Measuring Success in a Narrative Culture:
The Radical Possibilities of Stories
2009 Jack Ricchiuto
Just about every organization and community on the planet is dedicated to defining and improving their desired performance outcomes. The standard method of assessing success is using numbers.
Although quantitative data enjoys the status of having unquestionable validity as a source of metrics, numbers often fall short of helping us know exactly how to generate the next levels of our success.
In theory, the numbers "should" light the way to continuous improvement but, that's in theory. In reality, every failing organization and community has at least as many numbers as those that are succeeding. If numbers had the magic we assign to them, just weighing ourselves would have immediate and guaranteed impact on our weight.
This reality has inspired New York city which has now halved its inherited 2,500 statistical indicators so that it can continue the progress it's been making as one of the most complex and dynamic international metropolitan areas of the world.
Numbers fail in two scenarios. They fail to serve us when we're after more qualitative kinds of outcomes, like those having to do with feelings and perceptions, not just events and outcomes. We can measure head counts and clicks more easily than whether these heads and clicks are likely to return and refer.
Numbers also fail to instruct us when we're seeing the same numbers stubbornly repeat in spite of our trying different approaches to changing them. Sometimes that which gets measured does not get done because we're measuring the wrong things or the right things in the wrong way.
How many times have you been in meetings where everyone looks at performance data and people raise questions about "what it means?" This incites the call for even more boatloads of data, and on it goes until we return to our hallways and happy hours to make sense out of everything the ways people have been making sense of things since the beginning of time: through new stories.
What's interesting is that while numbers are the gods of the boardroom, stories are the gods in hallways and happy hours.
In the formal spaces of organizations and communities, stories are devalued to the category of "anecdotal data" and not considered valid and reliable indicators. In the informal spaces of organizations and communities, stories are what shape brand, engagement, and funding.
Stories move people to meaningful action; numbers move them to meaningless meetings. In the informal spaces, a handful of stories have far more velocity and credibility than hundreds of pages or slides of statistics.
In a narrative culture, one which honors the timeless value of stories, we are starting to explore together new questions about how stories can be elevated to the status of measurement validity and utility.
In the recently released "The Stories that Connect Us" (2009 DesigningLife Books), I introduce the notion of trend stories.
Trend stories are stories that communicate symbolic levels of success. In dramatic cases, it can be a single story of firsts or lasts. These are the stories of Rosa Parks and the Berlin Wall that spoke volumes about real and significant socio-political trends that defied mountains of statistics otherwise.
Trend stories can also be small constellations of stories that together indicate experiential significance. It can be the stories of teachers in an urban school system who hated every year of teaching until this year when changes in their world of teaching inspire an amazing sense of rededication and renewal.
The power of trend stories is that they indicate a level of achievement that implies that if this was achieved, it is certainly more of a trend than a personal story. This is the power of positive deviance stories. As soon as we know three villages have been able to reduce early childhood deaths from disease and malnutrition, we feel confident that enough has been achieved to make these stories trends.
In a narrative culture we're looking for the right trend stories to convey relevant, actionable, and valid indicators of performance on our desired outcomes. The questions of our inquiry become completely different from the usual statistical questions that drive data gathering.
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✦What kind of stories could tell us that we've finally got a foothold in specific kinds of new markets?
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✦What kind of stories could tell us that people feel a greater sense of safety and security?
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✦What kinds of stories could tell us that we finally have the right approach to funders and investors?
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✦What kind of stories could tell us that people are more loyal to the organization/community?
Each of these kinds of questions can form the basis for both performance goals as well as the indicators we track as we go.
Measuring success in the narrative vocabulary of trend stories opens up a whole new world of possibilities and raises a qualitatively different set of questions about what we mean by success in any venue.
Instead of working from the superstition that "more data is better data," the practice of identifying trend stories works from the opposite mantra that "smarter stories are better data."
It takes incredibly more imagination to identify the kinds of trend stories that would represent real and desirable achievements. The reward is that once we get the right trend stories identified, measuring moves from spreadsheets to video interviews, resulting in far more actionable inspiration than data could ever deliver.
