“I assumed as an engineer that if you got your facts right, what you were advocating for would be positively received. But there are so many conversations where you have the facts but can’t get others to listen.”
My good friend and CISL fellow Ian Ellison said this to me a while ago and there’s something very understandable in the assumption. If you’ve got the data, double-checked the evidence and come to a conclusion, it should be enough to persuade people. Shouldn’t it?
But people don’t experience evidence in isolation. They bring their own experiences, assumptions and judgements to it.
So, when we’re communicating solutions, we need to understand what the evidence means from their perspective. What does it confirm? What does it challenge? What might make it difficult to act on?
That’s where storytelling can help. Not by dressing up the evidence or making it more palatable, but by giving people a way to connect it to something they already understand.
I know from experience that for academics, engineers, scientists and others who work with a lot of information, reaching for a story doesn’t always come naturally. It might even seem absurd and trivial, especially when the facts are right there.
Prof David Grayson CBE described it well when he talked about his communications philosophy when chairing Carers UK:
“no anecdote without a data point and no data point without an anecdote.”
I think there’s a useful discipline in that. Ask what the evidence tells us and then ask what will help someone else see themselves in it.