Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge:

I work at a small management consulting firm. Our business focus these days is to reduce  the cost of delivery of engagements to be competitive with the larger firms. As of now,  almost all the offerings are manual (i.e. the work is based on human-human interactions).  Our short-term plan is to a) reduce the cost of serving the clients, b) to enhance the quality  of our offerings. To achieve this, we are planning on using solutions based on Artificial  Intelligence (AI). Why did we choose AI? Our idea is that AI can help us in terms of  Streamlining Internal Processes (such as Human Resources Management), Knowledge  Creation/ Capture (to reduce learning curves) and Project Augmentation (by collating  information quickly).

The critical question is which use cases we want to address? The answer to this question  can be gathered by understanding the pain points of our employees and our clients.

Selection:

I wanted to use story-telling as a tool to generate these ideas and define use-cases. We  organised some workshops for the target groups to gather and share stories about their pain  points. Besides the explicit motivation to gather ideas and to innovate, we have an implicit  motivation to create buy-in from the stakeholders on the need for AI. This will help ensure  that the future stages go smoothly with collaboration from all involved.

As explained by Mr Carlos White (Global Leadership Development Director, Mars) in the  video in Module 2, the storytelling will bring the context to the use cases that we need. It will  also help us to formulate possible business models (and monetisation models), instead of  just providing us with the use case. This will make the learning launches more powerful.

Application:

I gathered two small groups (4-5 participants each) - one of our clients and one of our  employees – on different dates. In both sessions, I asked the participants to share a story of  what was their biggest pain point during three time periods - during the last week, last  month, and last year. The clients were advised not to indulge anything confidential, and  focus on generic challenges/ pain points (as there were other clients in the session, who  could be a competitor). The only rule was – that it has to be a form of a story – a title, a  beginning, the meaty middle part, and should end with a lesson/ call-to-action. I gave all  participants 5 minutes to think after explaining the process. Each participant had 2 minutes  to share their story (though some went longer than that). After each story, participants and I  (the moderator) would ask questions from the story-teller about how this pain point could be  addressed, and what could have been done differently. Each storyteller had to write a key  message/learning on a post-it note for all to see.

The session with clients lasted 48 minutes, while the session with employees lasted over 72  minutes.

Insights:

Storytelling as a tool was useful due to the following three reasons:

a) It reduced the inhibitions participants had to share their challenges. Instead of just

focusing on the pain point, they could contextualise it – thus, shifting the focus from  their failure to the pain point in question. The sessions lasted longer than what I had  expected

b) It helped me to get internal buy-in to proceed to the next stage. Instead of just

showing the data on the need for AI to my management (2 of them were in the  employee session), I could show them the story around the data points. I am hoping  it will help to speed things up.

c) It was not monotonous – the stories were on different scales of emotions – from fun

to serious, from personal to professional. It helped to break any ice between the  participants.

Approach:

I feel storytelling can be easy for all of us as it is a basic aspect of being human. It also did  not involve extensive preparation in terms of logistics which will be required for learning  launches or require people to come prepared for visualisations. As an alternative, I would  have used visualisation to not only “tell” the impact of AI, but also “show” the impact.  However, I feel the barriers of participants to storytelling approach are much lower –  therefore, it is better to start with this. The next step would be visualisation; followed by  learning launches (I might skip mind-maps for this initiative).

