The Visual Storytelling Toolkit

Abstract

The need for companies to innovate continuously has never been greater, due to the complex and dynamic conditions in which they compete today (Gumusluoglu & Ilsev, 2009; Tellis et. al., 2009). The ones who need to innovate, are the employees of an organization. However, to properly innovate, the employees need to understand and be engaged with the vision and know how to apply strategy in daily practices. Yet, this is exactly what is missing. Most employees currently don’t have a clear idea of what their company’s vision and strategy entails (Kaplan & Norton, 2005): research shows that only 8.7 percent of employees rated their knowledge of the company’s strategy above moderate, although they would like to know more about it (Alexander, 1994).
This led to the following research question to explore in collaboration with P2 Strategy (an innovation consultancy): “How to enable P2S to get their clients’ employees to better understand, be motivated about, and apply the client’s vision and strategy into their daily work?”

As an answer to this question, the Visual Storytelling toolkit has been developed. The toolkit consists of tool suggestions on cards. These cards can be used by P2S to set up a tailor made workshop for a specific client, as well as staying involved with the client over a longer period of time. Visualization, materialization and storytelling are applied throughout the toolkit. The toolkit cards are divided into five steps that need to be completed by the participants (employees) during a workshop in order to reach the goal of engaged employees that can innovate in line with the vision. The five steps are:
1. Valuemapper: participants individually retrieve personal values as preparation of the workshop.
2. Vision Sharer: the vision and value shift are shared with the participants in an engaging way.
3. Connector: the retrieved personal values are explicitly linked to the vision(‘s values).
4. Content Stormer: the participants playfully explore ideas to implement strategy.
5. Reflectioner: participants keep the vision on top of mind and reflect (with others) on the progress over a long period of time.

The graduation enhance the understanding of the actual use of strategy tools in both innovation consultancies and their client’s organizations. Furthermore, this study enhances our understanding of how to incorporate design in strategy activities, and that there are interesting opportunities for design (visual storytelling) in the organization field regarding routine change and engaging employees. The findings of this graduation suggest that innovation consultancies need to change their own routines, before being able to change routines of their clients - and that design, and specifically visual storytelling, is a way to do that.