Numbers Don’t Lie, Stories Tell the Truth

Mazuba Mwiinga

That expression: numbers don’t lie. We all might have heard of it, right? It sounds trite but could be right.

In communicating impact or lack of it, numbers could hold the punchline of the fact on the matter. But would they still tell us the truth of the impact?

I guess it isn’t an issue for debate, is it? Looking through the glass-hole, there seems to be a coin-with-two-sides phenomenon here. However, storytelling in peeling the coated reality that numbers might not express, often times is low rated.

Storytelling is a silent motor whose effects are only heard, when it explodes. Behind the numbers, lie a human face only a storyteller would capture in the life of a target. Behind a number, appears a soul that may depend on an intervention beyond the Key Performance Indicator placed on the beneficiary, only which a story would spotlight.

In telling stories of impact, numbers matter less than the real change zeroing around a target, for a target is no longer a KPI, but a life that tells the truth of the matter.

Achieving a KPI, keeps our ego of success, but hearing the voices of the KPI, kicks us into human faced territories of actuality, knowing the severity or geniality of the situation - a state that would tell us about the complexities beyond numbers. Or the circumstances that would create knew forms of numbers previously unknown.

Assuming we all know, stories are said to have a beginning, a middle and an end. We surely all agree to that. However, truth be told, the beginning may not be as gospel truth as we may know, it ought to have been. For how the story starts, may sometimes be the end of it, or its middle chunk. Nevertheless, a good storyteller relies on numbers to tell a story that represents the truth that might have been overshadowed by the numbers themselves.

In curating that story, greasy or gritty as it might be, the teller hears what the numbers have never exposed him to before, and reconciles the reality with what the KPI gears to see. His exegesis of existing numerical information becomes critical comparative revelation of the stories he shares.

How these stories are started and ended, is the only way one would be able to see the kind of impact an intervention have had on the target. A poorly curated story risks showing a wrong picture.

A proficient storyteller, always shows, and never tells. For stories are told by the affected. The storyteller shows what the affected tells. ‘The pain of the wound is felt by the wounded,’ as my grandmother would often say. And that’s how we get to know the truth from numerical fact. Stories, breath life in numbers.