Challenge

I am a Change Management specialist at a consultancy firm. My role is to manage change in different  kinds of projects, as system implementations, business transformation, process change, among others. I  work for all industries, from consumer goods to hospitals.

The most interesting part of my job is to analyse the impacts of the change in people, processes,  tecnologies and the organization. When I do it, I understand that the impacts are different for some  groups of people; some are more impacted, some are less impacted by the change. I call each group of  people audience.

Every change brings uncertainty to impacted people. Even if this change is intended to produce positive  results, it causes anxiety as it takes people off their confort zone. People may fear to loose control, may  be afraid to have less importance in the future state, may be concerned that they will not know what to  do in their daily activities or may feel that they are loosing something important, even if they don't know  what.

A way to minimize anxiety and resistance to change is to understand people feelings and communicate  clearly the steps of change, its impacts, benefits and what is in it for everyone.

Selection

I selected storytelling as a design thinking tool that could help me in the change process.

Storytelling is a technique that allows us to transmit a message in an entertaining and accessible way,  using examples and translating ideas into simple facts that our audience can capture and understand,  and may reproduce to other people.

The reason why I have chosen it is because I use several communication tools along the change process  and I have read several cases where storytelling had brought success to improve commitment of  stakeholders.

Application

I decided to apply storytelling in a system implementation that would impact the work of all people in a  hospital. The complexity of the change is that every audience is impacted in a different way, so I needed  to engage with every audience, with different needs, expectations and concerns.

To create compelling stories, I identified some allies, at least one for each audience. I explained to them  the benefits of the system implementation and we did some simulation of the future state so they could  feel how it would work and impact them.

I asked them to tell me how the system could improve their work and some activities that would be  easier for them thanks to the system. They brought some real life examples that only impacted audience

could raise. Togheter we transformed this into stories.

I chose to use those stories in some short videos and written communication materials, like intranet and  project magazines. I also decided to use my allies to tell the stories, to leverage empathy throught the  identification process.

Insight

The results were awsome. Not only people felt closer to the project as they felt more confortable to ask  questions about future state. We did not have answers to all questions, but we were transparent about  it and we committed to come back with answers as soon as we had them.

Approach

Next time I will mobilize an ally network from the beggining and I will select more than one people from  each impacted audience so they can exchange examples and anticipate  other questions that may  appear along the change process.

