The Power of an Anecdote

Many years ago I was visiting a supplier in a region of the world that was suffering from some deep economic and governmental problems. The location I was visiting wasn’t the sort of place you were able to travel around freely, and I had both an armed guard and translator in the vehicle I was being taxied in. This might sound memorable in itself, but actually at the time I was rather used to the odd arrangement.

The thing that made this particular trip more memorable was what happened next.

As we parked up outside the typical industrial estate that I seemed to spend my early career traveling to, and as I got out and stretched my legs after the long drive, a commotion caught my attention from the edge of estate car park. A casually dressed man was aggressively confronting a fairly worn out looking older man whilst what I assumed was a mother and child sat on the floor nearby them crying. The group were stood in front of a very old looking wooden building that sat in front of fields of dry dusty dirt – a farm that was clearly down on its luck or some such thing.

The mother and child seemed to be surrounded by books, and various tools I didn’t recognise, and as the casually dressed man threw a punch at the older gentleman he was arguing with, the part of me that often tends to run towards fires and not away got the better of me and I went over to ‘intervene’.

Those that know me know I’m not the most well built man, and not particularly intimidating, so I won’t lie and pretend that the fact that I had an armed guard with me didn’t embolden me slightly – but the sight of what I had decided was a poor family being assaulted probably would have led to my doing something stupid either way. As my wife will attest with frustration today I still can’t help but not mind my own business in these kind of situations…

As I approached with both the translator running to catch up to stop me and the guard slowly following behind, the aggressive man stopped his berating of the other, and turned to look at me – clearly irritated at the interruption. The translator caught up and worriedly advised me not to interfere.

I ignored my translator and asked the older man (that I’d decided was the victim) what was going on. My question was relayed to him by my translator, whilst the aggressive guy looked slightly taken aback as he realised my guard was carrying a gun. The older man spoke frantically back to me – with glistening eyes, in the local language that I spoke not a word of, but my translator dutifully translated:

“They come and they throw us out, they come as they say we don’t own the land but we do, it was my fathers, and his fathers and his fathers and now it’s mine.”

He became more animated as he talked and gestured to the woman and child on the floor still behind him.

“They say we’re stupid, they say we don’t think. But my family have been farming this land for years and now it’s not the same. It’s their fault nothing grows – I just make the food – the government is supposed to give the water.”

The other man started shouting loudly at this, and the translator stopped translating and explained what was happening to me. He told me that the national government was struggling with water shortages, and had been for several years now. They’d had to divert the course of many of the local rivers and brooks to keep the water flowing to the cities. For the last few years rainfall had been measurably down year on year, and reservoirs were constantly drying up. As the political and economic centers of power were in the city, they would get the prioritised water supply and the outskirts (like the farm we were stood in front of) lost their irrigation facilities. A farm without water doesn’t produce food (obviously), and as the productivity of the region’s farmers dropped, the local government would evict farmers they claimed weren’t productive enough and sell off the land to whoever would pay to help balance the local government’s books. I questioned why such a casually dressed man was doing this ‘eviction’ job if this was some sort of government matter, and my translator explained that the local government in the country would use the local police force until recently when control was centralised – nominally to help quell the local unrest the country was experiencing. This meant that now the local government was without a formal police force and would employ anyone they could on a job by job basis, to go in, throw a family out, and pay the collectors cash to do so.

I realised as I heard the explanation that I’d inserted myself into a situation that was far bigger and more impossible to solve than I’d thought. Whilst my sense that something ‘unfair’ was happening had been 'on the money' when I’d seen the violence displayed to the farming family – clearly, there was nothing I was going to be able to do.

By this point the management team of the potential supplier I was visiting had caught sight of me, and hurriedly were rushing out to corral me inside, but I will admit to not being able to get the sight of the mother and child being thrown from their generational home out of my head which led to much less attention being paid during the visit than should have been.

The day seemed to fly by, and when I made it back to my airport hotel that evening I tried to search for more information on the story I’d been told by my translator, and to find at least some hope that there was a solution in play with a big NGO, or signs the national drought was due to end… or anything positive around what I’d seen.

There was so very little about the situation in this country on the internet. There were adverts for bright sunny beaches and promises of tropical paradise, and a few stories of the civil war that had occurred several decades back, but in general this place didn’t seem to make the international news, and the story of government throwing out farmers, or water shortages was nowhere to be seen.

After nearly 2 hours of ‘googling’, I could find only one reference to the situation I’d seen in the country and it came from a climate change report dated 7 years before. It predicted that due to the warming the ocean was experiencing as a result of climate change that rain fall was highly likely to be disrupted over the next decade in the region. Furthermore, it suggested that the most land locked areas of the country were likely to experience a period of desertification over the next 2 decades, and given the relatively high concentration of population in the region a large of amount of social unrest was expected, with the countries farmers and poor being the first to be impacted.

It was a long report, and whilst the predictions from 7 years before weren’t entirely accurate – there was enough similarity with what I’d seen and been told was going on at the edge of the industrial estate that day that it looked like the prediction was coming true. Yes, their government wasn’t handling it well, yes, there were some bad actors involved, but – fundamentally the reason for the whole exchange was climate change.

If I’d ever needed a wake up call as to the criticality and urgency of sustainability – this was it.

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A Powerful Tale

It’s hard to read this account and not feel moved by the story. It’s a real world example of something that we all are somewhat nebulously aware is happening, and it helps focus us on the reality of the situation.

That said, there is one very large problem with this story though.

It’s not true.

I made it up. The entire thing.

Sorry.

In truth, every element in the tale has a basis in something I’ve experienced or witnessed at some point in my life and career. However this particular set of events, people, the country even – is completely made up and from a disparate set of events brought together to make what at best can be described as a morality tale, and at worst – an outright lie.

Some of you will be annoyed with me at this point, and to those of you that are – I’m sorry. It’s never my intent to offend. Now though, I want to get to the important point.

Given how easy that story was to make up, and given how much you might have bought into it, what if that story had been written with a different perspective in mind? What if I’d told a tale of a poor family driven into poverty because environmental regulations meant the only industry they had ever worked in became frowned upon? Would you feel sympathy for the workers, or their children then? Would it change your mind against tighter environmental regulations – an important tool we have in our arsenal of weapons against climate change?

Even the strongest minded of us humans have a key weakness – and that is that most of us love an anecdote. It’s even better if the anecdote happens to align with our world view – it’s a double whammy of reinforcement that ‘we were right all along’. This addiction to anecdotes over data though is a real issue – both in fighting climate change, and every day life.

In fairness, access to data to inform decisions is a very recent development in our evolutionary history, as for millennia all we had was stories from (at most) the next tribe over the mountain to help guide and inform us. This isn’t true today though, although most of us, driven by our biology, act like it still is.

Why is this even on my mind? I recently watched a political address that made big commitments to various directions which the government in question were announcing they would take. How did they lead their audience to agree with them? They used anecdotes.

Not a jot of data was presented to commit billions of dollars worth of tax payers’ money to these various causes – money that in a pandemic hit COVID world, many people are struggling to find. Instead, a story about a single person struggling and saying ‘thank you’ to said politician was used to illustrate why this leader was right, and justified in what they were doing. A single story, about a single person, told persuasively, managed to impact millions.

All I saw from that politician, was a poor sales pitch.

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What’s the Harm?

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t also use anecdotes to persuade, or tell stories to illustrate a point – but having met with and worked with hundreds if not thousands of persuasive people in my career, I can absolutely assure you – I am certainly not the most persuasive. That said – I know enough to recognise when others are using tactics like ‘the powerful anecdote’ to lead and persuade, and this is what I find problematic in a world that faces real challenges today.

These aren’t just the issues of climate change either. The last 18 months have seen explosions in the use of authority by various governments in the name of fighting Coronavirus, and many of those power grabs have been allowed not through careful analysis of costs and benefits – but through politicians appealing to the heart using nothing more than powerful anecdotes. History is littered with the victims of governments and leaders that were good at telling stories and not much else, and many people forget that politicians are no more intelligent or capable of rational choice than the most average of us. They are often great story tellers - specifically taking courses in 'oratory', but also oh so very imperfectly human. Does their story telling skill alone make them qualified to make the kind of personal choices they have been making for us over the recent crisis? I'm not so sure.

I again should point out – I do believe that the power of using a good story can be a force for good. However I do have concern that there isn’t quite enough scepticism in the world today when anecdotes are used to lead us in our daily lives to the extent that they are today.

We’re only going to solve the complex problems that the planet faces by following the data, and also by taking the time to understand what that data is in the first place. I hear on an all too regular basis people claiming that ‘x’ is good for the environment, and that ‘y’ isn’t – usually accompanied by an anecdote of why this is. I think we need to set the bar a lot higher.

The world is beautifully interconnected today in a way that it absolutely was not just 15 years ago. There are profound upsides to this but also downsides in a society that doesn’t chase and even more critically – challenge - the data. A society in love with the anecdote like ours, often just repeats, simplifies and amplifies stories – mostly with good intentions, however often with unintended consequences.

I recently wrote in an article about the problems of ‘sourcing locally’, which is obviously a complex topic that I’m not going to cover in detail here, but suffice to say the thesis was that the common wisdom today is quite often incorrect. This is a great example of where globally the ‘buy locally for sustainability’ message is doing real harm to the world through encouraging inefficient smaller operations, where perfectly adequate large scale environmentally well managed operations exist. Challenging this common wisdom though is hard – hard data, and global peer reviewed studies are quite frankly for most people very boring, and the story about a local business supplying locally is heart warming and appealing – especially if a few words are thrown in about goods traveling less miles so being ‘better for the environment’. Worse, suggesting that this sourcing locally principle might be wrong has become for some people almost taboo. When following the data though, and doing it to save the planet – any place the data leads mustn’t be taboo.

This is one example, though it happens every day. In fact, most modern social media platforms are built upon our appetite for anecdotes over data. Imagine if you were to believe instantly everything you read on Twitter or Facebook? Now think of something you read today on Facebook that you agreed with… Ask yourself why you believed it? Have you seen data? Have you challenged it – or is it much more likely just a long held belief you have and the latest anecdote you’ve read online just backs up your preconceptions?

Now imagine that sales people, marketing teams and politicians around the world know that you’re susceptible to being influenced by powerful anecdotes, and that billions of pounds are spent to do just that… Imagine what they could convince you to do… And imagine what they’ve already convinced you of…

Beyond the ability to convince, there is a another well known problem with anecdotes and that’s the human memory. Research has shown that many of you will remember for years to come the story I told at the beginning of this article, however some will forget the context (it was a lie!) and will repeat it as though someone once told you it in truth. A few others will even misremember it as their own experience – which sounds unbelievable, but is a well researched phenomenon. Yes – you understood that right, there are some of you reading the story earlier who in 10 years time will actually think this happened to you… Anecdotes are far more powerful than we realise!

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What can we do?

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to live in the world where we have to evidence every single claim we make on a daily basis. Trust is something that’s hugely important to me, and we could all do with a little bit more of it in our lives. When something is important though – like doing the right thing for the planet is – it’s worth stopping and considering what’s right. Can that particular product or strategy be backed up by evidence? If not – why not?

Challenging our suppliers – in our professional and personal lives is something we can all do. If the products you buy don’t come with at least an open offer of more information on their sustainability credentials then ask what is being hidden. More transparency on the environmental credentials of a product is critical – and it’s up to all of us to ask for it, and be prepared to be asked for it.

Is this going to stop a well polished politician standing up in front of you with a practiced empathetic look on their face and try to convince you their way of running the world is best? No. It’s not. Not any time soon at least.

But if we at least start to raise our expectations of each other a little in our business to business or personal choices, to the point that evidence becomes standard when it comes to sustainability claims – I think eventually that higher standard will filter through… And if this becomes the ‘new normal’ that I keep hearing every one referring to in 2021… I can certainly live with that!

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Lee Whitton?