Reflection: Storytelling

Challenge & Selection

As a business consultant, storytelling is one of the greatest process in my toolbox. It allows my  clients to take a step back from the day to day actions and see the larger picture. Most of the  work in a company is splitted between different people and different department. This leads to  frustration and a feeling of policing by the management. Storytelling allows me to do two things:

● Understanding the pains of users: narrating their experience pinpoints what needs to be  improved or changed

● Share the end to end process with everyone involved: we paint a common  understanding of the process and its goal

This is especially true with workflow and validation processes where each participants only see  a fraction of the whole.

Application

One of the best application I was a witness of is a budget process between the HR and Finance  departments.  Both departments were relying on each other to close some of their processes. The Finance  Departments needed the HR hiring and turnover projections to set their budget. At the same  time the HR department was waiting for Finance budget to plan hiring.  I set up several workshops with both departments and we went through their budget process. I  ask them to narrate what they were doing in details and how they feel it should be done.  The Finance department explained they were in fact coordinating inputs from all departments  and were under pressure from the management to get results quickly even if not precise at first.  In fact, several versions were always presented before the final budget. A ballpark figure was  better than nothing at first.  The HR department on the other hand, were trying to be get as close as possible to the number  of hires for the next year. They were defining the main positions and skills they would hire and  calculated their budget based on those inputs.

Insight

Sharing those stories between the two departments allowed them to understand what they were  doing and how they could communicate better. Whereas the Finance department was looking  for constant updates, HR thought that it needed to give its input only when it was sure of  everything.

Without strorytelling, we might have missed this key point as speaking only about data, HR  would have say that it provided accurate results.  What we did was set up weekly synchronization points between the two departments so that  they can support each other defining their respective budget. It allowed them to speed up their  budget process and

Approach

I think that storytelling was a powerful driver for change. It allowed to see the world through the  other eyes. The limit is that the person narrating needs to take a step back and explain in  layman terms what she is doing, otherwise no real exchange happens.  I would also add visualization to the workshops to help everyone share the same vision.

