Using storytelling to understand roadblocks towards equality

Fa Leclercq

Challenge

Because my organization wants to be a leader in how it cares for its talented employees, naturally the  issue of gender equality recently arose. More specifically, prior research had shown an inequality in the  amount of female leaders present in the company. Furthermore, one of the causes of this phenomenon  seemed to be a significant bottleneck at a certain level of management in the company, where some  women seemed to ‘get stuck’ in their career. Being assigned to conduct a project to discover the causes  of this bottleneck, I used the design thinking tool called storytelling as a guiding principle throughout the  project.

Tool description

Storytelling can be used as a tool to gain deep understanding into the journey your target population  goes through. It helps researchers go beyond spreadsheets, numbers, and graphs by putting the person  at the center of the conversation, getting to know him/her inside-out, and most importantly, going along  with them through their life and journey and gaining deep understanding in all the ups and downs they  go through. I used this technique at several stages of the project to gain understanding in the career  journey that employees, and more specifically female colleagues, in the company go through to get  insight in possible roadblocks and accelerators along this journey.

Tool application and approach

In a first phase of the project, we organized a handful of in-depth, meaningful interviews where we had a  one-on-one conversation with colleagues which we had localized as key figures in our target population,  i.e. women that seemed ‘stuck’ in their careers. In these hour-long conversations, we discovered the  ‘backstory’ of each of these women, their ambition, and their reflection on the company and the role  they play in it.  Although we found some overlapping subjects, we gained most insight from the  differences we heard in each story.

After getting a retrospective view on the journey, we decided in a second phase of the project to get to  know the story of the employees at different stages in their careers leading up to the bottleneck. Again,  we used storytelling as our main tool in our arsenal. By inviting a dozen colleagues, all at different stages  in their career, to a short coffee break, we got to know what was going on in the lives of these  colleagues. This gave us ‘contemporary’ input, which was very much complementary to the retrospective  insights we had gained from previous interviews. Although we heard that most colleagues were full of  ambition to grab their career with both hands, they also recognized some roadblocks along the way.

We combined our data to assemble a complete and comprehensive story of the career journey of our  female managers. This story was then brought into a simple lifeline, which was the basis of our third  storytelling phase.

We invited a dozen managers and upper management and divided them in two workshop groups. The  main purpose of these workshops was as following: to get the final input on the story of the career  journey they had gone through.

In the workshops, we discussed the scope of the project and explained briefly what we had already  gathered. However, the power of storytelling rapidly became clear. Because the story was now told in a  group setting, we noticed how participants could feed off each other’s input and chime in by adding  quotes and anecdotes they had completely forgotten about, but that had turned out to be of great  impact. Conversationally, the participants recalled and refined their story and found commonalities, as  well as unique aspects in their stories. We used the story of these colleagues as our guiding principle  when presenting our findings to the board of our company.

Insights

We quickly realized the strength of storytelling in this project. Although the quantitative research helped  us identify the main problem we wanted to solve and find our main population, it was the storytelling  that gave us the real insightful information. We did away with the numbers for a while to just focus on  what the actual people involved could teach us about the way things were going in the company and  how they had been perceiving their environment.

My first key take-away from this project is to not get stuck on finding similarities in the stories, but to try  and see the beauty in the uniqueness of each story. Although similarities can be useful to get a high-level  view of the situation, the unique details in each story can help you get to underlying root causes of the  problems you’re trying to solve.

My second key take-away would be to never be satisfied with the information you have. There are  always details, anecdotes or differences that can help you get a more holistic view of the story you’re  trying to grasp. In this case, even three angles on the same story in my opinion did not fully bring us to  our so-called saturation point.

My last take-away would be to not get lost in the stories when the saturation point is reached. Although  storytelling can bring us very rich data, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Keep the main problem you’re  investigating in mind throughout the process to not get lost in sidetracks. This might in turn help you in  identifying solutions to the very problem you are trying to solve.

