Getting the Story Right: Multiple Takes, Multiple Perspectives

One of the things which teamwork allows is instant feedback and a fresh perspective. Before you get too deep into your line of thought and ideas.

We were in a Branding Workshop, which our expert Monia Poncik had helped envision. She and I had met almost every day the week prior, in order to help plan it. The objective: to collect the common vision and ideas from some members from our executive committee, which we would then later translate into a creative brief.

Monia Poncik and Corina Paraschiv in action, reviewing the branding workshop.

Part of preparing for the workshop had involved me defining our Brand and identity — we wanted to allocate as much time as possible to the actual brainstorming and the exercise that would then lead to unique selling proposition, personae, voice, and so on.

The big day had finally arrived. We were going to brainstorm, and discover just who we would be designing the program for, in the next few work sessions.

From left to right: Nolwen Mahe, James Zdralek, Toni Chowdhury, Corina Paraschiv and Zaid Dagamseh; Group pictures to thank the people and organizations who support us through their expertise and resources.

The meeting began, first with an ice breaker, where we recorded mini snipets of stories or insights on what Design Thinking meant to us.

We watched one of the short video clips I had produced during the IDEOu Storytelling for influencers class as a inspiration for the stories we would then share.

We then proceeded to the ice breaker — which will later be used for our youtube playlist as additional stories. Nolwen Mahe shared some insights on how DT transforms a team.

James Zdralek shared beautiful stories that made us rethink about what it means to really do Design Thinking as a process.

After this, we explored what had already been done by various sub-groups in our Design Thinking Montreal executive committees, and launched into sharing “the brand”. What we stood for.

The very first version of our presentation on the topic had been a very corporate powerpoint, sharing the vision for our community.

From that vision, which was my initial take on our project, we collaboratively came up with this one, with Monia Poncik.

But it turns out the workshop uncovered a whole dimension I had completely missed. It was a dimension each of my stories in video format seemed to carry — stories designed for participants and leaders — , but that none of my powerpoint slides — which were targeted to the executive committee and partners — spoke about.

And that was a much more personal story than design thinking, leadership and storytelling frameworks; it was about powerful, emotional things like excitement, impact, change, surprise, energy, curiosity, altruism, problems, powerlessness, being overwhelmed, and even having hopeful doubts — or as one expert put it “already being a half-believer”.

Somehow, it was something that had completely escaped the corporate slides.

As the evening came to a close, we knew this would only be the beginning of deeper reflections. Little bits of intuition that we would now have to follow up on and measure up to reality, as we went into the world to collect real data. For only with real, empathic understanding of the people and organizations we were designing for would we be able to craft both a program and a recruitment campaign that would be a true fit.

We would like to thank :

Toni Chowdhury, for the amazing set of pictures taken and shared with us that evening. Learn more about Toni’s captivating photography with Shutter-Tripper here.

And the Westmount Public Library, for lending us such an inspiring space for our workshop. Learn more about the library’s great cultural programs here.

This article is part of a series of article on Leadership and Community Building. It documents the early stages and making-of story of Design Thinking Montreal — a Think Tank, Leadership Incubator and Best Practices Center. You can discover more about the project here.