Reflection – Story telling

Challenge & Selection    Storytelling as a tool for communication is very effective in day to day life. I intend to use  this tool on a regular basis. This is an extremely powerful tool, as we all know  communication solves half the complications in any problematic scenario.  I work with an OEM which designs, manufactures and sells mobility solutions. Ours is a  very old organization whose inception dates to early 1931’s. As a byproduct of ages old  organization came the legacy system.  The pace at which the world moves towards customer keeps the market very volatile and  the competitors keep chasing for ensuring their survival. In this situation there was a  strong need for the organization to change its way of management. But the biggest issue  was to make the people across the organization accept the change which will turn out to  be painful in the initial teething period. The mindset change became the challenge and we  understood that it is not an easy task to make people accept the new ideologies. Thereby  we wanted to align the organization by effective communication and thereby make them  accept the ideology. We decided to choose storytelling as the tool for ensuring effective  communication. Because storytelling has the power to create impact on the masses and  thereby communication will turn out to be successful.    Application    I have a lot of experiences using storytelling, let me share one interesting story in the  journey I’d mentioned above. We had two major changes to be driven across the  organization. One was the policy level migrations and the other was related to day to day  management of activities. The toughest was to convince people about the day to day  management. In the initial stages we failed in selling the concept to the masses. But soon  we realized that people will not be able to accept the concept until they understand the  bigger picture and about the benefits derived out of doing this. We started with  implementation in pilot areas where the situation was found to be convenient and people  were ready to accept change. As planned the implementation started yielding result and  now we started putting in the thoughts of management and created success stories. We  were very concentrative in making sure that the story brings out the key buying factors of  the project. The story was then taken to masses. We started impressing the people  through our campaigning using the success stories. These success stories were so  impactful that people were able to relate it to their routine. The biggest advantage of this  was, we were able to make people visualize the end-result and benefit of the project  though the success stories.    Insight & Approach  As explained in the application portion, the strategy /approach we had chosen was very  realistic. People should be able to relate the story which is being told to their routine life.  When this is done, they’ll be able to understand our key buying factor and thereby the  communication becomes effective. The success of communication lies in the fact that the  intended information is transferred to the recipient of the same. This has proven to be  very successful in our case since we used storytelling combines with the positive support  of a success story / case study.

This finally had an overwhelming response from the entire organization and the  transformation journey was a great success which was possible only because we were  able to align the entire workforce by the power of storytelling.    I strongly recommend the usage of storytelling as an effective tool of communication  and problem solving.

