Financial Storyteller

IBM talks about Financial Storytelling?

I am a frequent reader of Fast Company magazine and it doesn’t take me long to find something interesting. This month I only needed to get as far as the inside cover! This page was taken up by an advertisement for IBM. The headline grabbed my attention:

Insights by the numbers.

Reading down the page I was interested to read what could be described as a formal introduction to my Case Study in Financial Storytelling: Building a Success Story, One Country at a Time. This is what IBM said:

How exactly do you draw meaningful financial insights out of information that is scattered throughout your organization and the world? Information today can sit in different departments, in different countries, in different languages, in different formats. By the time information reaches decision makers in business, how much meaning is actually left?

Precisely, I thought. So much can be ‘lost in translation’. So what to do about it? The advertisement continued:

IBM is working with companies to integrate their financial and nonfinancial information to help them fuel better, more confident decisions. By enabling real transparency into a company’s information, executives can access and understand it in real time, achieving a “single version of the truth” across the business.

A “single version of the truth” ? That is what I would call the Financial Story. The process of integration, transparency etc. that IBM describe is what I would call Financial Storytelling. Integrating the numbers, the indicators, with the individuals; the people they represent. Bringing out the narrative, the non-financial story of what is really happening in a business. 

The IBM advertisement continues for a couple of sentences about how successful they’ve been with this approach before presenting an explanation of the value it gives their customers.

... So we can move the conversation from “Are these numbers right?” to “What can we do with this information to grow the business?” A more effective approach to financial management gives businesses far more than simple tactical levers - it offers a real strategic advantage. 

Instinctively you might think this is the language needed to communicate with IBM’s typical customer. I think this is equally relevant to smaller companies and even entrepreneurs. This is of course delivered not by IBM but by a Financial Storyteller. That is the real strategic advantage!

Impossibly Large and Complex Numbers in Financial Storytelling

I was drawn to Chris Jordan's talk (below) by an rss feed which talked about the plight of the albatross. That talk is actually a different video, but this one has something I had to share. Chris demonstrates how we can use visual images to help us understand gigantic numbers. In today's society we struggle with numbers; the scale of them. As a result he believes that, as culture; we are not feeling enough.

I was struck by his reference to the 9/11 attacks. Over 3000 people died, the world was appalled and rightly so. Everyone was talking about it and was affected by it on some level. To paraphrase Chris's numbers, the 9/11 attacks happened on a Tuesday. In the following three days approximately the same number of people also died: of smoking related diseases. What's more, every day since, another 1,100 people die from the same cause. Yet nobody talks about that.

Chris makes a powerful point! On a day-to-day basis do we really care enough? As you will see in the video Chris's work helps us visualise some of these gigantic numbers. Hopefully they encourage us to feel more. He explains that if we feel more, we can change more. His comment is not that one issue is bigger than another, or one should get more attention. He merely states, "This is who we are today."

For me this is one of the best demonstrations of how you can take impossibly large and often complex numbers and present them in a way that makes a connection; a way that tells a story. 

In the same way Chris has done this for some of the big issues in society, financial storytelling can do the same in business. The numbers may be impossibly large, often they may be complex - but if they tell a story that can be communicated effectively, they can drive real change.

Financial Storyteller included in free new E-Book from Katherine Hansen, PhD

 I am thrilled to share information about Kathy's free new e-book,  Storied Careers: 40+ Story Practitioners Talk about Applied Storytelling. This is an 88 page illustrated e-book which you can download from Kathy's excellent site A Storied Career.

Over the last year Kathy has interviewed more than 40 Story Practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds with an equally wide range of applications in Applied Storytelling. 

I was featured back in July and in additional to the book, the full interview is available here. 

Making the book even more compelling is the structure. This is not a simple cut and paste of the 40+ interviews. Kathy has organised the chapters into topical subjects. For each subject the responses of the practitioners are grouped together. For instance if you would like to read about Storytelling Influences (Chapter 3), you can read what 12 different practitioners said. If it's Storytelling in Organisations (Chapter 13) you can read the thoughts from another half a dozen contributors, from all over the world. 

This makes each Chapter stand on it's own and makes for some very interesting reading. As a result the book is a rich resource about Applied Storytelling as it stands today. Bios and contact details for all the practitioners are included to strengthen this. Lastly, Kathy has also produced the book and is distributing it for FREE. I encourage you to take a look!

Case Study - Building a Success Story, One Country at a Time

These Case Studies are intended to illustrate financial storytelling and the role of financial storyteller in a variety of business settings.

In this Study, a geographically diversified company is struggling to understand their complete financial position.

To download a PDF of the complete Case Study (685 words) click here.

To download an audio version of this Case Study (mp3 4:57) click here.

Storytelling can help solve social issues and help businesses

At the end of last month I was invited by Graham Dover to sit in on the last session of his Social Innovation course at SFU. I'd met Graham when we both judged on the Social innovation Business Case Competition back in June. The format of this last session was that the students, who had been divided into teams during the course, presented their ideas to a selection of guests.

I've said, if not blogged a number of times, that the fact that the students are even thinking about such social problems as homelessness, addiction, the environment and so on is greatly encouraging. Students of today are tomorrow's leaders and the ability to look at some of these long-standing problems with fresh eyes is crucial if they are ever to be solved. As I watched I learnt a lot about what they wanted to do, but very little about why they would do it. They seemed to be caught in the glare of public speaking and trying to work with PowerPoint slides.

Talking about presentations and slides, Graham kindly shared the graphic he had produced by Aftab Erfan at Whole Picture Thinking. I love these kind of images, they really can communicate a lot of information in an effective and engaging way. I also saw this back in February when I attended the Northern Voice Conference. There it was Nancy White who did a pictorial representation of Rob Cottingham's entertaining keynote as he delivered it and also went on to do the same for a session called Say it/blog it with pictures.

All this made me think. Sometimes it's as if we are looking for that great new way to present something, almost as if the method is more important than the message. Other times I think the message is lost because it's not communicated well enough. Never is this more true than when it comes to numbers. The fog that suddenly appears in front of someone's eyes at the mere mention of numbers is similar I think to the fog that appears when people try to talk about social issues such as senior poverty, the personal safety of sex workers and many more.

When it comes to numbers many people are able to shut out the important stories of what is happening in their business, much the same way some shut out social problems. There are some great people trying to break down the latter at the same time as I try to address the former. Much as you can only ignore your own personal finances for so long, in a business the need to understand the numbers is arguably more acute.

The interesting thing here is that in both cases, storytelling is the key. If you translate the financials of a company into a business narrative it can be easier to make the right decisions and move forward. If you translate social issues into personal stories your communication can be far more effective.

That said, there is of course a limit to the comparison between financial storytelling and solving social issues; I will summarise by saying that the latter is obviously a lot harder than building a business narrative. Links can be made between the two, but I do respect the fact there can be a major difference in terms of perspective at least.

It's this difference in perspective that brings me back to the students of Graham's Social Innovation class. I'm sure some of them will go on to run successful businesses, some I hope will work to solve some of the social issues they presented in the final class. All of them will in some way need to be able to present, show slides/graphics which communicate the story they want to tell, but all the time they are thinking about the issues rather than the method is time well spent.