Storytelling: your service design best friend (Book & Figma Storytelling Kit at the end)

1 - What are stories

Stories are the core of the human being. Human first needs are divided into 4 categories: Body, Mental, Spiritual, Nature, essentially to create who we are.

Essentially divided in

• Body: What people do and act for the best of their life
• Mental: How people feel and think
• Spiritual: How people dream and believe to be or trust
• Nature: Where people act, think and dream and with whom...the context of living.

As you can see the 4 categories are also divided in 2 sub-categories

• Concrete and visible: Body & Nature
• Abstract and invisible: Mental & Spiritual

All our human nature is based on these 4 blocks that allow us to develop our self and be better day by day.

Stories are that: the best way to connect body, mental, spritual and nature components to understand what happen and empathize about it.

Stories are not only a way to tell something that happend or will happen in the future, is also a way to remember and better share our thought with other.

If you stories you touch the soul of other people you will be sure the have an impact on their lives and at least on their mind.

Good stories are remarkable and memorables. This is the basic of storytelling.

2 - The value of storytelling in service design

Ok, now we can go deeper on that.

In service design we use journeys and mapping to connect everything and make sense of what we deliver to our people (yes, I do not love customers, users, lets talk about humans, people).

There are 3 mains reasons to create storytelling in your company:

• Break internal siloes: Show to your colleagues that is possible to breaking siloes and work across stream. Be a divergent (hope you have the reference). If you are in the sale team you need to know what happen after or if you are in the customer support you need to know what was signed or bought with the customer. Everyone need to have a core role but everyone need to be aware about what happen before, during and after to better deliver the value. This is the essence of dynamics team working in journeys and stories. And this bring us to the second value
• Cross Alignment: Your customers (people or companies) do not mind about your organisation structure...they need simplicity and and clear path and journey to achieve their goals. When we talk about a journey, or a story, we need to think that everyone has a job to achieve, a goal. People lives around to achieve these jobs and hire solutions to get this job done (a functional one). People do not want to see your advertising newsletter for the sake to read it...they wanted because they wanted to get a job done, your news letter exists only to achieve a great and higher goal. For example: when you want to take a car, this is not your final goal but only a step for a greater one. You goal maybe is to take the car (little goal) in order to go to your family to eat on sunday (bigger goal). And this is what is really important, not taking the car but eat with your family. Stories are focused on the higher goal to merge and connects different dots and align different strams and entities inside your organisation. Work together to align horizontally and deliver consistency and work vertically in core teams to deliver expertize and quality for each step. The value of story is not "divide and conquer" but is more "Align and be consistent".
• Close the Gap: The third one is linked to the journey that you deliver to your people and how people think and act: their Mental Model. The value of storytelling and journeys in general is the capacity to understand how to solve people problems in different aspects of their life. Starting with the problem first (Mental Model) about what they need to get a job done we can better understand what to deliver (our solution) to help them get this done. Stories can help you close the gap and connect every dots about people Mental Model (Gains, Pains & Jobs) with your service proposition (Capabilities, products & processes).

The perfect moment to use Storytelling

We need to know that exists 3 different types of journeys and ways to describe a story depending on the when they happen

• Before - The past
• During - The present
• After - The future

One of the main use of storytelling in service design is to explain the connection between these 3 moments related to the service value delivered with 3 principles that I always apply:

• Design behaviours not features
• Design for the future knowing the past, the Design projection approach
• Design the invisible

If we come back to the 3 moments we can see that

• The past is the problem that we need to solve --> Our Why (The job to be done and pains)
• The present are the possible solutions that we can deliver to solve that problem --> Our How (Our solution)
• The future is the desired outcomes that we want to achieve thanks to our solution --> Our What (Their needs solved by our solution or the ideal state)

As you can see we can use storytelling to make the bridge between the past, the present and the future telling the story about how you want to solve people problems to achieve the desired outcomes.

When thinking about these 3 moments we need to pay attention also about the context and all people engaged in the system from front to back and merging all the company entities to deliver a cross consistent value in every channels and touchpoints in a coordinated way.

The perfect moment to use storytelling is just in the middle between understanding the current state of things and the future projection of the solution.

After conducting some exploratory discovery research to identify the problems and needs and just after ideation with your team and prioritizing and testing ideas you can use this tool to explain the value and prepare the implementation to better empathize and understand what happen in the future.

You can use Storytelling as a prototype to gather feedback too. Story is the most powerful way to share your thinking.

Why not use a simple and classical journey map ?

You can. You can use a Journey Map to design your future state design and be able with a Service Blueprint to explain what’s happen in a very system approach.

But this is not the point, the benefit of a storytelling is pure communicative and to clarify or debate about the idea of the concept and asking questions to better design the how it works. You can take the storytelling as a prototype of your idea to looking for improvement or questions about your story. If you story is not clear or not logic you have a problem on the solution.

Before to define a real future state journey map for implementation, test your idea with storytelling and be able to connect the 3 moments that is impossible to do with a simple classical journey map.

What I always try to create is a connection between map

1. CURRENT STATE: As-Is Service Blueprint/ User Journey Map (Tactic) or Experience Map/Mental Model/Job Map (Strategy) to frame the problem
2. WHAT COULD BE: Storytelling to share the idea to solve the problem (our focus in this article)
3. FUTURE STATE: To-Be Service Blueprint to design the full process and deliver it

Between the 1st and 2nd step there is the ideation step that allow you be creative and solve people problems.

Between the 2nd and 3rd step there is the Concept testing phase. You need to be sure to design the right thing (Desirable, viable and feasible)

Between the 3rd and the 1st step there is the implementation of your idea and the transformation of your to-be into the new as-is.

The Hero Dramatic Arc: How to play with emotions

For every story we need to think about the emotional state that we want to share with our audience and going trough different phases in our Before, During and After moments. The Dramatic Arc help you to better frame your opportunity (problem) and connect your solution.

Opportunity Problem Space

1. The first important element to introduce is the context: the current situation (who, where, when and with whom) are the ground elements to understand the trigger of everything in the story. With this elements you will understand the purpose of everything and the reasons why of future actions and needs.
2. The second element is the problem: in that phase you need to explain the goal and the problem that your hero (the who) face in a moment and the events that trigger everything. You need to explain the job to be done and which needs are underserved.
3. Third and most important part is the climax: This part is when you explain the negative consequences and also root causes of the problem deeping dive of the negative emotions and impact on your hero life.

Solution Space

1. Magic happens: Now is time to have fun. Finally your hero found a way to overcome problems with your ideated solution. Explain how heroes discover, explore, use your solution to get their job done better than before.
2. Desired outcome achieved: At the end, explain the ideal state of your journey what the ideal future looks like at the end (from a hero perspective and also business one). The story is finished...or another problems still there ?

At the end, the situation from the initial state will be improved thanks to the solution discovered and used to solve the problem.

Journeys & Humans - A Story to tell

If you to become the Journey Master to create amazing experiences for humans, define the concept backlog & be ready to test your solutions, I can suggest you my auto-edited book.

Discover a new way to design your user and customer journey with your team. Based on the Dungeons & Dragons game, animate ideation workshops to collaborate in the creation of the future experience of your customers and be ready to test your solutions.

This book allows you to:

• Learn more about the different types of mapping that you can use
• See the best practices for creating journey maps
• Learn how to run your own J&H game session
• Define the next steps for testing & develop your solutions

Find my digital version of my book here:

https://fredypascal.gumroad.com/l/ezrxs

Storytelling Figma Kit

If you want an early access to a Figma Storytelling kit please send me a Linkedin message about that and I will invite you to the Figma file to try and get feedback on the first version of the kit. (Integrated with "The Doodle Library" and "Paper Kit by Method").

The Storytelling Kit is a design system that allow you to create cards for storytelling to share with your audience the current state problems and the future state design.

Design with the story in mind aligning the who, when, where, why and what to define and shape your opportunity in the best way.

Fredy Pascal - Senior Service Designer