Design Thinking for Innovation Reflection

Storytelling

Challenge

I was asked to lead a Congressional Relations team that is responsible for receiving inquiries from  Congressional leaders pertaining to delivery of healthcare by our company to their constituents.  The  first thing I was told was that the team had an inventory of inquiries which exceeded the number of  responses that could be completed each day.  The team was falling behind and under a great deal of  pressure.  Even with additional resources, the training time to get someone up to speed would not meet  the immediate concern about timeliness.  The expectation of the Congressional offices was to have  responses within just a few days, whereas our operations teams providing the data needed for a  complete response required much more time to investigate healthcare claims and initiate reprocessing.   Looking at the history of our response time, it had grown significantly along with the inventory increases  as well as the inventory of healthcare claims.  They needed a solution, but everyone was up to their  elbows in work and could not find the way out.

Selection

As a leader I have found that storytelling makes a situation more tangible to associates.  Dictating goals  or numbers often gives associates very little context or motivation. I considered using brainstorming or  mind mapping to identify a solution, however I first needed to get the team motivated to find a solution.  The video in Week 3 reminded me that Storytelling ignites engagement.  Where there is engagement,  there is ownership.  This team needed to own the problem before they could start to solve it.  I had used  storytelling with another team that had a similar situation with inventory and had great outcomes with  getting them to understand “why” their work was important to the company, Congressional office and  even the patients.  I decided that this was the best approach to get the team thinking about how to  handle the situation with their inventory.

Application

To address our team’s particular challenge, I wanted to share two stories: one specifically about the  challenge and one specifically about leading a team to success.  I needed the team to understand that  this is possible!  I brought them together in a conference room.  Some of the participants saw the  meeting as a welcome break from writing responses – clearly, they were not the ones engaged and the  primary target for this tool.  I began by telling the team about a specific Congressional inquiry I had just  reviewed.  The Congressional leader had been asked weekly about the status of an authorization for a  necessary medical procedure for a woman in his area.  He just wanted to give the patient an answer that  assured her we were aware of her request and the process that it had to go through before it could be  approved.  I shared with our team an example of when I had been in a similar situation, waiting for an  authorization for care and filled with worry for my son’s health.  I explained that while I waited, I did the  only thing I could control – reach out to everyone who might be able to help or get me answers.  I  explained that this Congressional leader was trying to answer the patient’s inquiries and help reassure  her.  As I shared, heads were nodding around the room – we were finding common ground and sparking  the desire to find a solution.  Next, I told them about how another team had gathered together and  explored any ideas they could come up with to find a solution to reduce their inventory or decrease

their handling time to increase productivity. When I shared the successful outcome that team achieved,  they were ready to dig into our challenge.

Insight and Approach

The team quickly engaged after hearing the two stories confirming that storytelling did, in fact, ignite  their motivation.  They collaboratively identified a few simple modifications to the workflow that they  could implement immediately: they proposed using templates instead of drafting messages for each  response, they also proposed acknowledgement responses to reduce multiple inquiries.  Some of them  even shared how they were using these solutions already but hadn’t thought about bringing it to the  team.  By sharing with them the purpose or importance of our responses, they were all motivated to  tackle the challenge together.  Using a story to demonstrate the “why” of their work also created  empathy for their customer.  As a new leader to the team, adding the story of a previous success helped  boost their confidence that the challenge could be overcome.  The one thing the team did not do was  create a plan to implement their ideas and instead sought guidance from their management team.   Looking back, I would have added a second tool to approach the challenge: visualization.  By creating a  flowchart of the current process and sharing it with the team, I think they might have better understood  how to execute their recommendations through seeing where it fit into the process and would have  taken the initiative to design the actual process to implement their proposed solutions consistently.

