This time of year provides tremendous illustrations of the power and importance of stories.  From the stories that constitute our most core personal beliefs of the holiday season to those that detail running the gauntlet of inclement weather and travel delays to get “home for the holidays”, we define ourselves and others by the stories we tell.

As George Akerlof and Robert Shiller discuss in their widely acclaimed book, Animal Spirits (How Human Psychology Drives The Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism),

“The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives, of sequences of events with an internal logic and dynamic that appear as a unified whole.  In turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework for motivation.  Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories…. Great leaders are first and foremost creators of stories.”

Think about the stories that define your life.  How do these stories influence your perspective?  How do they influence how you see yourself?  What are the stories that resonate most strongly in your life?  What stories do you choose to relate to other people?  There’s a growing body of knowledge, that aligns with the passage above, saying these stories are fundamental to the formation of our identities.  This is a powerful thought.

Yet, traditionally in accounting and finance, stories are an afterthought.  We are taught to focus on the numbers.  We create the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement in accordance with GAAP, leaving storytelling to the sales and marketing departments.  My experience has been that it’s very difficult to generate engagement through the use of the financial reports, and in retrospect, I think it’s for this reason.

There’s a reason why people say the Notes To The Financial Statements will tell you “where the bodies are buried”.  The reason is that only in The Notes do we find stories.

From a regulatory perspective, for external reporting we’re fairly hog-tied as to what we can do.  GAAP is king.  These constraints are institutionalized and provide a structural grounding for capital markets that is required for a host of reasons.

Internal reports, on the other hand, present a tremendous opportunity to begin using stories to provide context and colour to business results.  This is the area of accounting and finance where we can really affect some change NOW by bringing life to the numbers.

In the following clip, Ira Glass (son of an accountant and award winning host of This American Life on Chicago Public Radio) describes using anecdotes to convey ideas and says,

“the power of the anecdote is so great, no matter how boring the material is, if it’s in a story form where there’s an anecdote happening,  it has a momentum in and of itself… like being on a train that has a destination”

(hat tip to Presentation Zen blog for a good post on this same clip)

Ira Glass summarizes the process of telling a story as:

1. Start with an action

2. Raise a question from the beginning (the bait)

3. Answer the question

4. Repeat

5. Moment of Reflection (the “why”)

Enjoy!