, because of their often poor user experience, users frequently create workarounds,  using cheat sheets, or even other 3rd party applications to complete tasks their current apps  don’t allow. For this reason, I am often in the position of trying to convince companies that  Design Thinking is a worthy investment for them, and their users.

Selection and Application

In order to help sell our clients on the Design Thinking methodology, I am often called upon to  use storytelling. In the lecture, it is mentioned that people can be “ignited and united” by a  cause in ways that simply listing current issues cannot. For that reason, it is up to me, and  other members of my team, to come up with a story for Design Thinking.

The lecture mentions that the ﬁrst thing about storytelling is that you have to know your  audience. As stated in my challenge, very frequently the audience does not know about the  Design Thinking process, and is often skeptical of why it may be needed for their organization.  Knowing this going into presentations, we have to be prepared to address some of that  skepticism even before it’s ever explicitly discussed. While telling the story of our organization  and how we utilize Design Thinking to help companies transform their business applications,  we often weave in bits of success stories we have from past clients. This helps us to address  not only the “what” of Design Thinking as we go along, but also the “why”.

Having a clear sequence of events is another key to good storytelling, as pointed out by the  lecture. For Design Thinking, this is often an easy task. We present the story by the phases of  the DT process, explaining clearly what that phase is, how we typically go about it, and why it’s  a key step in the process. This sort of linear ﬂow helps folks wrap their minds around the  process. Despite it’s linear nature, we do also point out that things may need to be iterated  upon, so we always had opportunities to go backwards if needed.

Finally, we make sure that all the questions we have asked along the way are answered, and  that there is time for reﬂection. This is our last chance to convince our audience that Design  Thinking is the process they need. Again, we like to site highly positive outcomes of other  workshops we’ve done, and point out the elements of Design Thinking that made the results  possible. This process has converted a lot of “non-believers”, allowing us to continue to tell  great stories, and achieve great results for our clients.

Insight

I think the insight I gain every time I use the storytelling tool is to see what the “aha” moment is  for folks in the room, and how that diﬀers across audiences and organizations. It often lands in  diﬀerent places for diﬀerent people, and for some folks, that moment never comes, and I need  to go back to the “understanding your audience” piece to try to understand how to alter my  message to make it more meaningful for that person or that group. Because the storytelling is  itself around Design Thinking, it also helps me understand more broadly what tends to trip  people up in the process, and where most of those “aha” moments seem to occur. That helps  me continue to reﬁne my story, and craft my message in a way that will be meaningful for my  audience, ultimately driving more business, and increasing customer satisfaction.

Given the nature of the challenge, I truly believe that storytelling is the best option. An alternate  or perhaps additive tool would be visualization. Some of my storytelling happens in brief  conversations at conventions or events, and other instances take place as part of  presentations where I can utilize slideshows, videos, photographs, etc. Having more options in  the latter of those scenarios, I can sometimes use things like storyboards to help present a  message. In that way, I am able to weave some of the other tools into storytelling as well.

