Reflection Storytelling

Challenge

I work in a market research agency. We recently developed a new approach to analyse  consumer behavior and opinions from web sources. After testing the approach in a small scale,  we find the results very promising as they provide rich and valuable insights. However, at this  point our approach requires a lot of manual work and thus is rather inefficient – especially on a  larger scale. We would like to develop a fully automated process of our approach that provides  the same valuable insights as found in our tests – but much more efficient. This means,  however, that our company has to make an investment in our approach. This again, means we  will have to convince a number of stakeholders of our approach, make them believe in us and  eventually release a budget for the investment.

Selection

I think the key to success, to convince the budget managers of our idea, is to wrap it into an  inspiring, emotionally involving story. Preet Luna’s contribution about the storytelling tool in  week 2 of this fantastic course really was an eye opener here. After watching the rather short  video it became very clear to me that in order to make this idea successful we would have to go  beyond presenting a solid plan. We would have to share our excitement about the idea, make  the stakeholders see our vision. Even though until now I have never been a great storyteller – I  decided to make a start with this challenge.

Application

To create a stage for our story, we initiated a meeting with budget managers and other  stakeholders of the company. As usual, we created a PowerPoint presentation as a means for  sharing our ideas. This time, however, we made sure the presentation wasn’t just about  projecting figures on the wall. This time we wanted to give the figures a personal touch,  something that the audience could identify with. We did this by conveying the perspective of  the users we seek to analyse in the course of our approach. So our story was about a fictional 32  year old man who is interested in buying a specific kind of product. We showed real pictures to  give an impression of his personality, his family, his home – to facilitate an ethnographic glimpse  into the living environment of this specific persona. Even more important, we told the audience  how he informed himself and talked to other like-minded people about the product and where  to buy it (which we knew about from testing our approach).

Insight

Our presentation had a very positive impact on the participants and lead to an exciting  discussion about the chances, the possible insights and findings our approach helps to reveal. It  was great to see how the participants immersed into the world of our fictional character,  identified themselves with him, and even added pieces from their own personal experience to

the story. Of course, we also evoked criticism towards our new approach which we openly  addressed instead of trying to dismiss it. Quite the contrary, we showed appreciation for  constructive feedback as it is helpful for us to anticipate obstacles and find better solutions.

Approach

Overall, choosing the storytelling tool was a great decision. It turned out that embedding all  information in an inspiring and emotionally involving story was the best thing we could do. It  helped to pitch our approach to the rest of our company in a matter that everyone else could  see its value as we see it hence it is vital to get them on our side so that we can move forward  now and collaboratively create a great new service for our customers.

