Reflection

Storytelling as the tool to find the real purpose and cause to change the mindset

Challenge:    At the beginning of 2009 I’ve founded my own company. I guess most of us know that we live todays  in a world called VUCA World (characterized by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity).  Therefore, since my foundation I’ve noticed that the rapid changes and advance of the economic and  technologies, and the needs of the population as well are the biggest challenges my team and I are  facing. I always asked myself what will happen tomorrow, what will be in 1 week or in 6 months? The  answer? Always the same: I don’t know because the data, customer insights, interviews and etc. just  let offered me the situations of todays and the past. Nobody knows for sure what will happen in  future and what the future particularly the customer needs require. Sometimes even the asked  customer themselves don’t know what they really want. As Henry Ford already had said it in his well- known sentence: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”    All in all, this uncertainty is challenging me specifically in that way that my team -   today I’m having an interdisciplinary team of already six mates – don’t know what the future will  bring, what will the product look like in the future and which steps follow next. They’re thinking in  “anxiety in uncertainty”. I feel their daily uncertainty and fear, and this brings me to the key question  that particularly challenges me: How can I change the individual mindset of my teammates from  thinking in "anxiety in uncertainty" to “opportunities in uncertainty", to ensure the right mindset  to design and innovate?    Selection:    Regarding to my description above I searched for the answer of my key question “How can I”. The  documentation and videos, in particular the introduction video about the Storytelling Tool for Design  Thinking of Andre Martin, Global Leadership Development Director Mars, Inc., inspired me in that  way that I guess my given situation requires an intervention on an emotional and normative  dimension. It requires a deeper intervention into the purpose, beliefs and cause. And this is exactly  what Andre Martin says Storytelling is aiming at.   Andre Martin describes Storytelling as a tool for “simply conveying a message that has logic, (…)  emotional connection, and it also has larger purpose.” (Video: Storytelling Tool, Time: from 00:53 to  01:00).   And based on these findings, I guess Storytelling seems to be the right tool to answer my key  question “How can I”.    Application:    How do I applied Storytelling to solve my challenge?   First of all, I’ve used the first question mentioned by Jeanne Liedtka at her Innovation Process “What  is?” to get a deeper understanding for what are the emotions, feelings and thoughts of my  teammates. By conducting an interview with each teammate I’ve tried to empathize and figurate out  what really matters. I questioned them, for instance, why you are here? What is your belief and your  deep purpose? Or why you’re belonging to us and taking part on our journey?   After those steps taken, I’ve took a journey back to the beginning of my business and asked myself:  Why I’ve started this business? What was my deep purpose and belief? And furthermore, what is the  real purpose of the business itself?  With these questions I’ve got quite insights of what is.

Then, after I gathered everything together and summarized, I saw that we’ve got minor analogies in  what we belief. There wasn’t any kind of common purposes.  So, it opened up a picture for me that gave me the answer to why they are thinking in “anxiety in  uncertainty”: The reason was that they believed in the product itself and not in the deep purpose of  the business – I have to add that the deep purpose of the business wasn’t communicated clearly at  this point by me.  This valuable finding I’ve used to prepare a great story. A story that tells about the why - why the  business exists, why we do what we do and why changing the mindset is necessary to survive.  Finally, I told them a story inspired by the following quotation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:  “When you want to build a ship, don’t begin by gathering wood, cutting boards, and distributing  work, but rather awaken within men the desire for the vast and endless sea (and give them a deep  and meaningful reason to long for it).”    The response on the told story was really surprising. The next days I recognized that my teammates  already thought little bit differently. Instead of doing everything to avoid mistakes they looked  outside the box for new potential opportunities. They took another perspective of the things and  questioned the sense of their doing. It seems to be like they are thinking a bit in “opportunities in  uncertainty” now.    Insights:    What did I learn and which insights I gained from applying Storytelling? If I reflect on the described  challenge that has occurred in recent months, I notice that words which describing a clear picture  with deeper sense can be so powerful to bring everybody to think, to question and perhaps to take  action. Why? Because in my case a great story gives the audience a deeper meaning about why they  do what they do. Rather, it gives them something to believe on - at the best case it arises a common  belief - and therefore an intrinsic motivation in everybody. They get a cause why they want to belong  to and to contribute something meaningful.   By applying Storytelling I’ve learned that a great story can empower most people, maybe even  everyone, to change the perspective on things they’ve never taken before, and therefore they are  more enabled to design and innovate.   As well, Storytelling helps me to manage challenges like my described one above on a different way.  Regarding to Design Thinking I’m sure that Storytelling is that tool which enables to set the right  mindset as the basic of the Innovation Process - doesn’t matter at which step of the innovation  process, Storytelling helps you with it.    Approach:

Last but not least I appreciate the usage of Storytelling for my challenge even though it took a while  to really empathize with my teammates and to understand the situations. Using storytelling  effectively for the first time isn't as easy as I thought it would be. To be honest, my story wasn’t  perfect. But my personal lessons learned shows that any effort to solve a problem with deeper  characteristic through storytelling is worthwhile anyway.  If you asked me if I would do something different next time, I would answer: No! I would select the  tool Storytelling again except that I would try to combine it with the Visualization tool because I  guess telling a story while visualise your thoughts and interrelations, for instance on a whiteboard, is  much more powerful and memorable.   In my opinion Storytelling is a learning process. The more stories you tell, the better they get. In that  sense, it doesn’t matter if your Storytelling skills already perfectly. Much more important is to do it at  all.

