There’s no replacement for hard data and the precision of mathematical analysis. Yet we know the data is meaningful when we can tell a story from it. Even so, story is not just the mark of rich insight, it is the means of that insight. Data becomes meaningful when we uncover the unseen human stories within it.
How a story cracked Enigma
The film The Imitation Game is a ripping good yarn based broadly on the life and work of Alan Turing and the team who broke the Nazi encryption device known as Enigma.
The odds against cracking Enigma were a staggering 159 million million possible configurations — changed every 24 hours!! Turing knew only a machine could process those possibilities at anything near the speed to crack the code. So he conceived, designed and built the forerunner of today’s computers.
Still the breakthrough eluded him — until a chance conversation in a pub with one of the women assigned to gathering the encrypted messages everyday. What she told him was a simple story.
Each of the women was assigned to typing the encrypted messages from one German signaller. In her case, the opening sentence always had the same structure. To her this was only an amusing and vaguely endearing side-point. To Turing, it was the key: one piece of repetitive code — a one line weather report ending with ‘Heil Hitler!’ — that could be decoded by working through past messages.
That simple human story provided the key to an unimaginably large dataset of staggering probabilities.
In my experience of ‘decoding’ strategy and culture, it’s always a story that enables the breakthrough:
- One simple story of shop-floor improvisation can reveal an unforeseen capacity for innovation.
- One simple story of working around a system can reveal the key not only to a better design, but also to a more engaged workforce.
10 essentials to ‘cracking the code’ with story
- Spend time at the ‘story-face’ — ‘down’ where the stories are
- Grow your respect for your people
- Cultivate your curiosity for your people
- Look past processes and systems to people
- Ask grounded questions. [Here’s how and some examples]
- Create opportunities for conversation more than communication
- Listen for the threads of stories in otherwise structural explanations
- Expect insights to lie hidden as much in the ordinary and banal as the exciting
- Don’t expect that this significance is already known
- Humble yourself to respect and listen well.
Where have you seen a simple human story crack a complex problem?
How long is it since you went to the ‘story-face’? Find it. Plan a listening visit.
COMMENTS: I have turned off comments because of automated trolls and their random text messages. Feel free to email me. You might enjoy this TEDx talk on the power of stories and questions to crack problems.