A Story to Remember: Quantifying the Business Impact of Simulation

5-minute read

We all do it; every human society has its own storytelling tradition. Why does storytelling matter, and what place do stories have in the business of engineering? Let your work speak for itself, right? But we know that doesn’t really work. That’s why marketing departments and agencies exist, because without those storytellers, brilliant products might never see the light of day or achieve the dizzying heights of success they deserve. Take cars, for example. Can you imagine trying to sell a nameless car? The current car naming convention is a form of mythmaking, just one of the many forms of storytelling. Of course, you do need solid engineering behind your cars or products, a name alone won’t cut it (Austin Allegro, anyone?).

The thing is, employing a marketing department, the primary organisational storytellers, is all well and good when you’re promoting a finished product or service to your consumers, but that might not be your remit right now. What if you’re at the start of the process? Say you’re an engineering design professional wanting to drive up the use of simulation in your organisation because you know it makes business sense and has many benefits over a physical prototype-based way of working. How do you get that all-important buy-in from your decision makers?

Then there’s the issue of traditional ways of working. The prototype-based way of doing things has been around for a very long time, while simulation, as we use it today, is a relatively new kid on the block. And traditions are hard to change. Think about the folk tales that you know by heart. The most familiar stories are the ones that have existed for generations, they are the ones that make us feel safe and sure. We know the structure of the story: there’s a princess somewhere waiting to be rescued, and the would-be rescuer must journey forth etc. We also know the outcome.

But what if you want to tell a different story? how do you get your audience to abandon their traditional imagining and believe instead that the princess is a lot less damsel in distress and a lot more Anansi the Spider and that this opens up endless possibilities for the outcome? How are you going to get your decision makers to see that the ‘if it ain’t broke …’ approach is actually holding the organisation back?

At the core of most business decisions is the notion of value. But, how do you measure value, and is that aligned with how the decision makers in your organisation measure it, is it aligned with the organisational culture? For example, if your experience tells you that choosing a simulation-led process rather than a prototype-based one is about more than just the numbers, how do you demonstrate the value in that? How do you change organisational culture so that the value in a simulation-led way of working is embedded?

As part of our ASSESS Insight Webinar Series, Mark Meilli presented the webinar, ‘Driving Increased Simulation Applications Through Better Business Impact Quantification’. Mark, a member of the ASSESS Business Theme Committee, has 35 years’ experience at Procter and Gamble behind him and has more recently, as a consultant, been engaged in helping design engineers develop strategies for better quantifying the business impact of a simulation-led process. In this insightful webinar, Mark gives us a breakdown of the six major ways of quantifying the business value of a simulation-led approach, who to enlist on the journey towards culture change (it’s not always who you think!), and a whole host of other thought-provoking things to consider.

Mark also tells us why stories and organisational folklore are important. There are many clever and sophisticated answers to the question of why we tell stories. There are also simple ones; storytelling is how we let people enter our world and see the world from our perspective and, simplest of all, stories are how we get people to remember what we’re telling them.

Check out the webinar below, and start telling compelling stories that help you drive simulation use up and transform your organisational culture.

Watch the webinar for free