Engaging Employees with a Tangible Storytelling Tool
Testing new methods is the best way to succeed
Hélice Experience is a Brazilian design start-up based in Porto Alegre which was founded by Fernando C. Guimarães, Rafael Barcellos and Alexandre Press in 2014. They offer strategy execution and engagement services. A lot of companies facing or experiencing a change turn to Hélice Experience to jointly develop and execute on a strategic plan. Hélice is committed to discover how they communicate what is happening at the company, why they do so and what they aim to achieve. To that end they engage employees in a dialogue and use various tools to help them understand their single part within the entire process and to identify next steps.
Due to his connection to SAP Labs in Brazil dating back to his previous work in the state government, Fernando obtained exciting insights into SAP’s involvement in in-house hackathons and outsourced resources with regards to innovation. This is how he came across the SAP Design & Co-Innovation Center’s (DCC) methods. When checking the DCC’s website he discovered Scenes and decided to test this tool. Scenes helps to create stories about products and services fast, collaboratively and iteratively. It empowers business leaders and professionals of all industries to shape their ideas and scenarios in the form of fun illustrative storyboards without the need of refined drawing skills.
Scenes strengthens understanding and harmony
Hélice Experience is known for getting people out of their comfort zone. To that end, they have applied Scenes in two very different projects. When it came to the ideation phase as part of the collaboration with a major client in Brazil, the Credit Union Sicredi Serrana, it was a natural decision to use Scenes. The company went through a strong shift of focus from strategic plans and projects around services and products to selling relationships. Even though they had already developed a new metric system to measure the “health” of the customer and the experience with the company, they were lacking inspiration and guidance on how to make it work. Hélice Experience kicked the co-innovation project off by stressing the start-up philosophy “fail as much as you can” to ultimately obtain better results. “Scenes was instrumental to face the whole complexity of the project”, they reflect. The client quickly noticed that improving starts with managing their very own employees to sell better experiences to these customers. They mapped the flow of information within the company and made their ideas tangible while brainstorming on how to enhance the customer experience starting with the reception on-site. “Scenes helped our client to understand how complex relationships are to approach. At the same time Scenes strengthened the harmony of the group”, recalls Fernando.
Scenes helps making complex processes tangible
Hélice Experience puts the co-creation at the forefront. “We believe the client itself is the best expert a company can have about their own issues”, states Rafael. In another project, they conducted a workshop with Sicredi Pioneira, the pioneer Credit Union of the Sicredi system. Employees from different positions and departments came together to co-create the stories they want to tell. As they aimed to attract younger people they chose a fresher and rather cartoon-like approach and were open for the creative ideas of Hélice Experience. To that end, the company used graphical recording to capture the client’s thoughts. They also applied Scenes to empower the client to craft scenarios and create the storyboard on their own. “Scenes supports our ambition to get the customer out of the superficial into the in-depth topic”, recalls Alexandre. “Scenes is playful and allows for the fast creation of scenarios. But the greatest advantage of Scenes is that it helps people making complex and abstract topics tangible”, states Fernando.
Based on their experience with the tool the co-founders of Hélice Experience stress its potential and conclude: “Scenes can be used as universal approach as long as it’s enough content for both digital and physical assets.”
Originally published at experience.sap.com on February 9, 2017.
