Reflection – Storytelling

1. Challenge: Improve caregiver’s service in Argentina.

My first insight for this challenge I´ve chose come a few years ago when my family needed the  service of a caregiver for my father, who a few months ago was diagnosed of Alzheimer’s and  needed somebody who take care of him.    We started the process of finding the right person for taking care of him, buy it really turn into  a very exhaustive process. The main problem was that my father was disappointed with having  an unknown person, taking care of him. He was uncomfortable and with a very bad mood… He  didn´t know how to manage the situation, did he had to talk to he/she? To establish some sort  of relationship? Or it was only a transactional service?... Of course we didn’t know the answer,  but we did have to struggle with the consequence. Every caregiver we take on, lasted from 1 to  3 months. So the question was if there was an “ideal” caregiver that we still couldn’t found or it  was a lost cause… my father was never going to accept the fact of having an strange in his  house for taking care of him.

2. Selection: I selected the Storytelling Tool, since the challenge became from a personal

experience, I think that this tool was the best one that suited for taking audience’s attention  and getting emotional connection, from putting the human beings and experiences up front.   (I recommend to see again Josue Lopez’s video about Storytelling as a tool)

3. Application: My first hypothesis was that if find a way to link patients and caregivers with

similar interests there will be more likely to create a connection, more than a service.  I thought if there was possible to connect, to link, making that “match” between the people  who needed a Caregiver and the Caregivers who needs the job for living there would be more  likely to establish a better and more personal relationship.  With my team, we tested the idea with a group of 15 caregivers and 10 persons who needs that  kind of service. Almost all of them (except de skeptic), agreed that there was a great idea to  link patients (or Elder people) with caregivers with this more personalized approach.  For giving an example if the Caregiver were a fun of football, reading o movies, in the case he  were hired for taking care of somebody with the same “hobbies” the probability of success  would be much higher.

After testing the hypothesis we develop a prototype of a web site (like Uber or Happen) who  lets you login as a Caregiver or login for finding one, with all the relevant information about the  person, preferences, rating, comments (like Trip Advisor Business Model) of other persons who  had been career for him.. with reputation and the opinion of other “clients”.    We presented the project to the General Manager of a Top 10 pharmaceutical company.  He demonstrated interest because from his point of view this was a way to “go beyond the  pill”, in other word it was an opportunity for starting a disruptive business within a traditional  industry as the health care in Argentina.

4. Insight: using the storytelling as a tool really helped me to put in context that clearly there was

an uncovered need and an opportunity for a new business. But I think that the best of all is that  when I talked with the people starting from a personal situation the engagement with the  audience was completely different. Applying the tool much more I spoke with different persons  about my experience, the need or “pain” and the project was very usefull because I received  inmediate feedback about the idea, and I improved communicating and getting people involved  with the challenge, using Storytelling as a tool.

5. Approach: Although in my case I felt very comfortable using storytelling, I think that next time

I´d like to complement storytelling with another tool (like mind mapping), just because only  storytelling may not be the best tool, or could be more powerful if combined with other.

