When’s the last time you felt like this? If you’re French, you know this feeling instantly.
This is Kylian Mbappe who became the youngest player to score 10 World Cup goals in the Qatar 2022 final. Now that’s a breakthrough.
I felt the same way after finding out that The Innovation Storytellers Show was just ranked by Chartable among the top 50 management podcasts in France 🇫🇷!! Merci to all of my amazing listeners in France and the francophone world who love learning from this community of Innovation Storytellers. Special thanks to my French guests from Orange [telecom], Cisco, Airbus, INNOVEVE, Microsoft Africa and so many more doing business in France who opened up the show to your communities as well.
But this post is and isn’t about soccer. It’s about global thinking, and more importantly, global storytelling. Your innovation matters, so how do you know if the story you’re telling about it will stick from Paris to Paraguay to Pune to Pasadena and Pretoria?
It’s not easy, but it comes down to three critical skills: Listening. Testing. Practice.
Listen Up: Knowing what and how to tell the story comes from better listening to what LOCAL communities need and want. I take people straight back to the empathy map, developed with live audiences – customers, influencers, decision makers and their obstacle makers – to see what they desperately need and want IN THEIR CONTEXTS. One of the benefits of being an anthropologist is always thinking about them before us and being open to learning from local wisdom and culture.
Put on that hat for a moment and listen for the native values, stories, and unique traits of a culture and its aspirations. Once collected, ask local teams to help you prioritize these needs. Rank and weight them. Discover intrinsic stories, archetypes, myths, and current trends that are actively circulating and find the connections.
Test Rigorously: Great stories don’t come out of the gate perfectly. They’re honed and tested across geographic, demographic, and psychographic groups. Once you know your ideal persona [or so you think], start testing your stories and ask for constructive feedback. This is not the time to get precious about the slogan or sound bite, but rather it’s time to get creative, analytical, and fearless. Like Kylian, you don’t look at a strategy on a whiteboard or watch a film and execute it, you try it, test it, and kick it around until you and your listener connect to it. That’s what your audience is craving too, connection.
Practice: Sharing your innovation story might start with the team, the board, or a partner, but eventually it will travel the world. I often tell my clients, “Keep saying it until it doesn’t feel like you have Legos in your mouth.” Know that there is not 1 singular story that will work universally for this diverse human family. Your job is to make the same values of the story stick with listeners for what they value. Get to feel comfortable and connected with all the variants of your story and watch the emotions and nuances across cultures, click. You might find that the story you developed for the Brazilian market is strangely applicable in Berlin but utterly useless in Bahrain. That’s why cross-testing and relentless practice will lead to the best outcomes. Like it does for Kylian.
