Example reflection – Storytelling

Challenge:

I am part of innovation team of an IT organization where I have to come out with new ideas to productize  and deliver solutions to the end customers. One challenge I always facing is to convince the ideas to the  stakeholders including Managers, Architects and Analysts. The experience, learning and perception of  different stakeholders are different. The value they see on these ideas may also different. The biggest  challenge I always face is convincing all these stakeholders to sponsor the projects.

Tool Selection:

Talking in Technical terms or in business terms is not going to convince the audiences with different skills.  One approach we can use the storytelling tool here where I should speak in a way where my audience can  understand the purpose of the discussion and seeing value in the case presented.

Application:

I have applied this concept to a problem specific to my organization, which is a conversational application  for communicating between customer and the service provider. When this idea (Conversational  Application) presented, both the tech and business team rejected it as they were treating the idea as a  chatbot which is common thing in the market. The idea was almost killed in the initial presentation.

But we decided to present the idea as a story by including

1. How it is useful to the end customers  2. What business value conversational application can bring in   3. How does technology can be key driver for this solution  4. How does conversational User Interface can helps customers to save time and money with the

help of an intelligent assistant.

When the idea presented as a story with the sequence of events and the emotions of customers, the same  is accepted by the stakeholders and added as a high priority project

Insight:

1. Presenting the idea as a story will motivates the audience to listen to a great extent. Make use of

this to impress them and help them to understand the story clearly with straight and precise  information

2. The story should be in a sequential manner where they can relate every points by imagining the

cases.

3. Both the business and technology people can understand stories and they can imagine how it is

well fitted to their domain knowledge

4.   The story teller should provide a space for the audience to ask questions, which helps us to

understand how does they conceived the idea.

5. Once we could trigger their imagination, they can also come out with brilliant thoughts that would

augment our presented ideas/thoughts

Approach:

Along with the storytelling, adding visualizations would lighten the thoughts of stakeholders and it may  help them to imagine it very clearly. It can help me clearly convey the story, message and idea easily and  clearly

