Examples Of Both The Power and Pitfalls Of Storytelling In Management

The following has been cross-posted at The CIO Weblog.

I’ve been catching up on my marketing reading over the past few weeks, and what’s great about some of the material is the use of storytelling. In fact, storytelling and the use of analogies are a great thing to use not only in marketing but also in areas like IT and general management. Storytelling can be used to get people motivated and on the bandwagon.

A Computerworld interview with Harvard Business School’s Professor Jan Rivkin, captures an excellent condition where analogies and storytelling work in the IT area:

Why is analogical reasoning so useful in a field like IT?
Analogies are most powerful in settings where there’s not enough
clarity to use deductive reasoning nor so much ambiguity that you have
to go for trial and error. Many pockets of IT have this middle ground
that’s familiar enough to make links to more familiar settings but not
clear enough to identify cause and effect. In that middle ground,
analogies may be the only options we’ve got.

What I like about the Computerworld article, however, is that it also explicitly touches on some aspects of organizational behavior (OB) and decision making. The OB field is something that I am particularly sensitive to and is something that is not covered by all business schools as a course in of itself. Here are examples of two OB biases addressed in the article (brackets added by me to clarify original text snipped out of context):

[A] potential problem [with using analogies] is the anchoring effect. Can you explain?
People get attached intellectually and emotionally to their analogies,
and it’s very hard to shake. If you look at Sun, Scott McNealy often
uses analogies drawn from the auto business. He argues that buyers
should be interested in the whole package, not the components, because
when they buy a car, they care about the whole car, not where the
carburetor comes from. But you have to question how dispassionately he
can assess that analogy. His father worked for years in the auto
business, and his sons are named for auto models: Maverick, Scout, Colt
and Dakota.

Tell me about confirmation bias. It appears that human
beings tend strongly to seek out data that confirms their beliefs and
invest too little in seeking out disconfirming data. We like to be
right. If analogies come into our heads, we can always find elements of
reality to confirm our belief in them.

I also have to give a positive plug for the warning on confirmation biases. This is a key thing taught Day 1 at many management consulting firms to test and mitigate biases for, but it is something which operating company employees seem to be less aware of (based on my anecdotal experiences). Not sure why this is so, but to be fair, management consultants also have tendencies for certain blindspots as compared to operating company employees.

But I digress. In any case, by all means use storytelling in management, especially when trying to establish some ground in a complex business area, but be aware of the pitfalls because anchors can be hard to shake and because stories should not be taken as universal truths.