Reflection – Story Telling

Challenge and Selection

I have been a snooker player for over 15 years and have played several local league tournaments back in India. One  of the things that most successful players have done in this space is start early to play, practice, and subsequently  master this game. In India where cricket is the national sport, and every child wants to be a great cricketer like  Sachin Tendulkar or MS Dhoni, it is very difficult to get increased participation from students and more importantly  educational institutions who know who a Ronnie O’Sullivan or Judd Trump is. The goal to get them to sign up with  these games and to come to training facility was almost an impossible task. During my career as an Operations  Managers in a large BPO organization I was based in New Delhi for a period of 2 years, when I decided that I would  try and create an institution which will help train the future Indian stars in the world of Billiards and Snooker. It  was easy to create and form SPIN (Snooker & Pool India Network) a startup focused on this one goal “to increase  the number of players from India into the domestic professional circuit”. The missing link between visualizing this  myself vs making this a reality was going to be getting everyone we went to offer this as service to understand the  cause and not look at it as a problem which needs a solution. Therefore, coming up with a great story as well as  connecting with the right audience became critical.

Like mentioned by Milton Pineda in his video “it's not about the list of things we have to do, it's about the  connection that we give to people via storytelling that brings a different element.”

Application

To create this really great story and to be able to effectively help the audience connect to it, I will have to be  accurate about who was going to be listening to this story. I will consider and invite 4 group of individuals to come  listen to the story and hopefully some or most of these individuals would be inspired to enroll with SPIN.

1. First group of individuals are the experts in the field (professional players, coaches and even local club  owners who promoted the sport). This group will become my biggest critic and will be able to connect to  the cause the quickest as they all would have faced difficulties coming up to the level they were at. These  individuals in their time would have hoped to get access to a facility like the one SPIN would offer and  benefit from the support of technology when they were amateurs.  2. The second group will be aspiring good players who play at a local club. These players may not necessarily  be able to sponsor a membership to a training program or even if they could join were looking at playing  the sport as a hobby. They were great players but had never been exposed to the benefits of structured  training program, most would have learnt the game by chance just visiting a local pub for a party which  had a pool table  3. The third group of individuals would be individuals on Sports Committees in schools who made final  selections / recommendations of which sports are included into the school / college curriculum. They  would almost have an unknown bias to include sports such as cricket, basketball or volleyball since these  games were more widely watched, played, and wanted by parents. If we talk about large international  education institutions in India, they will also promote sports such as Squash, Horse riding but they had no  idea how big a sport snooker has been for the past 50 years let alone the fact that it actually started in  India  4. The 4th and last group was a parents from different cultures, different walk of life. Parents of children who  went to local school and parents of students who went to international school. The reason to mix this up  was to extend the understanding of the sport to all type of students and parents. The goal of SPIN was to  extend the facility to everyone who wanted to take up the game, one aspect of this meant to make it  affordable to everyone.

Once we had the right audience the first step was to sell the challenge. Utilizing very little data in this discussion  and using combination of detailed questions along with feedback forms the audience was gathered in a club with  snooker tables around them. As Milton has described in his video this helped create the required energy along with  passion and excitement as the participants found a purpose for themselves in the story. While the players, coaches  and other players felt at home, the parents were a bit unsure of the venue.

As the session progressed, the players were given an opportunity to engage in a discussion to describe their  struggle getting to the level of the game they are at. The coaches were able to provide the importance of these  trainings and therefore more interest and sense of purpose behind enrolling for a structured program was  understood.

The parents and the Sports Committee team members were exposed to a new dimension of sport which existed,  but they were completely unaware of its potential.

Insight and Approach

Story telling therefore resulted in increased awareness of the sport but most importantly for SPIN this meant we  had been successful at grabbing the attention of mass population across different support groups. We saw that we  had an increase of 12% more inquiries for such a session again. Parents of close to 30 students enrolled for the  training program. 2 Colleges asked for a formal proposal on setting up a training facility in their premises to  provide training to students who would like to opt for the program.

The feedback which was gathered during this first session helped improve several other session and helped greatly  during the visualization exercise.

Through story telling the strategy to increase the number of professional snooker players had become very simple  but more importantly each individual felt connected to the cause.

