Example Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge & Selection

Being a consultant, I offer lots of services and creating a dashboard in excel is one of them. It so  happened that the data was more than 11 lakh rows and excel has got a limitation of around 10 lakhs.  Managing such a huge amount of data was a challenge on any day. I spoke to my client and she said that  there won’t be any change in the layout of the dashboard as it is globally agreed that we will maintain  the same design and there cannot be multiple dashboards to handle the data and wanted me to come  up with a solution and explain the same to the stakeholders. There was no looking back and the problem  had lot of uncertainty to deal with no concrete data available from the past to overcome the challenge.

I selected the storytelling tool to describe the story of the problem I faced and the wanted the  stakeholders to make them part of my journey about how step by step I overcome the challenge and  how inspiring it can be for others. I wanted to engage my audience at emotional level. The solution that  I applied had an impact on the team and did cost savings for the client. I observed in past my colleagues  presented the solutions for the problem but never had the connect with the audience and nor the  empathy from the client to be part of the journey of finding the solution. I thought creating a story with  flow having background, a bit of suspense, a bit of inspiration and emotions will help to nail the  problem.

Application

To make the audience and stakeholders believe in my solution I gathered some facts related to  Microsoft excel and Microsoft access which I was going to offer them as a solution to manage a large  amount of data. I created a story and did storytelling giving a presentation that how I got stuck with the  limitation of the excel rows in managing the large data. How I spent sleepless night to find the solution  [MS Access] to manage the data. I described my steps how I selected MS access after having discussion  with some of my senior members [managers]. The story kept on becoming interesting as I maintain the  tempo, climax, surprises and initiatives that I took to find the solution. I described in the story how I  reached the solution by doing secondary research and shared the facts and screenshots about the  solution. The trust and relevance to my story went on increasing as other people have faced similar type  of problem which they express during my question-answer part of the session. Finally the actually  implementation of the solution was shown which marked the climax of the story regarding how the data  was managed.

Insight & Approach

I have learned the following things using the storytelling approach:

•  Without storytelling data offers just a rear-view mirror.

•  While delivering story analyze your audience, structure of story, instill customer empathy into  the audience to create long lasting impression.

•  Storytelling keeps the audience engaged. Most people do not understand the details of  analytics, but they do want evidence where storytelling plays vital role

•  Experience based knowledge that comes up in the stories, can be more important in problem  solving than information gleaned by other methods.

•  Ideas can be communicated easily. It also helps to convey our personality and bring our product  in front as the lead as well as hit the emotional quotient of the audience.

•  People keep expecting more and about 92% of consumers want brands to make ads that feel  like a story.

