About 11 years ago, I left a job because my interests were not aligned with those of the people I reported up to. Not my immediate manager, she was great, but the leadership in that particular organization was interested in “telling the story”, and I was not. Allow me to explain: by “tell the story”, they specifically meant altered data to fit their preconceived narrative.
Storytelling serves a purpose: it provides a grounding for people to understand the message you were trying to convey. Most of the stories that we have align to some form of learning mechanism: either about human nature, or what to do or not to do in a situation, or why a particular belief is correct. Stories are not always accurate, but they are a useful tool. I have no problem with “telling the story”.
The difficulty for me is when somebody wants to tell a story for which the data do not match. The data tell story A, and the person wants me to tell story B. There are people who can spin an A to B, who can make silk out of a pig’s ear or gold out of flax. I am not that person. If it is in fact, silk, I can wax on relentlessly about the properties of the silk. If it is in fact, gold, I can illustrate all the ways in which that gold can be used. I am not going to tell you that flax is gold. Flax has its place, and it can be useful, but I’m not going to tell you it is something that it is not.
This “tell the story” requirement was handed down repeatedly, in various business meetings, over a six-month period and it drove me nuts. I was “mad” in the traditional sense, and I took the first job that presented itself to me in order to get out. This was a rash decision: it meant going to a place where I took what ended up being a pay cut, for work that ended up changing in charter. I lasted at that job exactly one year, before coming to where I am now. Or at least the company that I am in now.
I continue to hear the “tell the story” requirement, through various roles. In program management, you are often required to tell the story: in a technical way to engineers, and in a less technical way to management (depending on your management). It’s a sort of translator function: I enjoy it, particularly in the role I’m at. This is because I am not asked to fabricate a story, rather I can take the data presented and tell the *actual* story.
The thing is, that six months did so much damage in my head, that every time I hear “tell the story”, it rankles me. I remember being asked to change the data to suit the narrative that was provided, rather than the one the data told. As we increasingly have more immediate, multiple, and popular social media platforms, the desire to “tell the story”, and the use of that phrase, increases. The rankle in my brain also increases.
A further complication is that there are a seemingly endless supply of people who are willing to tell a story, to illustrate a point, that is not based in any sort of data or fact. Or, perhaps worse, are based in cherry-picked facts, ignoring other data (“oh those are outliers”). They would not survive peer review. Sometimes you can see it right away, and sometimes you cannot; this leaves the audience to bicker amongst themselves as to what counts as real, and which stories are right.
We are, as ever, in an election year. Technically speaking, every year is an election year: it’s just that most people tend to focus on the ones that happen every four years, as they offer a change in the highest offices of our country, as well as the entire House of Representatives, and about a third of the Senate. There are other posts and positions up for grabs as well, and ballot measures that fund schools, and fire departments, and port commissioners, and judges, and all kinds of roles. Most often, the stories we are inundated with are for the highest roles, though there are smaller stories for smaller roles as well. We are left to pick through the stories, and look for the data, and “do our research”, which is rather difficult in the absence of real data, which itself has been supplanted with stories.
There comes a time where every story ends. The book closes, or the campfire gets quiet, and you are left with the story in your mind, and the choice to do something with that story. You can take the analogy, you can take the lesson, you can take the idea; or you can leave it. The important thing to understand, is stories are just stories: they are one of several means of conveying information. It is up to the listener to understand the nuance, and the context, of that information, before making any decisions.
Bobbie Conti 