Story Time with Procurement

Written by Pierre Mitchell

"I think the biggest problem in procurement is that we suck as storytellers”

Amen!

This quote is from a CPO at the Procurement Leaders Americas conference I attended a few weeks ago in Miami.?These types of conferences are chock full of transformation stories, which highlights the importance of storytelling.?When pitching a business case, there must be an economic value proposition, but there must also be a compelling story. As another CPO at the event said: “the data without the story is a disaster”.?In my benchmarking and procurement advisory days, the data was powerful, but CPOs were equally hungry for the ‘stories’ of other CPOs who were most like them and solved similar problems. Likewise, procurement horror stories also serve as cautionary tales. The latter can fill an entire book. In fact, my old colleague Peter Smith wrote a book called “Bad Buying” about such stories.

Stories are powerful.?They’re core to religion, society, culture and even business – including the business of procurement.?The use of storytelling in business is by no means new —?this?HBR article, for example, is from 20 years ago — but it’s still an underutilized change management tool.?It’s sometimes helpful to reimagine the?“user journey” as a hero’s journey where business users must navigate Byzantine quagmires of contract legal review, the drought of budgets, the dungeon of internal audit and even the mysterious riddles of procurement’s n-step sourcing process.?

OK, it’s?not The Lord of the Rings, but?Procurement can be a hero by being both protagonist and?a lead author helping a team write new chapters in a bigger transformation story. A ‘hero role’ is often used as a leadership strategy, whether it’s a CEO guiding a firm out of a crisis (sometimes caused by the CEO!) or a procurement professional that is a ‘firefighter,’ ‘defender,’ etc.?Yet, stories consist of more than just hero roles. They often demonstrate how everyone can write their own story to elevate the mundane to something meaningful and aspirational. Take, for example, VSP’s procurement transformation. Although it?featured?a giant whimsical purple character named Moolah who learned how to become less wasteful in spending, the broader push from the board level was for ‘fiscal fitness’ to be built as a skill by every employee to not just help the firm, but also the employee (beyond the stock ownership program).

Stories can also codify knowledge concerning crises an organization has overcome and how it accomplished certain missions.?One of my favorite stories is the creativity-under-duress scenario from Apollo 13 where the crew had to MacGyver themselves a solution for a CO2 scrubber. I use that example for CPOs that have a grab bag of ERP, S2P suites, best-of-breed, homegrown and IT-provided (e.g., BI tools, MDM, workflow, etc.) solutions that need to be cobbled together into some sort of coherent architecture to deliver value.

Lastly, procurement must promise more than the basic story of cost reduction?— i.e., the ‘story of the brand’ that is relevant for the business and can be fulfilled. And the same goes for those serving procurement.?While the core story will be about value creation,?it requires continuous brand advocacy and storytelling. Such storytelling is a skill like any other and although it requires creativity, improvisation, cultural awareness and other soft skills, anyone in or selling to procurement should strive to be great listeners and question-posers (e.g., about outcomes sought or about potential causes to problems experiences) in order to find and frame some broader stories that go beyond the facts and figures to get at the ‘real stories’ that lie underneath.

Do you have some interesting stories to tell??We’d love to hear them.?Maybe we’ll do our version of NPR’s?Moth Radio Hour?for procurement.