Claudio, aka Agile Sensei, is an independent Lean & Agile software development consultant, public speaker and dramatic storytelling journeyman. He offers vital transformational leadership and management experience to help individuals and organizations achieve phenomenal improvements. His current work on Lean Enterprise Architecture is set to enable tighter strategy alignment and collaboration between business and IT in service organizations. Most of all he is a good storyteller. I asked Claude a question about this in a past podcast.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Stories of Lean And Agile
Joe: Let’s say I’m an engineer, I’m a consultant, and I’m an IT guy. How do I go about telling a story? If I’m an introvert, can I use your process or do I just have to have a natural ability like you do?
Claudio: This is a great question actually because a lot of people tell me; I’m not a storyteller. But then actually, if you listen to each other, we tell anecdotes all the time, we tell little stories all the time. We do tell stories to each other. The point being is I’m an engineer, I’m very logical. Tell me, how do I start one of these dramatic stories? I think there is a very simple idea. I came up with, in a moment of lucidity that I will never find again I guess, but it’s this one, right?
Say you have an idea, a product or two, a process, whatever. Your goal is to create a story so that you convince somebody else, right? We need to create those dramatic stories where, as I said, someone wants something badly and goes after it against great odds.
We need to create obstacles and so on. One idea, even for creating basic scenarios to start with, is to say let’s create a list of all the features of my product, if we’re taking a product, the attributes of a product. You look out what you really want is a list of the benefits? That could be an idea, a service and so on.
Benefits now differently from the attributes from the features of a product are really specific to the audience, whomever you are talking to. Actually I have a pen in my hands right now. If I take this pen in front of me, attributes of a pen would be the color, the make, and so on. But, the benefit to me as a writer is probably different from the benefits than a student would have and then a poet would have.
They are completely different from the benefits from the investor who puts money in the company that produced this pen for us. So, benefits are really, really focused to the audience you are talking to. This is mistake number one when we do presentations is that sometimes we pitch to the wrong audience? Having said that, once you have this list of very explicit benefits, you write another list and that list is the opposite. If the pen can allow you to write beautiful poetry, to give that analogy, then you write the opposite. You can’t write beautiful poetry.
If value stream mapping allows you to visualize what you are currently doing, then you cannot visualize what you are currently doing, and so on. You know what I mean? Or, if Kanban allows you to have something that enables continues improvement, you don’t have improvement, and you don’t have a mechanism for improvement.
Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do
Special Marketing with Lean Book and Program offers on Facebook