The Downside of Stories
In Marketing, and elsewhere, stories abound. The story is the new vehicle for breaking through advertising noise, showing your passion, and illustrating concepts. That is all fine. Increasingly, stories are also used to interpret and explain data. This is what I find dangerous, and it relates in particular to the success or failure of businesses and products.
Humans are all too willing to use narratives to make sense of data, even when none is supplied. Consider these phrases:
A man walked into a room with a bag of candy. Four children began to smile.
I’ve grouped them together, and they feel like a narrative. It’s hard to resist connecting the two sentences, but they could be interpreted independently, as two unrelated sentences. Try it though, and your brain rebels. They must go together, they make so much sense. Seriously, those kids must be smiling because of the candy.
The Washington Post recently ran this article:
The title is interesting, and I read the piece. As it turns out, the author relates a single example where a…
