Example Reflection – Storytelling

“Making strategy accessible”

Challenge & selection

I have the responsibility to establish a new service line, maintenance management services,  in the firm that I work for.  The nature of the service is different to the traditional business of  the firm and people are uncomfortable with the change that it will bring, including having  different conversations with their clients and learning new skills.  This has presented me with  a great challenge in getting colleagues to adopt and sell it. However, the new service is part  of the approved strategy of our firm going forward, and staff will have to embrace it.  My job  was (is) to get them to do so.

I selected storytelling as a tool to convey the importance of the service line by telling the  story of our clients and how our service will provide value to them. The Big Wicked Problem  is the inability of our clients to maintain those assets that support their organisational  outcomes, often resulting in spectacular public failures, and I show how through the  development of maintenance management services, our firm can assist our clients to solve  this problem.  This has allowed me to make the proposed service practical using situations  that my colleagues are very familiar with.

Application

I make the solving of our clients maintenance problem practical by telling the story of known  clients with known problems, often in public domain because of asset failures, but also  dependent on my internal audience, for example if I am speaking to water engineers, the  story will be based on examples from the water utility industry that they can relate to.  I show  and illustrate how we can solve the problems through the new services we plan to offer / we  can offer.  The story line often goes like this: “our clients are dependent on their physical  assets to deliver the business outcomes, our role is to assist them with the maintenance of  those assets so that the outcomes can be realised, therefore, we have to develop the  complementary skills and capability to support our existing clients to better maintain their  assets”.

I end the story of the client problem by describing the next steps that we as an organisation  have to take to open up the opportunities offered by the service line, thereby galvanising my  colleagues into action.

Insight & Approach

By illustrating our new service offering through the telling of a story about a re-occurring,  known problem at our existing clients, one that my colleagues were aware of but did not  know how to solve, I was able to demonstrate the value of the proposed new service line.

They understood the problem and well as how to sell it to clients.

I was (am) often approached by the audience with immediate opportunities to offer our  solution.

The way that our firm would normally have gone about deploying a new service line would  have been to develop marketing material in the form of brochures and perhaps a few internal

sessions to describe the new offering, hoping for widespread adoption and roll-out.  I found  that by linking the service offering to a known problem experienced by our clients through  telling a storey of how we could solve the problem, I had more success in making strategy  practical and understandable.

They immediately got the message of what we were trying to do once they had put  themselves in the shoes of our clients and understood the problem and solution.

