Reflection Storytelling

Challenge & Selection  As a consultant I usually find myself in situations where my customers (often enterprise-sized)  organization works in organizational silos, preventing them from utilizing their true potential. Also,  more often than not they also have an inside-out perspective within their silo as well, meaning that  the collaborative cross-organizational collaboration needed for success is missing. Another  implication of this way of working is that very few (if any) stakeholder sees the holistic picture of  what needs to be done in order to succeed with growing their business, resulting in silo-based sub- optimizations.

One approach that has been successful in-order to create a common “big-picture” understanding  and a clearly defined cross-organizational goal has been to use storytelling. Usually, I create a multi- layer story, ranging from how the customers interactions triggers different functionality in the  underlying internal IT-landscape. Combining these two aspects not only creates a more holistic view  of the challenge but simultaneously opens up for the constructive/creative discussions among the  different stakeholders when they see how they fit in in the puzzle.

Application  Before I draw anything I collect the various views of the problem statement by talking to and  observing (if feasible) the different stakeholders. In the best of would the end-users are included in  this work, however, in B2B settings it’s not always easy to get access to the actual consumers  (and/or customers). The interviews gives me a more detailed insight about the domain and usually  highlights gaps in the overall process or solution.

When I have a clear understanding of the solution I start mapping up the story and decide which  perspectives that are needed in-order to capture the holistic picture. Along the way I usually ask the  different stakeholders for feedback regarding their area of responsibility to make sure I get the  details right. However, I try not to reveal too much of the other aspects (at this stage since that is  the objective of the next phase).

When I am confident that I captured the details in each respective aspect I start building the scenes  with my hand-drawn (and vectorized) figures, see the two snapshot images below for reference. The  scenes are later animated (often in PowerPoint), detailing e.g. how the customers interaction effect  the information flow in CRM, how a two-factor authentication works across the devices or whatever  scenario(s) that needs to be detailed.

The last phase is to tell the story using the narrative that accompanies the animated PowerPoint- presentation. The audience ideally consist of the primary decision-makers and affected stakeholders  and the discussions that follows the storytelling are super valuable.

Insight & Approach  My methodology has evolved over the years when trying to “connect the dots” in cross- organizational and complex business environments. Previous I used a combination of flowcharts,  information flows and customer journeys to try to explain these concepts. The fact is that I still use  all those methods to form my own understanding and build the domain knowledge. However, I  experienced that many stakeholders could relate to a set of the artifacts (but not all of them),  resulting in lower impact both on understanding and discussion. When starting to tell the story I saw  a drastically increased impact and gained faster results at the client.

The storytelling as proven to be very powerful as it creates alignment, breaks down silos (to some  extent at least) as well as provide an outside-in perspective that glues together with capabilities  within the internal landscape.

The new insights and reflections that arise when the holistic picture and the (often) overlooked  opportunities are presented and explained can really be the tipping-point for alignment and the  ability to focus on a common goal. However, a word of caution: One need to find the appropriate  level of detail in all layers and also validate each layer so people don’t get stuck in the wrong  discussions.

Image 1. The customer receives an email to verify its email-address

Image 2. The internal micro-service landscape responds accordingly, marking the email-address as  verified

