Picture books not presentations
The power of stories over data
As an engineer by background, I love data and logic. Like many of you, I spent countless hours in classes on sigma distributions, logic, etc. Traditional programming is dominated by if-this, then-that reasoning. Machine learning is dominated by statistics and linear algebra and such. But while data has its place, Product Managers need to understand its limitations.
1) Stories not data
If we want to drive change, if we want to launch a product, we must do so with stories — not data. Let me unpack that a bit.
Data is important. Very important. And decision makers should be making decisions based on data. But we shouldn’t try to convince a general audience with data. Data is boring. It involves spreadsheets and calculations and stuff.
You should instead build a story around that data. People love stories. We’re designed for it. There’s a reason why you’ve never seen a group of kids sitting on a rug listening intently to someone reading a column of numbers from a spreadsheet.
2) The ‘story’ of ChatGPT has swept the world
I was in a small store on the south coast of Portugal this summer and the shopkeeper was having an issue with the payment machine. They turned to me and apologized, then stated ‘we are not chatGPT enabled yet’. Generative AI has nothing to do with their payment system, but that statement was instructive in more ways than one.
First, how quickly the knowledge of ChatGPT has spread to the far corners of the world. But more importantly, it was less about what ChatGPT does and more about a human narrative about how ChatGPT was going to change our technical world in some way.
Note the shop keeper didn’t say “We aren’t LLM enabled yet”. A technology by itself is too abstract. If the story around ChatGPT was told primarily through transformers, tokenization, statistics, and reinforcement learning, I don’t think the shop keeper would have ever heard of it. But the capabilities of generative AI in a product are extremely relatable, even if the specifics about what it is capable of get a bit blurry. That leads me to another observation.
3) A story can be so powerful that the details get lost — to the detriment of everyone
The power of stories is that they are easy to understand and pass along. Yet that’s also a challenge because we often find that people can be in violent agreement about details yet argue over the top level story because they misinterpret what the hell they are talking about.
I was in a friendly conversation with a friend this summer over a controversial political topic. We were getting each other’s viewpoints on the topic when we stopped and asked ourselves if we really even knew what the law in question was. We both had pseudo, loosely held opinions on the topic but realized we didn’t really have the data! So data is ultimately important, but a story and an identity are more powerful dispersion tools.
But what if we humans had a shortcut heuristic that enabled us to bypass the story line altogether? Oh, but we do…
4) Identity is even more powerful than individual stories
Humans are social, even tribal, beings. We use social heuristics to simplify our lives. Identity is made up of a set of stories we are told or tell ourselves. We don’t have to have all the data as long as our tribe says X is better in the X vs Y argument.
I’m not just talking about politics or big issues. Teams, programming languages, etc can have their own tribes. As long as a tribe has subscribed to a set of stories which dictate behavior, it will be very hard to convince the tribe to do something else. Unless you can use stories to find common ground.
Let’s take climate change. For unfortunate reasons, climate has become an identity issue. You can’t find identity issues head-on. No amount of data and rational argument is going to change minds. Instead you need to change the conversation and find common ground which achieves the end goal.
5) Use stories, backed by data, to change the world
In summary, next time you are trying to sell your product or convince an audience, don’t just righteously shout out cold, hard data points. Don’t go McKinsey on your audience with 8 point font arguments in boxes on a slide (unless your audience is ex-consultants, in which case this method is fully endorsed).
Instead craft a story based on that data. A story your audience can align with. Heck, maybe even work in a little Joseph Campbell* Hero’s Journey analogy. Something with emotion and empathy from a human standpoint.
Give them picture books, not presentations.
*Some would argue this is Carl Jung popularized by Joseph Campbell. Perhaps, but Joe wrote some greatly accessible books for us non-philosophers. Kudos to both.
