Student: Maria Amin  Coursera: Design Thinking for Innovation, Maria Amin, UVA    Challenge:  The design thinking tool I chose from the Design Thinking course was storytelling.  This is a  skill I have wanted to improve as some of the most successful consultants I work with are great  storytellers.  Traditionally, the way we sell consulting within our service line is to identify the client's  current issues and demonstrate our group’s capabilities to address them.  We needed to change the way  we told our group's consulting story.  A story that moves from a capabilities to character-driven  approach that all team members could tell and customers wanted to hear.     Selection: Our consulting sales practice is based on developing relationships based on high value and  trust.  As a result, I chose storytelling as a tool to build on connecting with clients in the way Design  Thinking week 2 lecture described it “as a way to make a strategy relate-able, to give it color, life,  through character and plot." The lecture finally gave me a framework to build a story, develop suspense,  and create a seemingly simple answer.  I believe this simplicity is a key to building trust and developing  relationships with clients.       Application:  I began with white-boarding the steps of storytelling with a colleague in a two-hour design  thinking session. We sectioned off parts of the walls with the 5 areas:  main character, sell the challenge,  fellowship, tensions, and a path to move forward.  From a host of different characters, we started with  our main character as Valerie, a high level executive and a potential customer, tasked by her CEO with a  new annual goal to create a digital strategy to increase revenue for her business unit. We brainstormed  all the different ways Valerie could try to achieve this goal utilizing different colored sticky notes.   We  used the petal visualization tool as described in the week 3: Meandyouhealth story part 1 to map out  the fellowship step to fully understand the people associated with Valerie.  This visually connected the  tensions that each relationship created, their needs, and how we could overcome them through our  story.  We put an action item in our "parking lot" to mind map these relationships further to create new  solutions and offerings for these customers and channels.  We also planned to evaluate each  relationship as one that might need its own story crafted.  The path to move step was perhaps the  easiest as we aligned outcomes, activities, and outputs with Valerie's needs.  The alignment was  essential to create a simple solution and key to our story's purpose of building trust and rapport.         Insight: Our efficient minds hoped that this one session would create a story that would resonate,  however, we had to redo the white-boarding exercise again as we found we had an additional audience:  our consulting colleagues and leadership.  We had to add a layer to the story to engage our service line  leaders and to promote our new story internally.   After iterating on our final storyline, we tested with  select members of our audience through intentional practice sessions and in actual sales situations.   Feedback from these sessions was extremely beneficial and requires us to continue to iterate and adapt  the story.       Approach:  Our story, as technology consultants, needs to change as technology and our client's needs  change.  As a result, we will need to iterate our story continuously.  I will keep the framework of  storytelling as a tool to use again.  One of my challenges will be to create a few different characters and  plots for the different personas we work with and sell to.  As mentioned before, as a team we need to  revisit and build out the value and tensions for each of our fellowship members so we can create stories  that resonate with our different customers, internal and external.  In general, I was very pleased with  the process and results of our first story and I am looking forward to furthering my storytelling skills.

