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Friday, February 26, 2010
Stories Tap into Our Intuition
Author Robert Dickman describes stories as "a fact wrapped in an emotion that compels us to take action that transforms our world." Author Annette Simmons adds, ‘facts aren’t influential until they mean something to someone."
When we come together to inform and affect change in our lives, our communities and our world through dialogue and deliberation it is profoundly shaped by the narrative wrapped around the evidence at hand.
Public engagement is a pivotal process for effective decision-making to create sustainable communities. When the statistics of a problematic issue are placed in real life context it then becomes an issue that we can think about.
As author Dan Heath notes, "the fundamental mission of making data stick is to drag numbers within the range of our intuition."
When we seek to engage civic society in the process of informing programs and policies that address the challenges facing communities; it is our responsibility to push data into the realm of a meaningful context. Key to unlocking the story of what we know pivots on our ability to weave together our intuition with the evidence we have available to us.
This is why stories matter.