StoryQuest Blog

Telling stories. It seems to be something that we instantly relate to the spinning of long, drawn out tales of our exciting, or not so exciting, daily adventures. Sometimes we forget that telling our stories can have a life sustaining precedence, such as in an emergency room, to a police officer or in front of a jury of our peers.

In these instances the way we tell the story is just as important as the facts presented in the account. In a blog by PR and Marketing professional John Durante relays the importance of these facts in his blog, but also the way they are delivered.

During a visit he made to an emergency room he noticed that the medical professionals were “drowning in data.” In a broader context the importance of the story is just as important as the data presented to the listener. The span of events and how they took place is just as important as the events themselves.

The same is true for business. Executives do want to be presented with the facts. The number or errors in their shipment process, the number of new accounts acquired in a year, the number of redundancies in their company etc… Facts are undeniable and sometimes jobs depend on them. What we often forget is that the medium is just as important as the message.

The story of an executive’s failure and then his journey in solving the problem to ultimately triumph in the situation is just as effective, arguably sometimes more effective, than a statistic, PowerPoint presentation or pie chart.

For as Durante points out, “Without data, there are no knowledge. Without knowledge, there can be no context. But without the story pulling together the data, knowledge and the context, how successful can we be, in public relations, or in medicine?”