Story Analytics

Analytics in simple terms is defined as the science of analysis. It generally involves extracting and piecing the data to useful information to help businesses make decisions. So what do stories have to do with analytics? Right?

In the Information Age where everything appears to be about data and companies are increasingly striving to be data-oriented, what is the need for stories?

Daniel Pink in his book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” argues that we’re entering the Conceptual Age where the importance of the story, the context will become all the more important.

As much as technology has evolved, one of the basic tenets of human intelligence is to be able to appreciate stories.  Humans have been involved in storytelling since early civilization. During olden days, stories were used to convey wisdom and impart knowledge. The same was applied during our childhood when we were told stories to help distinguish good from bad, to help make the right choices, and become better people.and to look for the meaning in them.

As we grew up, in the workplace, however, stories have been relegated to mere entertainment, as distractions from our jobs. Can sharing stories more effectively help us solve our problems? Can the art of communication and writing or telling stories, using analogies etc help us present our case better? Can it be used to simplify a complex problem into easily understandable terms that everyone could agree upon? Why not?

To me, the purpose of story is not to ignore the data, but to supplement it. The story needs to be married to the data.

There is an old folk song in India of a man who showed his son a carving of an elephant in a tree.  To the little boy, it looked like an elephant hiding in the tree, and he cried in fear. His father then pacified him and helped him see that it was not a real elephant, but merely a carving.
A loose translation of the folk song goes like this: “Did the elephant hide in the tree, or did the elephant hide the tree?“.

The ability to see the tree in the elephant and the elephant in the tree, thereby distinguishing illusion from reality while appreciating art is a gift we posses.

Seeing the story but not the data is like believing that the illusion (in this case, the carving) is real.

Seeing the data but missing the story results in us overlooking at the context behind the data. We would only see the tree and not the beautiful carving of the elephant. In other words, we would be missing the forest for the trees.

Yes, data is absolutely critical. True, numbers can’t lie, but people who interpret them can. Not knowing the context or the story behind the data leads to facts being misrepresented. The recent financial market collapse is testament to that.

The purpose of this blog is to explore ideas around how the art of writing and narratives can assist in the workplace, in projects and business analysis.

Behind every bit of datum is a story, and in every story lies data. We’re surrounded by as many stories as data. It is a matter of identifying the right ones in our ability to make the right decisions.