The best story wins…

Cold hard facts or clear compelling stories? When it comes to really understanding our world, it’s the latter that matter.

Writing in the FT, John Kay picks up on the age-old power of stories to help us make sense of things: “Probabilistic reasoning has become the dominant method of structured thinking about problems involving risk and uncertainty – to such an extent that people who do not think this way are derided as incompetent and irrational. Yet this probabilistic approach, a recent intellectual development, was heavily implicated in the 2008 financial crisis. Legal systems have evolved over hundreds if not thousands of years…to establish the degree of confidence in a narrative, not to measure a probability in a model. Such narrative reasoning is the most effective means humans have developed of handling complex and ill-defined problems… We cope with these situations by telling stories, and we base decisions on their persuasiveness.”

So stories rather than stats are the great sensemakers. And as John Kay implies and Life of Pi highlights, the best story wins.