We are wired for story | Working principles

An interesting thing happened in the UK last week – a television dramatization woke everyone up.

There’s been a long running scandal in the UK involving one of the worlds leading IT providers (Fujitsu), the Post Office, the Government and the people who run the fabulous, generally small, Post Offices known as sub-postmasters.

For those of you who aren’t from the UK, the Post Office might not be a concept you understand and it’s not at all easy to explain, but I’m going to try. At its simplest a Post Office is the place you go to send a parcel, but it’s a lot more than that. In many ways a Post Office is an extension of the government, but it’s also more than that. It’s more like the ultimate service desk. If you are a foreign national you can apply for residency here, this is also the place to exchange currency, the place for photo ID validation, they also allow you to put money into and withdraw money from hundreds of bank accounts, and the list goes on.

There are over 11,000 of these facilities across the country and everyone at some point interacts with a Post Office. I’d be surprised if there are many people in the country who don’t know where there nearest one is.

I’m not going to retell the story of the scandal here, there are far more knowledgeable and skilled people to do that:

• British Post Office scandal – Wikipedia
• BBC iPlayer – Panorama – The Post Office Scandal (UK)
• Mr Bates vs The Post Office – Wikipedia
• Mr Bates vs The Post Office – Series 1 – Episode 1 – ITVX (UK)

What I am going to comment on is the power that has been unleashed across a nation now that everyone, at least it feels like everyone, has connected with the stories of the people involved.

Here’s the trailer for everyone outside the UK:

This isn’t a new story, the Panorama documentary listed above is from 2022, significant court cases date back to 2010, there was huge exposure of court cases in 2019. And, yet, none of this connected with the psyche of the British people in quite the same way as a dramatization of the story in which we follow the struggle of an unlikely band of sub-postmasters against the might of corporations and government.

This dramatization has connected with people in way that everything else hadn’t. The show has touched hearts in a way that statistics never did. I’ve followed this story for a long while and this dramatization changed me. Being transported into the midst of the situation created emotions that no news report ever did, which I find interesting, because the news reports were about real people.

What was the result: A petition has started requesting that the former head of the Post Office side be stripped of a CBE, a national honour, and (today) over 1 million people have signed it. The government is hurriedly rushing out statements about blanket exoneration of all of the sub-postmasters involved in the scandal. My own social media has been alight with people wanting to do something. A retired senior colleague decided that this was the subject that would make him return to LinkedIn, as just one example.

I don’t fully know why now, why this telling of the story, has blown everything open. What I do know is that we are wired for story and that is a signifcant part of the answer.

Why do we dread KPI, SLA, SLO, and any one of the statistical treatments that we face very day? Perhaps it’s because they don’t include any story?

Why does our heart sink when we see a set of bullet points on a slide? Again, no story, no metaphor?

If it’s stories that lead to change, why do we tell so few of them in the corporate world?

Even within the Agile/Scrum community, where a story is a method for gathering needs, I think we’ve turned something helpful into a monster by connecting it with the dreaded story point.

If you want to see someone change, connect them with someone who’s already made a change, why? The person who’s already made the change has a compelling story to tell.

I have a grandson who is nearly 3, he can tell me story after story. We’ve visited a revisted the worlds of Peter Rabbit, Chase and the Paw Patrol, the Gruffallo and Zogg to name just a few. His imagination is continually sparking stories, building farmyards and aligning other toys in the narative. We are wired for story.

Time to start practive your story telling.

Header Image: This is the tope of Helm Crag, also known as the Lion and the Lamb because of it’s appearence from the village Grasmere below.