Reflection - Storytelling

Challenge

When I worked at eClass, my team looked for a new way to generate educational content for our

students. They are interested in subjects such as business, innovation or marketing, and follow our

content in social media. Personally, I had to develop a material to explain a Design Sprint process, so

that our students can access the content, understand it and share it. A Design Sprint according to its

creator, Jake Knapp, is "a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design,

prototyping, and testing ideas with customers." You can read more in https://www.gv.com/sprint/

Selection

One of the best ways to face this challenge was using the human-centered approach of Design

Thinking to explain a specific tool to produce and test ideas. Even when Design Thinking and Design

Sprint are not the same thing, Design Thinking plays a fundamental role in the actions we can do in a

Design Sprint process. And storytelling was an excellent tool to generate content that our students

could identify with. We really wanted to avoid answering questions such as “what is a design sprint”,

“what is it for”, “what is it necessary to do it”, or “how to do it”, in a unidirectional way (question -

closed answer). On the contrary, we set out to address the needs of the users for whom we were

creating this content. As we can see in the video "Storytelling Tool" of week 2, storytelling is about

creating a cause for our students and anyone who wanted to access the content developed by our

organization. We wanted our users to find in the content an inspiration to take to their own teams.

Application

To apply some storytelling techniques, we used a structure called Power Pitch Method, oriented to

generate value proposition narratives. I attended a workshop with 10 colleagues and each one had to

develop different topics ("what is a design sprint", "how to learn another language", "how to make a

business plan", etc), based on our own experiences with each topic.

First, we worked on our voice and how we can lose the fear of telling stories in public. Each attendee

had to talk about their topic, projecting our voices in a particular way. I explained in 2 minutes what a

Design Sprint is with a horror story voice, then like an animated character, and then with the voice of a

little girl. In addition to laughing, we learned that our voice and body expression are vital elements

when we are telling a story. Then we worked on a script for each of our topics, based on the Power

Pitch Method structure.

The first two topics evoked negative memories and experiences:

● My pains: what are the problems that make it difficult to create products together with my

team? It's important to refer to these situations as "pains", expressing my frustration from not

being able to reach my goals.

● My painkillers: what temporary solutions have I tried to implement without positive results?

Once again, it was necessary to emphasize the frustration I felt when trying to come up with

solutions that calmed my pain just for a short period of time.

The following points are oriented toward a promise of change and a solution, so our voice tone and

body expression were positive, optimistic:

● Value proposition: ​what could a design sprint process offer to ease my pains?

● The process: ​How is a design sprint done? What are its main characteristics? What are its

differences compared to the "painkillers" that I mentioned before?

Finally, we read our script in front of a one of our peers, who gave me some feedback. Then I listened

to the story of my peer, giving some recommendations to improve the narrative.

Insight

One of the most valuable things about this method is to leave the technical explanations and all the

detail of the process in a last place, in order to prioritize the connection with our pains and the things

we want to improve. We always tend to answer the typical "what, how, when, where" questions in a

structured way, with existing definitions, leaving aside our own experience and our "pains". If we know

what those pains are, we will be able to find new value propositions and solutions which we can feel

identified with.

Approach

This technique was addressed from our own experiences, expressing our pains and painkillers, to

define a value proposition that we considered would be effective for our pains. To bring this narrative

to our students, it is important to listen to their pains and painkillers first. Then, we can work on a

value proposition and a description of the subject that makes sense to them. We can talk to

designers, marketing managers, engineers, software developers, startup founders or anyone who

needs to create new products with their teams in an innovative and effective way. We should ask

them about their pains and what they have tried to do for improving their processes.

