Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge and Selection

Storytelling describes the social and cultural activity of sharing stories and experiences. Every  culture has its own stories or narratives which are shared as a means of entertainment,  motivation and even education. It is also, as I have learned from this course on Design Thinking,  an effective tool in not only solving problems but also creating a cause. Below is an instance in  which I selected storytelling as a way to not only get people on board with an idea but also to  help unite them towards a cause.

During the lockdown imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, many people  were faced with the formidable task of procuring basic essentials themselves and their families.  In such a depressing and distressing situation, I was faced with the challenge of lending a  helping hand and trying to provide assistance to the most vulnerable in our town. With this  vision in mind I contacted a few like-minded individuals to pool in ideas on how to address this  problem. After a lot of deliberation, we finally discovered a potential solution in the form of an  online store for groceries and other essential commodities as well as a home delivery service.  This would enable those who could not come out of their homes to have their essentials  delivered to their doorstep without putting their health at risk. However, another problem  unfortunately arose. A few people were daunted by the idea. They lacked the motivation and  drive and did not see a way it was possible.

Application

To tackle this problem, I resorted to a narration of a story from my own experience in my  locality. There is an old lady who lives alone and who was distressed by her inability to procure  basic essentials. As neighbours, we all rallied to help her but it was a short-term enterprise. She  needed something more reliable. I told them seeing this old lady struggle to get her essentials  made me realise there were so many more out there in her situation, which is why I had asked  them to come together and come up with ideas to help elderly people like her as well as other  people. I reiterated that the online store and delivery service solution we had come up with  would truly enable us to help such people in need and we would also be fulfilling our social  responsibilities.

Insight and Approach

After narrating the story and presenting the vision behind this need to help people, everyone  was motivated and it helped bring everyone together to work hard for the cause.

Where persuasion did not work, storytelling had the desired effect and the team got together  to successfully launch an online service that was hygienic and maintained the protocols issued  by the government for this pandemic. We started by contacting suppliers, keeping inventory of  some essential items then proceeded to launch an online app that was fairly easy to navigate  and use for people to place their order. The orders were delivered by a designated few of us  and we followed all sanitizing and social distancing protocols to ensure that the customers were  never given even a single moment to be concerned about their wellbeing. This project has  become a huge success and now we have more than five hundred customers (we initially had  under 20!).

From this I learnt that storytelling is a powerful tool and has a high impact factor and this  course has shown me how beneficial it would be to if I continued using it in future instances to  overcome hurdles that would otherwise seem too hard to conquer without storytelling.

