Reflection: Storytelling Application

Challenge

The clients we tend to work with in my company, a small consulting firm for growing

businesses, are small to medium busines owners that are starting to experience  significant growth. They still have a small business mentality, used to micromanaging  everything themselves. This makes them lack a big picture mentality and see everything  as a small set of problem, disconnected form each other and without a larger vison for  their company and an idea of where they want to go as a company now that they are  leaving the beginner playing field. They haven’t really understood their business beyond  their initial instinct of wanting to create a product or service and produce it and they  struggle to develop beyond that initial stage. If they have new clients beyond their initial  target group, they are often unaware of them, if they have adjacencies, they are also often  unaware of their existence or how to exploit them.

Selection

I choose storytelling for these types of clients because it allows them to see the clients  and opportunities that their growth can provided them. Storytelling is the creation of a  cause, a greater narrative beyond a simple problem/solution dynamic. It is customer  centric and searches for their experience, their needs, and their views on both their life’s  and the product that they are engaging with. Using storytelling with our clients allows them  to articulate a vison of what their company is and where it is going through the creation  of a unified story for the purpose of their company. Most of our clients have never created  a story for why they created their company, what they hope to achieve and how they see  their clients. I also choose storytelling because in certain cases it is a tool, they can use  themselves, depending on their business, to interview their clients and apply it  themselves.

Application

The best example for how I applied the storytelling tool, is with a client whose company  was a medium, but quickly growing, IT firm.  The company was obsessed with analyzing  every single decision, including things as trivial as cleaning supplies for the office, at every  level, from the person actually in charge of the activity, into his supervisor and then the  founder. At the time of our work with them they had a 3-layer structure. They had very  little autonomy at the bottom 2 levels. This had brought the company to a state of  perpetual paralysis. They were over emphasized on small process, seeing everything as  induvial problems without connection to the issues their peers had or an overall strategy  for the company. They dealt with every client and issue in a piecemeal fashion and had  to common view to what their purpose or strengths where. This has resulted in their  growth coming form word of mouth form stablished clients that could see that they were  actually good at their jobs but now from new independent client given their poor sales  ability.

The way we solved this was by bringing the founder and his manager independently and  making them interview some of their clients with a premade questionnaire in addition for  follow up questions they might have in the moment, we also  told them to ensure that they  only talked 1 minute at most for every 2 minutes there clients talked. The questionnaire  revolved about finding out what their clients needed to commit to further spending on IT,  how they saw the company and what they valued about them. We also told our client to  ensure that they never talked about specific products they had but to keep the company  discussion in a more general area, to ensure this didn’t devolve into an interview about  specific product performances. Finally, we brought the managers and the founder  together and made them exchange what they had learn into a story of what their company  is and what they are valued for.

Insight

There were a couple of insight gained for the client and one main one for me. The main  insight the client learned was that what their own clients valued most about them was the  personal touch they received from them. They liked their product but above all they valued  the fact that for them their IT providers weren’t a faceless multinational with a help desk.  They were known faces, people they communicated with on a first name basis. People  that were willing an able to go with their clients through any questions they might have  without billing them froe vey single hour o time spent, that cared enough to congratulate  them on birthdays, and rush to their aide when they had an unforeseen emergency. Our  IT company clients had though that their strength was in their product, but it truly was in  their service. That has been their challenge with sales, they has been emphasizing to  prospective clients their product without telling them how they would implement them,  how they would support them. This made them look as just another IT provider, without  the benefits of size but also without the benefits of personalized service.

For me the greatest insight was the importance of empathy. Empathy with you coworkers,  empathy with you client. Being connected to the non-technical aspects of the business,  the emotional connection one has with clients. The bonds of trust are often overlooked  but are a stronger link that most people assume. This increased my regard for design  thinking because it is a process that allows the inclusion of such non-quantitative aspects  of business that most other processes ignore.

Approach

If I ha to deal with the same client again I believe I would still use the storytelling tool for  them. It was effective in helping them realize their unknow strengths, in giving them a  vison for the company and bringing them outside their focus on minutia and technical  aspects. What I would change would be to add the Mind Mapping tool as well to the  process. Including some Mind Mapping between the managers before and after the  interviews would have probably clarified their new joint vison even further and might have  given a couple of extra insights.

