When I read fables or fairytales or princess stories to my daughters (ages 6 and 2.5) they are always able to separate the lessons/morals embedded in these stories from the context of the stories themselves. For instance, they understand that if the message of a story involving princesses and an evil witch is that you should be nice to each other, this doesn't just apply to princesses and witches.
They never say: "Well that's all fine and good, but it clearly doesn't apply to me because I am neither a princess nor a witch and, quite frankly, I'm a little annoyed that you've wasted my time with this irrelevant drivel. Don't you have some specific stories about things I am likely to actually experience in my days at kindergarten?"
They get that they are supposed to extrapolate the lessons from these made up, fantastic stories and apply them to their everyday lives where frogs don't talk and not everyone is royalty.
Why, then, are business executives often unable to accomplish this same task? Replace 'fables' or 'fairytales' with 'case studies' and see if you've ever been in this situation: you are trying to communicate a broad lesson as it relates to brand or marketing or social media, etc... and you use a case study of a company that has some clear takeaways. And your audience looks at you like you are an idiot and says "well, that's all fine and good, and we are happy for that company in the case study, but they are not us and they don't compete in our industry (or category, or geography, etc...) so we are a little annoyed that you've wasted our time with this irrelevant drivel."
Perhaps it is the specific nature of these case studies that makes it easy for them to refute. They are based in the real world and are easy for people to pick apart and re-analyze and find sufficient holes to justify rendering them useless for intelligent consumption. Maybe we would be better off turning these case studies into fables or fairytales or princess stories and teaching the lessons of, say, Social Media, by anthropomorphizing food or animals and making the story so fantastic that nobody could really argue the facts - they would just focus on the lessons. In essence, write the case studies as if they were for 6 year olds... Perhaps the Aesop's Fables of Business?
Yup, fairy tales, or just any tale that can get the execs and engineers into empathising with the user.
I love Mrs Armitage on Wheels as an analogy of those software products that grow like Topsy: http://effectivus.com/2009/02/barnacle-billow-or-barnards-star/
Thanks for the post!
Posted by: Chris Steele | January 27, 2010 at 10:51 AM