What’s your story?
Photograph If you’re in business, perhaps the most important question you can ask yourself is, “What’s your story?”
Stories are how we make sense of the world and understand one another, and asking questions is how we begin to construct our stories. It’s hard to imagine any business leader — or enterprise — could last very long without being able to answer such questions as, “Who are we? What business are we in? How do we want to the world to see us?”
The same goes for political leaders. Without a compelling story, a candidate doesn’t give voters a reason to get excited — or to cast a ballot. Compelling stories are also the means
What’s surprising, perhaps, is that the gearheads in academic economics departments may finally be getting wind of all this. If they are, much of the credit must go to Robert J. Shiller, the Yale economist who won the Nobel Prize in his field in 2013. Shiller’s iconoclastic new book, Narrative Economics, ranges across disciplines to explore the role of narratives in explaining (as the subtitle has it) “how stories go viral and drive major economic events.”
Related stories
It’s fitting to focus on Shiller’s book in this space because narratives are the stock-in-trade of this column. In previous months, I’ve explored the power of some well-known narratives — Most executives and entrepreneurs will be tempted to respond: “Told you so!” But before you dismiss Schiller as the bearer of obvious tidings, note that narratives, as he defines them, aren’t just stories. “The words narrative and story are often used interchangeably,” he writes. “But according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a narrative is ‘a way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of view or set of values.’”
People need narratives. It’s one of the ways “We can think of history,” the author tells us, “as a succession of rare big events in which a story goes viral, often (but not always) with the help of an attractive celebrity (even a minor celebrity or fictional stock figure) whose attachment to the narrative adds human interest.”
For business, narratives are a double-edged sword. You or your product can suddenly take off and achieve phenomenally rapid success. Sometimes that success is a flash in the pan. Sometimes it’s the iPhone. And when the narrative goes wrong, the fall from grace can be equally fast. Because we’re talking about narratives, an example from the world of book publishing comes to mind.
A sudden and unexpected bestseller is the industry’s favorite surprise. But when the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Junot Díaz was accused of harassment and unwanted sexual contact in 2018, the consequences were very different. An investigation Why do some narratives — and not others — catch on? As noted, it helps if attractive people are attached to the story, and strong visual images, Shiller reports. Truth and falsity, on the other hand, don’t seem to matter as much, which is sobering. Ultimately, though, Shiller sees the forces behind narrative virality as mysterious, repeatedly drawing analogies to the spread of disease: “Major things happen because of seemingly irrelevant mutations in narratives that have slightly higher contagion rates, slightly lower forgetting rates, or first-mover effects that give one set of competing narratives a head start.”
It may not be too much to say that business leaders earn their keep Consider the rise of the wheeled suitcase. “These did not become popular until the 1990s, when a Northwest Airlines pilot, Robert Plath, invented his Rollaboard with both wheels and a rigid handle that can collapse into the suitcase,” Shiller writes. “An earlier version of the wheeled suitcase The suitcases finally caught on only when flight crews adopted them and paraded glamorously through airports, pulling them along. Still, why then and not sooner? In this instance, Shiller is strangely incurious. His readers, Like the media’s ex post facto explanations for the daily rise and fall of stock prices, these speculations are blessed Narratives are accounts of patterns, and some people are very good at spotting them. I suspect it takes a lot of imagination. At the same time, the human need to create meaning can be a trap, because the world, like some naturally occurring Rorschach test, serves up all kinds of stimuli that don’t mean much of anything. Managers, in short, have to be wary of seeing patterns where there are none. This phenomenon is common enough that there is a name for it: apophenia. In extreme cases, it can be a symptom of mental disorder. But it’s simply human nature to be seduced So sure, it’s important to ask yourself, “What’s my story?” But the questions can’t stop there, because it’s hard to tell whether the story describes what is really happening or simply what you’re thinking. Best to go a little further, and ask someone else: “Do you see what I see?”