Challenge    While I was studying at my business school in France, we got the chance to follow a six-months  project to learn some skills on how to launch our own businesses. It involved creating teams of 5  to 6 persons and then finding a great idea and preparing everything for the launch. On the last  day of the course, we would be due to present our project with a solid business plan and a 15  minutes’ pitch to 400 others students and a jury of professionals (BNP Paribas, L’Oréal and so  on…). Only 10 teams among the 65 participating would be allowed to go on stage for that  presentation, a selection from the teachers would take place two weeks before to pick up the best  projects. With my team, we faced a hard time choosing an idea, most of our propositions were  nice or funny but none of them was relevant to help our potential future customers solving a true  problem.     Selection    We decided to talk about our everyday lives with my 5 team members and to tell each other every  time one of us was facing a problem or had faced something difficult in the past to see what ideas  could emerge from that. We didn’t know the name of that tool at that time but we were using the  storytelling tool. We had to find interactive way to share our stories with the other team members  to get their attention and then we were using the outcomes of those stories to brainstorm.     In the end of the course, when we got selected among the 10 best teams and allowed to go on  stage, we got to use that tool again to create an engaging story to pitch for the final presentation.     Application    Two weeks before the start of this entrepreneurial course, my father died from a cancer. I was  back in school because I didn’t want to miss anything but my mind was somewhere else. I just  knew one member of the team personally (and she knew what had happened to me), the other  ones were just student I could have seen in the corridors, nothing more.     When we decided to apply the storytelling tool, at first I didn’t want to speak about such a painful  personal experience. I didn’t feel safe enough with the other members. We kept telling each other  stories for 10 days, meeting once a day, but none was bringing us a powerful idea. When I began  to feel a bit more confident with my team, I decided one day to tell them about my father’s death. I  was very sad at the time because my father grave was 10 hours by train from my school and  even by plane, the shortest way to go there took me 8 hours. Also, I was thinking about what the  body of my father could become in that grave and it scared me a lot.     Everyone listened very carefully to my story because the subject was tough of course but also  because almost all the team members could identify with it. If it wasn’t a father, they had lost a  friend when they were a child or a grandmother and could barely go on the grave more than once  a year because of the distance and because of our nomad lives. For instance, during my  business studies, I happened to live in 4 different countries. When you’re abroad, you can’t visit  your family’s graves easily and sometimes it may make you feel sad. We realized we had the  start of an idea there. Six months later we were on stage, presenting our diamond made of  human ashes to the jury. We were offering a new way to think about death and to keep our  beloved ones near us. Also, we liked the idea of permanence that a diamond brought. Thanks to  storytelling, we could explain how this tough personal loss gave us a great idea and how this  project helped me (and the others) to see death not only as a reminder of all the bad things but  also as an opportunity for creativity.      Insight

Thanks to the storytelling tool, we got to know each other very quickly as we were telling our  personal stories to the group on a daily basis. It helped me feeling at ease to bring my personal  experience about my father’s death and we then realized we all echoed in a way to that  experience. That was the starting point of a great idea but also a great adventure that lead us  until the final presentation.     Also for that final day, the help of storytelling was crucial. Our idea wasn’t an easy one to  introduce and we knew many people may be shocked by it. Explaining how this idea happened  and how it helped me to go through that experience moved the audience who was then more  receptive to accept such a disruptive way to deal with death. When we tackled the business plan  part, everybody was listening carefully because their attention was hooked by this storytelling  technique and I can tell you silence was not a common thing during that day.     Approach    I would definitely keep the storytelling tool but next time, I would try to create a secure climate  from the start for everybody to dare sharing its personal stories right from day one and not from  day 10 after getting to know each other because in this project we had six months so it was  alright but in a shorter one 10 days might change a lot. Also, learning how to present well this  project for the final presentation was crucial to my career. Every time I am going to a business  interview, the recruiters are amazed by this story and ask a lot of questions about it. Of course,  this is because it wasn’t a common project but also because I learnt how to introduce it in a  catchy way that engages the person in front of me and questions its relationships to death and  memory.

