Storytelling

Challenge

I work as a Software engineer in a mid-sized German consulting firm. Our division is focused on the public sector. One of your biggest challenges is to keep a project moving forward. In Germany, there is the public Bias that the public sector is lazy, overpaid, and gets nothing done. And to be fair, as someone who has previously worked as a member of the public sector this is partially true. A problem is often a small group or a single individual who is blocking Innovation. The deeper reason why this Person is blocking the Projekt can be plentiful. But they have almost always one thing in common, they don’t befit directly from the project and don’t seem to understand the improvements the project will bring. They fear is it going to be a waste of time, money, and energy. So a big factor for the success of a project is, that I show and convince those Individuals, that this project must be done.

Selection & Application

I am using storytelling right at the beginning of a project, to create a productive environment. I start by asking questions about previous projects, bad and good ones. This way I can identify, who might be skeptical about the new project. And also get a feel for what they fear the most. As we learned in the video (https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-design-thinking-innovation/lecture/PAXC d/storytelling-tool)  of Philip Negrete, a great story always has 3 elements an emotional connection, logik, and a higher course. For me, the higher course is always the benefit for the Customer and public sector. The emotional connections are usually the colleagues who befit from the Projekt and some personal experience to let the receiver know I am oping up and trusting them, the Logik Part is the hardest to generalize and has to be tailored for each Projekt. Usually, the plot of my story revolves around, how in the future the Customer could use a Product and what kind of improvements could be possibel.

So usually I start each project with one short Story, and re-steer if need or someone new joins the Team.

Insight

The story does not need to be long, somewhere arounf 10 min is most of the time more than enough to get everybody on board, or at least to start opening up. I observed that this is well spent time and energy since afterward we have a more productive working atmosphere. Also, it seems that I do not have such a big problem with previously mentioned blocking individuals. Since the project team is believing and supporting the project they subconsciously influence colleges that are not directly involved but still could hold up parts of the project. But you have to be careful to not promise features that can not be realized, it should not be a science fiction story, you still have to be realistic. Because the mod of the complete project could tip and you lose everything you wanted to archive.

Approach

In the future, I will continue to use storytelling to create a common ground for my projects. Obviously, I will continue to try to improve my storytelling skills and I am considering taking a Masterclass or a course at skillshare. For bigger and more creative projects I wanna try the Mind-Map technique and the whole design thinking process. As good as the tools are for themselves, I can imagine that they work even better together. I like to work more iterative and wanna embrace a fail-fast mindset.

