Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge  I work in Change Management for a large government organization that provides compensation benefits  for workplace injuries.  We are an organization with a generally older, long-serving workforce but also a  very culturally diverse workforce, as our main office is in a very diverse city.  Recently, because of a legal  obligation, we had to implement a plan to be able to record customer’s pronoun preferences.  This both  required design thinking in the best way to record customer’s preferred pronouns in our case  management software, but also how we would approach the topics of Gender Identity and Gender  Inclusivity in our work.  This was a challenge because it would require our older and culturally diverse  workforce to have an understanding and sensitivity to issues of gender identity and gender inclusivity.  Some of our staff may be from a generation or culture where these topics are not understood or talked  about.

Selection  When looking at the challenge, we decided that we needed to capture our employees’ attention and  have them emotionally connect to the plight of someone who may not have a typical gender identity.  Thus, we decided to use storytelling. We needed to tell the story of why customer’s ability to have their  preferred pronouns recorded and for our staff to be sensitive to their gender identity and expression  was instrumental in having a positive customer experience.  We wanted this storytelling to result in a  behavior change of recording and using the customer’s preferred pronouns and being sensitive to issues  of gender identity.

Application  To capture our staff’s attention and to help them build a connection with customers who may have  diverse gender identities, we told the story of one customer’s journey with our organization.  This  customer had a gender identity that did not match their sex-at-birth (and their legal identity  documents).  We described in detail how every time they called our organization as part of their benefits  claim they were called ‘Sir’ or ‘Mister’, even though they identified as female.  We described how this  made them feel increasingly angry and hesitant to interact with our staff.  Then we described how it  impacted and delayed their return-to-work which affected the length of time we were paying benefits  and therefore impacting our costs.

This approach proved to be very effective in rolling out this initiative to our staff.  In post- implementation feedback we had data that indicated that staff understood why the initiative was being  implemented and also measured very high levels of commitment to follow process and be sensitive to  diverse gender identity.  It also drove engagement with a corporate intranet blog post related to the  initiative.

Insight  The approach of storytelling that I selected was not because I understood design thinking, it just seemed  at a gut level the best way to have employees connect with a topic that may not impact them but is  deeply impactful to some of our customers.  The outcome of using storytelling in this initiative  reinforced to me how effective it is in creating successful change and anchoring a behavioral change to  the emotional experience of a customer.  Now that I have taken this course I understand why  storytelling is such an effective tool in design thinking.  Like the video on storytelling indicated it is  something that can unite and ignite people.  It can create lasting adoption of change.  I am even more  resolved after this course to incorporate the practice of storytelling into my change management  activities.

Approach  One approach that would have made storytelling even more effect in this initiative would have been to  conduct ethnographic research with customers who had diverse gender identities.  Understanding their  customer journeys and their day-to-day lives could have informed storytelling to make it even more  impactful and powerful.  In addition, it could have informed our design of pronoun collection in our case  management software to make that experience better for customers.

