How stories help us cut through information

Stories and storytelling have been really trendy in the business world in the last few years. And for good reason.

This article in Scientific American “Why your brain turns life into stories” examines research that has been exploring the impact of stories on our brains – https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brain-doesnt-just-experience-reality-it-edits-it-into-a-story/ – A relatively new area of research (the last 20 years) that has developed alongside the development of brain scanning technologies.

The research suggests that our brains use stories to reduce complexity and edit information to focus on a few significant events, people and connections. We then turn events into cause and effect, remembering that events led to an event, for example. Our brains are also using ‘scripts’ – memories of familiar situations that help us anticipate what will happen next without processing everything from scratch.

Stories help us make shortcuts through information. We connect new experiences to existing knowledge – recognising patters. Our shortcuts influence what we notice too and that means we must be mindful of what we remember in a situation and why. The stories we believe shape how we see the world and new experiences.

I think this last point is very important. If we all see the world shaped by our experiences, how can we look afresh at familiar situations? This is a challenge for organisations right now.

Maybe we need to be cognisant of how we use stories as shortcuts and consider and explore what information we use, the assumptions within that and how that fits into our world view.

That’s why the data and insights we choose to seek out can be very powerful in either reinforcing our world view or challenging it. For example, there will be data in all organisations that will show areas for improvement. But do we use that data to challenge how the organisation acts? Or do we discount it as it does not fit our world view?