Reflection-Story Telling

Challenge & Selection    Story telling is one of the most commonly used tools by me in my daily work as I am leading  the Tech Innovation & Analytics function for our APAC office.      On my daily job, I need to spend half of the time exploring with external tech start-ups and  incubators to source the latest technologies while the other half of the time engaging the  internal stakeholders to look for “proof of concept” opportunities to drive digital  transformation. Therefore, it is always a challenge for me to attract competitive or popular  startups to run a pilot with us while same time convincing my internal stakeholders such as  marketing and sales to come forward to invest time and funding resources to test a potentially  scalable innovation solution that could help uplift the business value.     And I find story telling extremally powerful and effective when it comes to pulling the  external tech startups/incubators and my internal business stakeholders to join forces to test  out new creative ideas or solutions.     Application    Here is one recent example of how I applied storytelling to unite external tech startups and  my internal business functions to join force in testing new innovative “proof of concept”  project that is named AI On-Demand Video Interview Evaluation.  Initially, I identified this  tech company that has the video AI interview evaluation capability, then I went into my  monthly catch-up meeting with our regional people VP, sharing with her the story of how  Uniliever has successfully transformed their recruitment process by applying AI technology  and removing biases to candidates which has received very positive employee branding effect  as well as a very attractive ROI of the project. That story has around interest by my people  VP on the topic of how AI could help her digitize her recruitment process to the next level,  knowing her as a very ambitious and competitive leader. With her confirming her interest in  talking to this tech vendor, I reached out to the AI tech vendor to give their sales team a story  of how my people VP has successfully led her last digital transformation in employee self- service platform that led to the global adoption of that vendor’s solution which has sparked  the interest in working with us to run a pilot.     With my story telling, my people VP and the AI tech company soon entered into a 1-year  pilot contract that has eventually led to a big success and this year, we are moving into  phase2 of the pilot to scale up to rest of the APAC office.       Insight & Approach    Therefore, we could see that story telling sometimes is even more powerful than hard sales  pitches or advertisements to unite people from different walks of areas at work and get the  desired outcome.     As a result of the successful pilot I led of the AI interview evaluation in APAC, I went on to  share the successful story to my global team in New York about how the adoption of this  cutting edged AI technology has helped our APAC offices transformed our recruitment

process and improve process efficiency which is also a common pinpoint in our north  America office and they were surprised that there is such a great tech company from the US  that has delivered such a great project and they weren’t even aware of it.  Eventually, through  another story telling back to the vendor, they managed to sign another deal with our America  office to scale up the solution we built from APAC and the project is still scaling as I wrote  this reflection.     As a digital innovation and transformation leader, I will continue to apply the story telling  skill not just at my work but beyond to benefit those whom I encounter in my life.

