Using storytelling as a finance business partner - why it works

Telling the story behind the numbers

Finance business partnering is about?creating impact for the business which can only be achieved by deriving insights from analysis and influencing your stakeholders to translate the insights into action. The last part - telling the story behind the numbers to influence your stakeholders - is often were the real battle is fought. A battle finance often loses in what I have called the finance business partner 'last-mile problem' in another recent article. ?

A key reason for failing to convince business stakeholders of the importance of insights provided by finance arise from the presentation of the facts, rather than the facts themselves. A recurring oversight by finance professionals is that facts alone do not cut it. In fact, presenting facts that challenge someone's beliefs can actually lead that individual to strengthen his/her support of their original stance as a result of the cognitive bias called the?backfire effect.

Instead, we need to persuade our business stakeholders through both logos, ethos, and pathos as first outlined by Aristotle more than 2,300 years ago. A little simplified, this means that a persuasive argument must be both logical, credible, and evoke feelings. One way to achieve this is through storytelling.

How storytelling works

That storytelling works should come as no surprise, as it has been one of our primary means of communication since we first started documenting our stories as cave-painting more than 45,000 years ago (apparently someone drew a pig in an Indonesian cave). But why is this? What makes stories so appealing??

The answer lies in our brains. It's quite simple. If we listen to a PowerPoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that is all that happens.

When we are being told a story, the picture is dramatically different. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too. In fact, our brains react to stories as if we were living them ourselves.?Our brains essentially light up with activity across a range of areas. This is what is called neural coupling which means that the brain of the person telling a story, and the brain of the one listening to it, synchronize. This is shown by brain scans conducted at Princeton University.

This is also why metaphors are effective. When you are presented with phrases like “She smiled with her cotton-candy lips” and “He had leathery hands” it activates your sensory cortex. Phrases like "John grasped the phone" or "Simon kicked the ball" create activity in your motor cortex, which coordinates the body's movements.

Thus, if someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up. If the story is about motion, our motor cortex gets active. To conclude, storytelling works because a story puts the whole brain of the listener to work.?

A sticky story - example

Let me tell you a story, to underline the point. I know this might seem a little far fetched to some hardcore finance professionals, but bear with me for the following paragraphs, and the point should become evident.

THE STORY OF JOHN MONTAGU

In the year 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was in important man. John was an elegant and well-spoken aristocrat by day, but a socialite and partygoer at night. Specifically, John fancied spending his free time playing cards while eating and drinking with his high-society friends and acquaintances.

Engaging in his favorite leisure activity, John found himself facing a conundrum. John could not find a way to both eat and play cards at the same time without revealing his cards to his opponents. Handling his knife, fork, and playing cards simultaneously rendered it impossible. John pondered; how might I eat while keeping one hand free for my cards?

To overcome his struggles, John came up with the idea of asking his chef to prepare a beef and place it between two slices of toast, as this would allow him to eat the beef with one hand while handling his playing cards with the other. His kitchen staff found it to be an odd request but delivered on their master's whishes. John's invention worked wonders!

And that is how John became the inventor of the most popular meal in the western world: the sandwich - which remains named after John, the 4th Earl of Sandwich.

The interesting thing about the story of John Montagu is that you are unlikely to forget the story of who invented the sandwich ever again. At least, you are much less likely to forget, than if I had presented the raw facts as simple bullet points, e.g.,

• "John Montagu was a British politician and aristocrat"
• "John Montagu invented the sandwich in 1748"

Keep this in mind the next time you want to deliver a "sticky" message to your business stakeholders or team members. Rather than present your facts in a list of bullet points, wrap your message in an appealing story.

I will share insights on how to construct an effective story in a later article.

Where to learn more

This article is heavily influenced by the following articles, that might also be relevant to the reader.

• The science of storytelling
• The neuroscience of your brain on fiction
• Why telling a story is the most powerful way to activate our brains
• Clicking: how our brains are sync