The Benefits of Change

Abstract

Every change creates both positive and negative outcomes. The positive outcomes are the benefits of undertaking the change effort. Some of these benefits will be obvious, but there may be other benefits that are important to certain segments of your change audience but may be just beneath the surface and not obvious; or people may refuse to recognize some benefits.

Inspiration, Relevance, and Immediacy: Introducing StoryFORMing

Entrepreneurs and innovators enthuse when introducing a new solution that will improve people’s lives. Their passion is a key ingredient. But passion can lead to blind spots that may slow down or even block success. Also, business schools teach analysis, which often relies on cold facts and bald figures stripped of human relevance. While quantitative analysis plays an important role in assessing the potential of new concepts, spreadsheets and data-rich models aren’t enough to win buy-in. To ignite hearts alongside heads, entrepreneurs and innovators turn to methods that tap people’s imagination. Good stories are relevant, have immediacy, and inspire sharing.

Hollywood producer Peter Guber has an anecdote that illustrates what happens when we pitch without a story. In Tell To Win, he described his dream of bringing a minor league baseball team he owned to Las Vegas. He thought the family fun of having a home team would improve the quality of life in Sin City. So he arranged to meet Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman. Guber knew Goodman as a force to reckon with, and Guber need the mayor’s support for building a state-of-the-art stadium as a home for the team. But he walked into the mayor’s office armed with the data but without a story. Statistics simply aren’t enough when you’re there to sway someone into action and what you’re offering isn’t what they’ve expected. Guber is big enough to describe his failure. Had he had the right story, the mayor would’ve seen how his own interests would be served by the value a home team brings to the Las Vegas electorate. It’s the same insight behind the jobs-to-be-done framework. Clayton Christensen told a packed house at RSA in London in 2013: “Spreadsheets made numbers the substance of management. If you watch managers at work, you’d think they ship numbers. The only virtue of numbers is they provide a common language. But it’s a terrible language when you work with anything of substance.”

Storytelling is a vital method. For too long, though, storytelling skills have pooled in a marketing or communications function that may be located downstream in the invention process. storyFORMing is a visual thinking tool that helps individuals and teams generate a canvas to explain what you’re doing and why anyone would care. (That is, after all, what Guber was missing in his conversation with Mayor Goodman.) It frees story formulation from depending just on talent because it becomes a craft people can learn and practice. Now, perspiration (work) can underpin inspiration.

Let’s look next at relevance and immediacy. The questions that power storyFORMing are written in everyday English. They encourage us to shed jargon. This means that the resulting story can be understood by a wider range of people, which is so important when we want our innovation stories to spread.

Imagine you’re working as part of an NGO team striving to curb malaria deaths. The evidence is unequivocal: the most vulnerable are infants, children under five, and pregnant women. Other trials confirm that regular use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets reduces mosquito bites that transmit malaria. The NGO plans a social marketing program bringing branded mosquito nets at an affordable price point to communities with high infection and mortality rates. The program will involve community members in promoting and selling ITNs and in setting up and maintaining safe, affordable insecticide retreatment services. The problem is that in most households, men control disposable income and find sleeping under the nets without their children most comfortable. How can the nets be sold to men but used and maintained by women? Let’s leave the puzzle there for a moment and turn for a moment to the storyFORMing process.

In storyFORMing, the six areas you’ll consider are:

• 1. Who do we serve?

• 2. What do we offer?

• 3. How does our offer benefit people?

• 4. If those benefits last, what’s the new normal?

Answering these questions forms the core story. The core story is bounded by two important considerations:

• 5. Who are we and what are our capabilities?

• 6. What’s going on in the wider world?

For the NGO team, the division of household resources and health risk in the wider world means that two storyFORMs are needed, one capturing the offer for men’s perspective, and another for women. Without the men seeing the need for a net they do not use, women, infants, and children may go unprotected. The storyFORMing process would make the men’s perspective tangible, and what is learned can be used to brand the product and its distribution channel to appeal to men’s desire to protect and provide for their families during the periods of life when women and young children are most vulnerable, even when to do so is to sacrifice their own sound night’s sleep. Similarly, the retreatment services branding can speak to the responsibilities women feel for their own health and the health of their children, affirm their value as human beings, and reinforce their agency. Two storylines weave together in one overarching story: preserving health against the threat of malarial infection and death (Fig. 8.2).

Fig. 8.2

StoryFORMing Canvas

So, the articulation of plural perspectives is one benefit of storyFORMing. Another is that the storyFORMing canvases you make (iteration is easy) can sit easily alongside Lean Canvas or Business Model Canvas, and its questions plumb the richness of people’s experience in a more in-depth manner than Value Proposition Canvas. People can storyFORM simply by listing answers to the main questions and the 10–15 sub-questions in each section. However, taking a task-like approach to storyFORMing limits its power. Instead, I encourage people to add several practices to their storyFORMing:

• Bring others into the dialogue. The questions are so portable. Bring them with you and treat the responses they garner like a harvest: it’s nourishing when it’s fresh.

• Postpone convergence. Let the team sit with the questions and the answers they’re gathering. Ask people to discuss what they’re discovering without pressure to take decisions. I’ve seen teams wholly align on a single company name we’ve proposed working in this way. It’s the opposite of dictating a decision as if the path to take rises in front of all more or less at the same time.

• Introduce the canvas so that instead of lists, you start working with the answers in relation to one another. The canvas uses color and shape to establish the relationships between these considerations, and when people storyFORM together in person, the three-dimensional aspect of the storyFORMing canvas provokes fresh connections between the team’s understanding of the wider world and its perception of itself and of the people it strives to serve.

Because storyFORMing is an accessible, flexible framework it can be embedded at the front end of innovation, which you can then use throughout a project’s lifecycle. Learning it can make you more efficient in developing an initial concept and add ease and joy when it comes time to evaluate a prototype or pilot.