Post-its in Paris
The post-it wars started. Not on windows but on walls. I did two Story Mapping workshops with planning team here at BETC. I taught them to stick. And they in turn taught me how to teach. As a teacher it’s always a bonus to experience the feedback of a quizzical look in real time. And better yet when it is done in French. All to realize that somehow you didn’t quite get your ideas across and you better be quick on your feet to make better sense of it so you don’t lose your audience to an open laptop.
I Story Map. In my now over 20 years of working in digital both on the creative and strategy side I’ve seen first hand that the power of collaboration trumps all else. Especially in experience design where mastery of all that affects it in our fast paced world is akin to asking Sisyphus to stop pushing that boulder up the hill. It just won’t happen.
Collaboration is a challenge to the traditional hierarchy and process at our agency — especially at BETC — where creatives keep the client at arms length until they are good and ready and observe the traditional obsequious relationship within their own ranks. It is a rigid structure that doesn’t bend easily when faced with the complex demands of a world gone digital.
Story Mapping, for those who don’t know, is a technique originally created by software developers to help them better visualize and write code to fit the needs of the end user. I’ve flipped it around a bit and adapted it to experience design. The process itself can be transformative if done properly. Story Mapping focuses on real customer needs — or pain points — and challenges brands and agency teams to come up with solutions that deliver more meaningful relationships between businesses and their clients. Story Mapping is not about advertising. It is about creating better products and services that help people achieve their goals — whether it is to have a better experience with their bank or a less anxious experience with their airline company. It is, in many ways, how people like you and me actually experience brands.
The goal of Story Mapping is to uncover solutions to pain points that people wouldn’t know they wanted. That’s a bit of a twist of a sentence but imagine being able to create a new kind of taxi service like Uber. We were happy with taxis until Uber came along. Now imagine the potential of doing the same for a financial service — or an airline company. That’s what we want to do in Story Mapping. And the only way to do that successfully is to collaborate with the client. And bonus if you can get a real customer or two in the room to work it through with you.
BETC is a natural place to teach the potential of Story Mapping. Because they are such a highly creative agency they are used to playing with big ideas. And Rémi Babinet, one of the visionary founders and lead creative at BETC, is known globally in the industry as a maverick who loves to challenge the status quo with transformational ideas. Witness the agency’s new building in Pantin — which I will write about in another post shortly — and the transformative energy behind the design and architecture of the space itself. Story Mapping seems to fit the same potential at Pantin and demands the agency to create things that really matter.
During my time here at BETC I’ve had the chance to approach my daily busyness with a quieter and more thoughtful mind. I am very grateful to the Havas Lofts program for affording me the chance to escape the madding crowd of my home office in New York where the demands of the day require constant sprints between meetings. The natural philosophical thoughtfulness of the French has afforded me the cultural context of, well, thinking. And writing. And with the help of Marianne Hurstel and Mathieu Dugast, I’ve been able to push the definition and techniques of Story Mapping into a much more useful place. My goal is to offer it as a service that all of us can learn and use across all offices to build better brands for our clients and perhaps discover and make better ones so that all of us, as humans on this planet, can live better lives.
