Stories.

I often write articles with a first person view, based on something that has happened to me or something I have encountered and as such have formed an opinion or view on. I do this, to give people a sneak peek into my thinking and add humanity and personality to what are sometimes just dry facts and figures. Nothing makes a slide pack of facts and figures go quicker than a good anecdote involving the presenter and how they used the screened information in real life. It seems that adding humanity or personalisation, as anecdotal stories or anecdotal evidence in meetings, lacks validity for many and is often called into question. Called into question because empirical data has substance and is black and white but hard to remember without some colour added.

Anecdotes are used every day in everything we do and they add paint to the stories told, making them vivid in life and in business. Plausibility is added especially if a fact can be humanised in narratives that create believability by virtue of coherence. So says Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize winner in economics, who believes our brains are wired to believe in stories. We are more inclined to believe if something happened to you or me via the facts presented. We want to believe in people, not facts.

If we look at the definition of anecdote, the above rings true as "short account of an incident" and "the act of informing by verbal report of history or biography" take us back to a time before the current tablets and more attuned to stone tablets. The pictures painted by anecdotes fall into two categories, truth and bullshit, and this is the divide that many, especially in business, find hard to bridge. The difficulty in telling the difference comes down to a couple of important factors, credibility and trust in the teller.

The story tellers of old, wandering from village to village, were appreciated for their skills entertaining people but gravitas and truth was accorded the village elders who were tasked with the anecdotal history that mattered for the future. Today the view is, that trusted history is kept in ledgers by the CEOs and CFOs of companies and the story tellers are now the conference speakers, used to motivate the villagers to work harder and smarter.

With corporate corruption today, that doesn't always hold up and again it comes back to the individual and the credibility they carry, to give their anecdotes and stories weight and measure, for the listeners. The old, "trust me I'm a doctor" has long since died, along with the believability of the "Enron brigade", and business today has more counters and balances but the quick summary via anecdotal evidence remains to test the listeners.

I'll continue to use anecdotes and stories because I'm not an accountant but I'm careful because people today are more questioning in regards to trust and credibility and that still matters to me.