Storytelling & Diversity - two keys to learn from crises

It all happened around Christmas last year. Until then, my leader Ralf Franke, Medical Director with Siemens, had been hoping that the Coronavirus outbreak might be limited to mainland China. When he heard about the first cases outside the country, and when Germany’s public health agency Robert Koch Institute started defining regions of risk, it dawned on him that “there was a tsunami heading straight towards us”. 

Ever since then, Health & Safety experts at Siemens in all countries have been working towards protecting the safety of Siemens employees and ensuring business continuity at the same time. We are in a continuous learning process, and we keep adapting our actions. According to Ralf

“it is of major importance that the experiences and the know-how we generate do not go to waste”. 

Diversity is key

This crisis serves to illustrate clearly the importance and value of integrating a broad bandwidth of perspectives, backgrounds, and expertise. Diversity is also key in the context of learning from the crisis. But how can we capture multiple dimensions and perspectives? How can we explore diverse realities?

 To be asking “What will you be doing differently?” is just not enough. We need to understand what worked out well, and why certain actions do not show the expected effects. We need to explore the causal and contextual relationships as well as the consequences of what is being done. For a comprehensive and deeper understanding we need to dig deeper. Ralf Franke:

“In order to tap the full value potential, we need to directly access the personal experiences of people – and we need to do that now”.

Storywork gives us access to the complex practical experience of people. As storytelling expert Professor Michael Müller describes: “Learning is enhanced by situations of emotional significance. Storytelling supports our creation of problem-solving strategies and the implementation of competent behavioral patterns, which the storyteller would not have been able to put into words without the storytelling process. Storytelling opens the context of people’s actions and their emotional involvement”. 

Here’s our approach

I myself have worked on the basis of narratives before, e.g. with the concept of the “Hero’s Journey” at the beginning of a big project. I also use narrative techniques in my coaching sessions.

This time, we will work based on a narrational inquiry. With the aim of preserving our experiences in the COVID-19 crisis, we are proceeding as follows:

In phase 1, I am doing open narrative interviews. Phase 2 will have our team evaluate these interviews based on methods of qualitative content analysis. We will be looking for “critical incidents” – situations which turned out to be particularly challenging or successful. We will be asking the following questions:

• Which experiences, findings, best practices, and lessons learned can we identify within these narratives?
• What are the contradictions and common features which manifest themselves when we compare various narratives with each other?
• What are the value systems behind these narratives?

We will formulate our initial hypotheses and present them in a visual format.

As phase 3, based on these hypotheses, we will then conduct semi-structured interviews asking questions about selected topics to make our hypotheses more concrete and to broaden their spectrum. In this joint evaluation, diversity will again play a key role. Everyone in the team will bring in their individual unique professional expertise and backgrounds.

The shared view of the narratives and hypotheses will help us achieve a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of our Environment, Health, and Safety Community, and it will provide insights on how our company is working in the current crisis. This will permit us to be better prepared for subsequent crises, as well as to adjust our strategic orientation and shape our future.

 I’m excited about this approach – I find it extremely rewarding to be listening to these narratives. What is your lessons-learned approach? Please get in touch!