Story Telling

Palani Tan ( noah14@hotmail.com )

Challenge & Selection:

Many a times I am in a situation where I have to motivate a team or an individual to solve problems  in their work or personal space. I use story telling as a primary tool to help them visualize the  situation they are in and it helps them approach the problem from a different perspective. Multiple  perspectives lets us break down the problem into simpler blocks and helps understand the inter  linkages and leads to simple solutions. Story telling always helps the team to participate, empathize  and co-create solutions which also solves change management complexities.

Application:

I was in a situation where we were coming up with a new digital user experience strategy for a  client with a large customer base. The client wanted to develop a strategy for expanding the current  customer base. Within the client organization multiple entities were involved in the process such as  IT, Business, Branding and marketing. Each one had different priorities and the design strategy  being proposed either had too much complexity to be implemented by the IT team or too simple for  business to justify incremental revenues due to the new strategy or it simply did not meet the  branding requirements.

I used the story telling method where, all stakeholders were brought into a room, this being a great  challenge as the teams were spread across Asia and the US. However, once the teams were in one  common location, it provided us a platform for resolving differences immediately. The different  user experience elements were handed over to small teams which had a mix of all the stakeholder  teams and User experience experts. The teams came up with designs and developed their own  stories to tell as to why and how their designs were arrived at. These stories were relatable by the  rest of the stakeholders as it had business implications which they had faced in their day-today  operations. The teams were able to discuss and agree upon experience element designs.

Insight & Approach:

What I learnt from this exercise was that even teams which do not see eye-to-eye in normal  business context can be made to understand each other’s perspectives by bringing them together  and making them co-create stories and solutions that solve critical organizational issues. By  providing an environment to make them co-create solutions and helping them share with the rest  of their team, they were able to see each other’s perspectives and agree upon a middle way so that  they can go ahead for implementation and hence make way for growth of the organization.

Story telling is a tool that I believe that I will use in future as well in situations where I need to make  and push complex decisions for an organization. It involves all stakeholders to think and deliberate  on each other’s perspective at a one-on-one level in a conducive setting without the interference of  organizational dynamics. The solution or strategy that comes out of it is the most optimal and not

necessarily the right solution. But it works as all team members have jointly developed it and will  be earnest enough to see through its success.

