Using stories to drive understanding and action in Product Organisations
We can use the sense-making features and logic of storytelling in product discovery and delivery to test ideas, create shared understanding and direct decision-making… here’s why and how.
Creative projects are about exchanging information
When I communicate with you in a creative project I usually want to achieve one of three outcomes.
- I want to make sure we share a common understanding of reality — if we don’t, we’ll find it hard to collaborate.
- I want to convince you of things — not only do we see reality in a similar way, we agree on the things that we’d like to change and the things we’d like to maintain.
- I want to persuade or inspire you to action… I want to break any inertia and after getting agreement on the things we’d like to change, I want to move you to change them.
Stories are often the most effective method for achieving all three of these outcomes. And by stories, I’m using the broadest possible definition — the creative use of language — particularly analogy and visually rich language to connect pieces of information which lead to a satisfying conclusion.
We know stories can be powerful because they can change how we feel and what we believe. They can inspire action and faith or make us question reality. When a magician “misdirects” us, they really convince us to tell ourselves a story that can’t be true, but which we see unfolding before us. The conflict between the story of reality and our perceived reality transforms the mundane into magic. Good corporate storytelling achieves a different type of transformation, it converts information into knowledge or agreement and action.
Logical steps and imaginative leaps
Making sense
When the link between cause and effect is evident and consistent with our expectations we say something makes sense.
Making magic
When the link between cause and effect is broken and the surrounding sense-making information architecture replaces our expectations with something poetic or profound, we say it’s magical… it changes our view of reality.
Making products and services — product discovery
But for people making products, another way of making connections and making sense of cause and effect can help us compete. If we only or always use logic to connect cause and effect or move from discernible signals to conclusions, our innovation and competitive advantage is wholly reliant on the uniqueness of our data and ability to interpret it… but these are sometimes replicable. They might work if we’re “organising to execute” in stable domains, but we need additional skills and approaches to compete in areas of complexity and innovation.
We can’t use magical thinking in product development — it results in waste and wishes that never come true — it’s also better suited to generating artistic value rather than user and business value.
So, we need a way of using the “expectations” of logic with the sense of possibility and ambition inherent in “magic” to guide the way we make sense of the world and initiate change. We need a type of thinking and information exchange that sits between magical thinking and logical thinking…
This is the space where stories become most useful. They can synthesise the signals we discern, and navigate back and forth from general and specific ideas to create something new and predictive that we can test. Stories are a form of connective tissue between cause and effect — or between premise and conclusion. By honing our ability to create this connective tissue we can more reliably move people from observation to conclusion and from conclusion to action.
Stories aren’t just connective tissue between cause and effect — they can also connect or bridge hypotheses and experiments, options and actions, alternatives and priorities. When we decide what the opportunities are within a product domain we’re really telling ourselves (and our teams and stakeholders) a story about reality — the reality we observe and the reality we want to create. To lead a product you need to be able to tell stories — to connect these things in ways which make sense and are persuasive or compelling enough to inspire action.
Deduction, Induction, Abduction — or the hop, skip & jump of drawing conclusions…
The three relationships between cause and effect are analogous to three types of reasoning — deduction, induction and abduction.
Sometimes in product thinking and design we can use deduction. Deduction is like hopping from one reliable fact that you have confidence in, along a string of factual conclusions to arrive at some conclusion you can rely on with certainty. Imagine adding up the numbers in a column in Excel… you know that maths is reliable and the answer is true and universal.
Sometimes we have all the information that we need. There is a “general” premise or rule that we’re certain applies to our situation and from which we can draw a conclusion about the specifics we face. Truth is guaranteed because of the reliability of the connection between the premise and conclusion.
Deduction is an important skill to have — to be able to logically move from the general to the specific and verify the truth of a statement is important. But it’s only one type of thinking, and is much better for verifying rather than generating ideas.
Induction involves probability. It’s a longer step or skip from the truth of the initial premise to the conclusion. Induction generates a prediction of a generalised rule from a particular instance (or set). Therefore, inductive reasoning is often linked with qualitative research, where data and observations from individual participants are coded and analysed, and — collectively — help form a general theory. Induction allows us to build theory from data. Whereas deduction allows us to test theory and hypotheses.
With abduction, it’s an even bigger leap of interpretation and faith. We generate new ideas from, and recognise meaning in, the information that’s available to us — which is usually an incomplete picture — and not enough for deduction or induction. The key point here is that we ‘generate’ new ideas, rather than test or verify them in the way that we should when using inductive or deductive reasoning. Abduction is useful in both quantitative and qualitative research analysis and interpretation. It’s also the type of creative thinking and ‘leaping’ that generate innovation.
If like me you get a little confused by the difference between the three, you can rely on Latin to help clarify things. Deduction shares etymology with “derive”, it makes sense from a thing. Induction is more about movement up towards a conclusion, from observation. Abduction moves us away from what we knew to expand our understanding or possibilities.
If you’re not supporting abduction in your organisation, then you’re unlikely to compete in a world that changes too fast to rely only on deduction and induction.
Therefore…
For Latin fans, there’s another helpful bit of latin that might help us grasp the why and how of using stories to drive understanding and action — “post hoc ergo proctor hoc”. Like all my latin, I got this from The West Wing and it means, after this therefore because of this. It’s used to describe a logical fallacy — that correlation doesn’t prove causation… that’s true in product thinking too, you can’t rely on hoping that the “cause” you create will inevitably lead to the effects you want, just because you wish they would — you need to fill in the connection using stories and either deduction, induction… and in lots of cases for the most innovative activities, abduction or a blend of the three.
Therefore is therefore probably the most powerful word you can use in product management. Therefore forces us to understand the connections our story is forming between premises and conclusions — and causes and effects. Therefore works for the routine operations and scientific management approach of deduction. But it can also be used for complex and innovative operations.
Decision-making and action is all about therefore — product teams need to be able to move from signals to conclusions to actions to conclusions. When we have data this is simple — we have verifiable, ready-made arguments and proofs. But before we get to the stage of collecting data, or when we need to interpret, stories can help because they impose a logic or “narrative gravity” to help draw conclusions or boost the confidence needed for action. When “generalised” information is lacking, we can project the ‘generalised logic’ of stories to support information exchange and decision-making in our teams. Stories don’t always need facts — but they always need logic or artistry to make imaginative leaps feel as safe as the logical steps of deduction…
By now we’ve got rid of all of the people who think “stories” is too wishy-washy for data-driven organisations. And all the people put off by two egregious uses of Latin… and we just lost another set of people with the use of egregious… but here’s the gold for the people who stuck with this post…
Use “therefore” to test the logic of product decisions…
I’ve been evangelising the value of stories in sense-making, decision-making and motivating action. It’s worth pointing out that stories can also be used for evil… stories can mislead, they can overly simplify or misrepresent things… understanding how they operate can not only empower you to use them in your own role, but can insulate you from falling prey to their beguiling effects. Therefore… read on…
Early in this post I gave a very vague definition of what I mean by story — I said it was the creative use of language… but my real definition of a story is something with continuity and coherence. It is a string of connected statements and conclusions connected by ‘therefore’ statements rather than ‘and then’ statements.
Therefore is what we say when we have data. But it’s also the most powerful question to ask in the more qualitative and speculative activities in product development. If someone presents a prototype, a feature or a ‘day in the life of the user’ story and they say “and then…” between actions and interactions, rather than therefore, they haven’t finished the design work. You shouldn’t prioritise any work other than filling in the gaps with “therefore” or “but”… Just as continuity errors or unmotivated actions break the suspension of disbelief in stories and magic, they’re also signals that your design isn’t finished.
Organisations are likely to have a favoured form of thinking and making sense… “stories” might be too wishy-washy a concept for data-driven organisations, they might seem too unreliable for logical thinkers. But in every form of making sense — stories have a part of play… they will always help you do the three key tasks of communication as a product leader — share meaning, persuade and inspire. And in complex operations, where you can’t rely on the logic of deduction — you can impose logic in induction and abduction through stories and asking “therefore?”
When we tell someone a story — whether we’re doing it to give them information, to convince them of something (or even just for entertainment) we ask that person to suspend disbelief — to understand reality, buy into a reality, or to entertain the reality of “what if…” So, the more skilled we can become at storytelling — and sniffing out stories that don’t add up — the better we can support our teams in critical evaluation and imaginative speculation.
