Recently, Judy Bayer and Marie Taillard wrote a short piece for the Harvard Business Review Blog called Story-driven Data Analysis. To oversimplify a bit, in the strategic landscape now, thanks to the ascendancy of “big data,” there’s far more data available to strategists, analysts, and marketers than they can realistically make sense out of. Stories, they say, provide a means of constructing hypotheses as a lens through which to view that data, and subsequently, guidance on how to appropriately analyze it.
To put it in an anthropological context, ultimately what’s really producing all this data are thousands or millions of human beings doing things to accomplish what they need to accomplish, whether at work, at home, traveling, exercising, whatever. Big data can take these things we do and turn them into numbers, which quantify our actions. But quantification isn’t the same thing as understanding. And the way we have always naturally understood ourselves as human beings is via stories. Thus, stories are also what we need to truly understand all this data.
In my experience, much of which has revolved around launching new products into new markets, when data was available at all, it certainly wasn‘t “big.” Not by a long shot. I might get the results of small marketing surveys. Maybe I'd get the opportunity to do phone interviews with ten or so people from a target market. Or I might simply have to rely on internal SMEs who happen to be members of the target market. In these situations stories have always played an even more critical role, and for many of the same reasons. The nub of it is this: if you’re building products (or even selling services) for human beings and you want to do it well, you need to understand them. Not as data, but as actual people—“the person behind the data.” And the best way to do that is through stories. Yes. Back it up with data wherever possible. But start with stories.
This applies at all level of the business, from—at the very top—the formation of the business model, to pricing and competitive analysis, all the way down through design and prioritization of individual features, and everywhere in between. In all these functions, stories are the necessary foundation upon which everything should be built.