The Magic of Storytelling
Using creativity and storytelling (verbal and visual) has been a core practice in TBD’s projects. It makes the envisioning process more engaging and immersive, allowing the audience to enjoy, loosen up, and believe, compelling them to come up with solutions that are both innovative and practical, with both logic and empathy.
A future scenario depicting hyper predictive analyses enabling accurate shopping suggestions and automated services fulfilling the needs of time-deprived consumers
In numerous future scenarios built with our clients, we’ve brought to life many stories with words, illustrations, and videos, often placing humans, as customers, consumers, and users, at the center.
Consider the single dad who needs his refrigerator replenished automatically, the social influencer who wants to focus on creating her content rather than the logistics of shipping products to her followers, the fresh graduate from a lower-middle-class family who dreams of having better mobility options to commute to work without purchasing a car, or the elderly cancer patient who needs regular medical appointments while facing another global pandemic. Do you feel their tangible pain and want to root for their pursuits? What about the business opportunities if we solved their problems in these future worlds?
Bringing human experiences into consideration when solving problems of process and operations
With B2B businesses and process and operations focused topics, we also emphasize the elements of human experiences with storytelling.
In a current scenario, we may have the GI lab director struggling to keep track of the whereabouts of scopes and their timely replacement and repair. Her nurse team might misplace scopes due to overbooked schedules. In future scenarios enabled by more technologies, they might find life easier with an AI copilot, or they might become more overwhelmed. What might be the problem? What can we do to mitigate risks?
Making analogies with tales or storylines familiar to the audience can help simplify, clarify, and make sense of complicated concepts and information
Even when we look at the future at a competitive landscape level, storytelling can add more color to the picture, making it easier to digest and engaging to consider.
A “Game of Thrones” situation describes the increasingly fierce competitive dynamic in 3-5 years in an advanced technology industry, where diverse customer demands are skyrocketing and all players compete on innovation and strategic agility, while your organization might or might not be ready to jump in. In another scenario, “The Peace Before the Storm,” the market slows down, competition focuses on price, external threats loom, and consolidation is on the horizon for smaller players, while your organization might or might not have a clear direction for strategic M&A and investment. What can we do now to be more prepared, resilient, and proactive?
These stories are not just creative expressions of the artists. They are based on the data and insights from the research phase, where we take rigorous steps to scan, collect, analyze, and prioritize information to inform the scenario building. Nor do they serve as mere entertainment or fun creative exercises. They effectively help the audience create solutions that are both innovative and practical.
Why? There’s proven science behind why people resonate with a good story: The story arc matches how our brain processes and remembers information, while emotional content in the stories enhances memory retention. When listening to a story, people’s brain activity mirrors that of the storyteller, creating a connection known as neural coupling. This gives storytelling power in persuading changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors by creating a deeper connection at the levels of values and emotional experiences.
Visual/video can bring a future scenario to life beyond text can amplify the effects of storytelling
Now, don’t forget the added power of multiple visual storytelling methods. Storyboards, visual journey maps, and video clips are powerful tools to employ when trying to immerse the audience in make-believe future situations.
An illustration of a man running out of the door with a briefcase in one hand and a toddler in the other immediately does much more than a 500-word paragraph. An early-adopter consumer telling you on camera about how he enjoys his vacation by leveraging various technologies, showing you pictures from his trip taken by drones, and recounting the pleasant moments will stay with you with vivid details and inspire you to design future solutions for more people like him.
This is a repeatable process of insight synthesizing, world creating, and enhanced communication. It’s both an art and a set of techniques, based on a solid framework and requiring knowledge and skills gained in practice.
Any questions about this approach? Interested in a conversation to learn more? Contact TBD for an intro.
Additional reads on the science behind storytelling and visual storytelling
Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication By Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson “We used the speaker's spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker's activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener's activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate.” https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1008662107
Words Versus Pictures: Leveraging the Research on Visual Communication By Pauline Dewan “Pictures are not only more effortless to recognize and process than words, but also easier to recall. When words enter long-term memory they do so with a single code. Pictures, on the other hand, contain two codes: one visual and the other verbal, each stored in different places in the brain (Paivio). The dual-coding nature of images allows for two independent ways of accessing visual memories, increasing the odds of remembering at least one of them.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297749750_Words_Versus_Pictures_Leveraging_the_Research_on_Visual_Communication