Final assignment_STORYTELLING    Design Thinking for Innovation

Challenge

In 2016, in the company where I currently work, we realized that there was a quantifiable and  historical problem: there were few women in management positions and that meant that as  an organization we were far from parity. In addition, it also meant that we had wasted talent,  that we were depriving ourselves of innovative ideas, improved profitability and  representation of the highest percentage of our clients: women. It was difficult for us to  verbalize and quantify the problem, but once identified, the most difficult thing was to  understand how we could solve it, knowing that the solution would be in the medium and long  term and that to achieve it we needed to listen the women who were managers, to  understand their experiences during your career.

For this reason, in 2016 the 80 women who held management positions in the company were  selected, and they were asked to hold a 2-day focus group to find out what obstacles and  levers they had encountered in their professional development in the company.

Selection

It was the first time that the 80 female directors of the company had gathered in the same  room and, although most of them felt excited by the meeting and found it very promising,  there was also a tense atmosphere in which none of them felt empowered enough to share  her personal experience.

And this is when the tool we used comes in: storytelling.

The meeting was led by the female manager who had been assigned the goal of increasing the  percentage of female executives in the company in the next 5 years. And it was she who we  advised to open the session by telling her personal story at the company.

Application

The female manager began by explaining all the benefits of her professional development in  the company since she entered 20 years ago until now. After about 5 minutes of explanation,  she said the following: but what about the things we never say because sometimes we don't  even realize it? And from there she began to mention all those moments in which she had felt  that, being a woman, she had had more difficulties to advance professionally: when her boss  had interpreted that because she was a mother she would not want to go on that business  trip, when to She hadn't been promoted because she didn't have so many things in common  with her boss, when she had given up raising her hand or speaking at a meeting, when she  hadn't been able to present herself for a position of more responsibility ...

Once she finished her story, we separated the 80 women into 10 groups of 8, and we  encouraged each of them to mention moments in her professional career where she had had  difficulties. Encouraged by the story of the first female manager and by those of the rest, all  women empathized with each other and felt part of a group, part of a generation of unique  women capable of changing how much they wanted. They told their stories, came together,  and together they found common patterns.

Final assignment_STORYTELLING    Design Thinking for Innovation

Insight

With the material from all the stories collected, we were able to design the journey of women  in the company and develop an action plan to address those moments and situations that  prevented more women from reaching management roles. Those processes and situations that  were positive were also detected.

In 2017 we brought together all the directives participating in the focus group and we showed  them the results of the analysis of the information based on their personal stories that we  collected and processed from the first meeting.

As a result, the women executives devised a new great initiative: a diversity program in the  company, in which the top management was involved, that would work to promote gender  equality and diversity with specific actions and with a clear objective: to achieve parity in  company management.

The program was created in 2018 and currently continues, with more than 40 projects  underway and with new objectives included in the organization's strategic plan.

Approach

In future situations such as the one described, apart from storytelling, we would like to use  other design thinking tools such as mind mapping, because in the sessions held with female  managers, we lacked some techniques to encourage their creativity and pooling of ideas. For  the subsequent analysis of the stories that all of them told in the groups in the first meeting,  we would have done very well if the storytelling had been reinforced with some other tool, but  it is true that the result was splendid and we are very proud to have been able to know their  experiences in such a personal and intimate way to be able to solve an important problem.

