Reflection – Storytelling    Challenge  I have only been working as an IT operations engineer at the blood bank in my country for six months. I started  out working in blood collection, drawing blood and doing medical examinations on blood donors. One of the  first projects I got assigned to was designing a new center for blood collection in which we would collect  plasma (a component of blood) more efficiently, faster and cheaper, while also satisfying more of our donors  needs. Before I started working on this ambitious project, another department performed an analysis on the  needs of the donors by asking them to fill out a survey. With the acquired data they established some design  criteria and a draft of a new process of registering, performing medical examination and drawing blood at the  new blood collection site. Because this will be a new building, we also have the freedom to design the physical  space in a way that suits our new process, a blank canvas to start from.  I, as an IT representative, was added later to the team. The What is stage was already passed and the  “Wowing” concepts from the What if stage were already chosen. I was presented with a process plan which  had a lot of gaps, unfortunately not the kind of gaps that would leave room for others to contribute, but holes  in the reasoning. The process plan was very inconsistent and though some solutions in it were very innovative,  they would pose a lot of major practical issues in the daily workflow. The whole process was aimed at a ‘happy  flow’, if one thing would differ from business as usual, there were no back up processes in place to prevent  long waiting times for donors or unsafe situations.    In this project we are working with different departments and we would be drifting off in the same arguments  in different meetings. It was obvious that some of the team members were getting tired of discussion and were  leaning towards settling for ‘satisficing’: picking the least worse solution we could all agree on, while individual  solutions we could not agree on would be way better options. It was hard to optimize, find a solution that best  met design criteria, because those criteria weren’t clearly defined.   The input from the survey was interpreted in different ways by different people and because the questions that  were asked were only multiple choice, they were already kind of steering the participants into answering what  the interviewer wanted to hear (a tricky sort of confirmation bias). It was hard to search for higher ground and  alignment with all those different views and opinions. When I first learned about the outcome of the survey, I  was quite surprised. I had worked with donors every day for four years, but the problems flagged by the survey  were not the topics I had heard donors complain about.    Selection  I selected storytelling as my tool to use in this phase of the project. Frankly, it wasn’t a calculated choice, I had  just watched the lecture on my way to work and I decided to give it a try right away when the opportunity  arose. Our team for this project consisted of managers of different departments and the surprising fact was  that none of them had ever donated blood themselves. A lot of them had even never visited a blood collection  center. When I realized this, it became clear why they only designed the new process to work for ‘happy flow’,  they just didn’t know about the reality of the people who work there. This is why I used storytelling in two  ways.  First, I had to draw attention to my view of this problem. It was hard to get a voice in this discussion, especially  for me as a non-management rookie employee. The average age in my company is relatively high and I’m just  25 years old, so it’s hard to get people to take you serious and to really listen to you in an environment where  experience (translate as: how many years you’ve been in the company) is the highest valued asset.  Second, I had to try to ignite and unite the people in the room by reminding them of our shared cause to  prevent further discussion. Storytelling is a great tool to achieve both of these goals.    Application  I started telling the story of a donor at the collection center and walked them through the whole process the  donor had to participate in. I tried to create a vivid picture in their heads of what was happening to this donor

and what would happen if this donor was very nervous and would maybe even faint during or after donating.  This is a very common reaction in donors and it is of great importance to take time to comfort someone who is  nervous in order to prevent them from feeling unwell or even fainting. This was one of the things of which they  hadn’t thought in the happy flow, in which this donor wouldn’t even have a chance to see a nurse to ask  questions, but could only interact with a computer system that doesn’t provide any comfort. This story was  extra powerful because none of them had ever donated blood, so they could feel themselves get a little  anxious, just like the donor would, in this new environment and new experience.     Insight  After the story finished, there was silence for the first time since I joined these meetings. Suddenly no one felt  the urge to prove their point and shout louder and louder to drown out others. A lot has changed in the  process plan since and donors as well as blood collection nurses have been invited to join in on the sessions  and think with the managers. It is becoming more and more a co-creation of all of the involved stakeholders.    I realized storytelling is a very powerful tool to create more vivid images about what it actually is you’re  planning to do and what it means for the people who have to do it on a daily basis. This particular story  generated a deeper empathy for the donor as well as the nurses in the blood collection facilities. It made  people realize we’re not competing to have the loudest voice in the discussion, but we’re all trying to make  things better for this shared cause. I think everyone uses storytelling sometimes, I now realize I use it a lot, but  never really consciously. Now that I am aware what a powerful tool it is, I can start using it even better.    Approach  A different approach would have been not to use storytelling, but learning launch instead. If I wouldn’t have  had the hands on experience from being a donor as well as being a nurse, I couldn’t have told the story in the  same powerful way that I did. At the moment I joined the project, they were unfortunately already way past  this stage and had carved their process plan in stone. Instead of using storytelling in this phase of the project, it  would have been better to design smaller steps of the process and test them in real life earlier on in the  timeline. By testing small pieces of the new process and gathering data on it’s efficiency and donors  satisfaction, it would soon have been painfully clear that their plan wouldn’t work in the imperfect reality of  daily processes where ‘happy flow’ is very rare. But then it would only have been a small investment, a small  bet, and we would have been able to learn from this experience and alter the small piece of the plan, instead of  having to do it all over again and wasting a lot of money. I think it would have been a lot faster to iterate our  way to success by testing each small hypothesis again and again until we hit bulls eye and then continuing the  process instead of clinging to the assumptions we made without ever testing them against reality.

