Reflection – Storytelling

1. Challenge:

I work for a global pharmaceutical company and we regularly work on projects across  multiple geographies. The customer in this example is the internal team that further process  the material we make. There is an inherent challenge working with teams spread around the  world – often with slightly mis-aligned processes and rather different working cultures to  our own. The specific challenge here is to improve collaboration so that work is not  repeated or ignored.

2. Selection:

To start off the design thinking process I thought it would be beneficial to use the  storytelling technique. I feel that this is a good place to start engaging with a group that are  unfamiliar with design thinking. And the same applies to me, who had never used design  thinking before.

3. Application:

In our company we’ve seen corporate “improvement initiatives” come and go and my  feeling is that people don’t think they make any difference. They consume a lot of people’s  time and energy and more often than not, the initiative slowly fades into insignificance and  people regress to doing what they’ve always done. These initiatives are just seen as  something to sit through, endure, tick the box and then carry on as normal. The thing that is  always missing is the story from the individual’s perspective.

So I felt that I was using storytelling in 2 ways. Firstly to engage with colleagues and  convince them that design thinking was actually worth it and secondly to get personal  insights on the design thinking challenge.

4. Insight:

The first insight was to appreciate how hard it was to overcome people’s prejudice that this  would just be another corporate initiative waste of time. Colleagues already have too much  to do and they need to be convinced that this project would be worth it.  By giving some  examples of how design thinking had actually made a difference in other similar scenarios  was useful. And especially examples that showed that it made work more satisfying.  That’s  really what people want at the end of the day – satisfying jobs. As design thinking is more  human-centric that other top down corporative initiatives – once we started it was actually  quite easy to get information on how people felt about the current process. People didn’t  hold back! People felt that their contributions went into a black hole, presentations would  be prepared for meetings where other stakeholders didn’t turn up, work was being done  but it felt like it was just “ticking a box” somewhere. People wanted to take pride in their  work, but felt that the work wasn’t valued. Getting personal narratives was really  enlightening. We’re all humans trying to do something meaningful after all. I think these

personal narratives gave a moment of reflection, let people air frustrations and make the  process more employee centric rather than management centric. As has been said many  times, if there’s no employee buy in, no initiative will work well.

5. Approach:

I think storytelling was a pretty good tool to get people engaged and consider it a good use  of their time. Most corporate initiatives are top down and there is some resentment that it’s  being forced on the employee. By gathering people’s stories it becomes much more  personal and human.

