Reflection – Storytelling (Module 2)    Challenge  I am an economist for a large infrastructure consulting firm in the business development team.  As a  result of digital disruption and increased connectivity, our industry is in a significant state of flux.  Our  clients’ needs are changing both in terms of the qualities which they value as well as the particular  skills and services that they need to acquire to help solve their challenges.    As a business, our challenge is to ensure we are agile enough to service the changing needs of our  clients and ensure we are adaptable and resilient in the face of uncertainty.  Out of this, my challenge  is to help develop a new way of working with our clients that differentiates us from our competitors  and enables us to be adaptable in an uncertain future. In order to address this challenge, I have been  working with the strategy team using a design thinking approach to further understand this challenge  and consider a different future.      Selection  I chose to use the storytelling tool to help us convey a new way of working with our clients.  I chose  storytelling as I thought it would be an effective way to demonstrate a possible future way of working  and, hopefully, get our clients excited about this future.  As per the lecture video on storytelling, we  need to “help the audience understand that the current state is more dangerous than any other  possibility out there”.    Our strategy team had already undertaken a lot of work in this space to design a differentiated way of  working with our clients.  We had undertaken some secondary research and ethnographic interviews  with specific clients and stakeholders to understand their unique challenges and what they value. We  had used this information to ask “what if” and brainstorm possible future scenarios and had developed  a rough napkin pitch.  We had an idea that we thought would help us to reduce our clients risk,  increase trust and move us “up the value chain” to becoming key partners rather than having a  transactional relationship.  We were now ready to test with clients and find out “what wows”. To try  and rally the group behind this different way of working, storytelling seemed to be the best tool.      Application  To develop our story, we gathered as a team.  We looked over our napkin pitch ‘future way of  working’ and realised that it needed to be more user-centred.  We needed to frame our story from our  client’s perspective in order to demonstrate why this approach was a good idea.  As per the lecture  video on storytelling, “a good story is designed for the audience and follows a clear sequence of  events”.      As a team we worked on our story.  We developed a narrative and used PowerPoint to show some  very basic, stick figure visuals, that would help to illustrate our concepts.  The stories were written  from the perspective of a character who represented our client and we used the project lifecycle to  provide a clear sequence of events that demonstrate our future way of working.    We wanted to share our story with different clients within the built environment, so we developed our  base story, but we tailored it slightly to each of the specific clients. Our story needed to connect to the  emotions and values of the client for which we are trying to deliver value. So, the hospital we were  building in story the story with client one, became a shopping centre with client two; however the key  elements and structure of the story remained constant.  Our stories went over quite well and elicited  honest, open feedback from our clients.  Most comments were positive and aligned to our story, but  we also received feedback on specific elements that client’s would change.      Insight    The feedback and reactions that we got from our clients were invaluable. I believe that in telling a  story about a fictional character, and engaging our clients on an emotional level, we got deeper, more  honest insights than we would have got by just asking questions.  What was most eye opening to me  was how effective the story was in illustrating our approach to our clients.  They completely  understood what we were saying and why.  This was much more effective than a traditional written  proposal and I believe we should be using storytelling more often to pitch our ideas.

Approach    I believe that storytelling was the most appropriate tool for our purpose.  We needed test with our  clients if they liked what we had come up with as a different way of working.  However, I believe that  our story was too long.  Next time I would focus the story in on a specific element of our future way of  working – or focus it around the central theme, which in this case was partnering.  Despite this, our  insights and outcomes were positive. The best thing for us to do now is refine our future way of  working based on the feedback we got on our story, and develop a learning launch.  If we can create  a small experiment to work differently with a client on a project we will be able to test very quickly  “what works” as is discussed in week 4 of the course.

