Challenge:

Many of my colleagues were disturbed by our organisation’s new/unwritten value system. Many of  us were afraid of losing some values (human-centred and emphatic, inclusive, engaging  workforce), which were deemed to be extremely important to many of us.

In order to work some of these elements, we decided to do a design thinking challenge on ‘how  to make our organisation more inclusive for people with disabilities and limitations?’. Why did we  select this challenge? Well - we wanted to have a topic which is not only very much human- centric and engaging but also tackles with inclusion overall. We wanted to contribute to the social  conversation we were having openly  at that moment. And there we go - we had a great topic!

Selection:

We have selected storytelling as a tool since we believe in the power of storytelling. We wanted to  put the human beings and their experiences front and centre and take the whole organisation  along on a journey with us. We knew that we needed to develop deeper empathy to kindle the  value system we used to have in the organisation. We needed to prove that there was a bigger  message we had to convey. The message was to become more human-centric and we wanted to  show that by the topic we selected.

Application:

We have applied storytelling at diﬀerent moments in the process. (1) before the design thinking  session: once the topic was selected, we communicated the information about the topic and  design thinking session internally. We used stories of our colleagues and their struggles. The  support our colleagues got was incredible. So many people with disabilities and limitations came  out and started to talk about their own disabilities and limitations. These process has created a  base, which was not at all expected. This was the ﬁrst time, I experienced the power of  storytelling. (2) during ‘what is’ process: so many of our colleagues volunteered to tell their stories  (interviews) to design thinking participants. They all knew that by sharing their stories they would  be contributing to ﬁnd solutions to become a more inclusive organisation for people with  disabilities and limitations. Many of them opened their hearts to the interviewers. It was an  amazing process. (3) during ‘what wows/what works process’: once the teams had their proposed  solutions, they also used storytelling to explain their solutions. (4) Once all the proposed solutions  were presented, the sponsor of the project selected one prototype to turn it into a reality. Then the  solution was introduced to the whole company, using storytelling!

Insights:

- Storytelling is very powerful. It can inspire people. - It is extremely useful if you would like to convey a big message - It has to be constructed well, otherwise the message could be lost along the way - It could be less powerful in business topics (this is just an assumption and should be tested) - It has to be genuine, otherwise people will not follow you.

Approach:

- When I was communicating the stories of people, I did not use the real names of people (since I

did not ask people if they wanted me to use their names or not). This approach was risk-averse  but less eﬀective. Later on some of them came back to me to ask me to use their real names.  This was much more powerful. The reaction to these stories were bigger and more emotional.  So I learned that next time I should ask permission before assuming that people would not like  to reveal themselves...

