Narrative in Research
Telling Stories and Shaping Perceptions
Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds. Each culture's Make-a-Human kit is built from stories, and maintained by stories. A story can be a rule for living according to one's culture, a useful survival trick, a clue to the grandeur of the universe, or a mental hypothesis about what might happen if we pursue a particular course.
— The Science of Discworld, Terry Pratchett
The use of narratives in research, communication and organization is one of my favorite topics, and I hope to expand on this in future posts. This is a popular subject, and most of the concepts I introduce here are based on the works of others — if you find this overview interesting, please be sure to check out the links in the Further Reading section.
The Researcher’s Role
My personal experience in research began with the misguided impression that my role was merely to create useful knowledge that would hopefully be consumed by others at some point. However, I later realized that in doing so, I was passing the buck and not properly fulfilling my role within my organization. My responsibility as a researcher is in fact much broader — I must be proactive in ensuring that my knowledge is well-utilized (imparting it on the right person at the right time). Taking this a step further, this often means that my role entails both creating knowledge and utilizing it myself — I need to be my own best customer.
The researcher should play an active role of sense-maker and perception-shaper — using their knowledge and understanding of reality to induce change (or impermeability) in their customers’ posture or policy. This is usually initiated in response to significant changes in reality, whether external circumstances or internal aspects relating to the customers themselves (by which I mean decisionmakers that the researcher supports or reports to, inside or outside their own organization, depending on context).
To this end, the researcher should weave narratives and act as a kind of story-teller. But how can we make our research accessible and relevant to others? How should we best distill the complexity of our research so that our products are meaningful to our audience, such that our conclusions resonate with them in ways that matter?
You might be familiar with the following scenario: say you recently discovered something of interest in the course of your research, decided to present your findings to your customers, and assumed they would deduce the implications on their own. However, you found yourself caught off-guard by follow-up questions such as “so what?” or “what should we do about this?” — these are in fact the most important questions a researcher must answer.
Furthermore, we shouldn’t settle for merely generating research products, but rather strive to provide an end-to-end service — what might even be best-described as an experience — to decision-makers. Our goal is to help them develop a better grasp on reality in order to make better judgements on how to deal with current circumstances.
Once we reach an assessment in our research, we must put it to good use:
Direct attention of decision-makers and steer discourse within the organization towards specific occurrences in reality, by answering the question “what is happening?” (or “what has changed?”)
Help our customers understand the value of these occurrences, by answering the question “so what?”
Guide the decision-making process towards specific courses of action, by answering the question “what should we do (and how)?”
Our answers should take into account several crucial parameters:
What aspects of reality are relevant to the organization’s function?
What do our customers hope to achieve? What are they afraid of? What do they have to gain or lose?
How might our customers be affected by current trends? How could these changes support their goals, undermine them or put them at risk?
What tools do we have at our disposal to adapt to current circumstances or take advantage of them? What can our shared experience teach us about how best to utilize these tools for this purpose?
In many ways, our role as researchers is to tell a story about the intersection between the organization and phenomena in reality (in other words: making sure we understand what we’re facing, ourselves, and our context). The story that we tell about a given research subject is how we organize our assesemments about it. To make use of our story to influence decision-making (or inform future research), we must proactively take a part in the process — our customers and colleagues cannot afford to wait for our input indefinitely (even if they are inclined to do so), and the discussion will take place regardless, with or without us. We need to be in the room where it happens, and provide answers to the above questions on time, while it still matters.
But how does one learn to influence decision-making? Much like any other skill, we should try to imitate past efforts (both in terms of process and final product); request feedback from peers about our interactions with customers; make the most of the internal review process by learning from others; and cultivate our experience by analyzing our own achievements and mistakes.
Telling Stories
Stories have a typical structure that our audience is almost certainly highly familiar with, generally composed of multiple stages: exposition, conflict, climax and resolution. By viewing the researcher’s role as that of a (reliable and factual) story-teller, we can take advantage of this deep-rooted familiarity and structure our products in ways that “plug-and-play” into our customer’s story port, so to speak. If you’ll allow me a biological analogy, we should fold our narrative proteins such that they bind to our audience’s story receptors.
We can make our talking points easier to understand by highlighting narrative elements such as causality, directionality and contrast. By regarding our customers as “protagonists”, and meeting their hardwired expectations of what constitutes a “good” story about their encounter with the phenomenon at hand, we can provide them with an effective sense-making experience.
A story, in this sense, is a structure we use to explain why the information it contains is meaningful to our audience. It serves this purpose both in the context of a single product and in our continuous interaction with our customers (which offers a shared learning experience that informs and refines our narrative over time). It exists in our head in some initial shape from the very start of the research process, but undergoes many changes throughout. Finally, the narrative ceases to serve its purpose when it doesn’t match up with reality anymore, and it is vitally important that we recognize this in time.
Complex narratives tend to “compress” into simpler forms that are easier to digest and communicate, such as visual representations, metaphors and figures of speech (if I may digress from the subject of research for a moment — some historical examples of controversial narratives that were intentionally “constricted” in this manner include slogans and catchphrases such as “Make America Great Again”, “It’s the Economy, Stupid”, and “Pro-Life” — each of these tells a story about the intersection between Americans and their reality). Rather than resisting this tendency, we should recognize its inevitability and carefully guide the process of simplification by use of illustration and thoughtful choice of wording.
Something else to consider is that narratives are often in competition (this is most obviously true in the above political examples) — the larger our organization or research community, the more likely we are to encounter differing grasps on reality — influencing decision-makers corresponds to propagating a narrative of our choosing.
However, the point of contention in such cases is not necessarily the veracity of one fact or another, but rather how to interpret what we know, such as claiming causation as opposed to correlation, or assigning relative importance to certain data points. Thus, competing narratives are not always contradictory, but rather emphasize different elements of reality. As researchers, we must be knowledgeable of competing narratives, and assume that our customers are well aware of them (or even actively promoting one or another). Furthermore, we should ensure that our own products acknowledge and converse with other points of view, and either support or refute them explicitly (counterintuitively, the lower the quality of competing narratives, the more challenging and time-consuming this becomes).
By this point, you might be concerned that adopting such an approach to research communication is deceitful, but story-telling is merely a tool, meaning one must learn to wield it effectively; it can be used for both good and evil (narratives don’t tell lies — people use narratives to tell lies); and there are stories of varying quality (independent of their basis in fact or fiction) — a truthful narrative is only as good as the data and analysis on which it is based. I’m not advocating that we cherry-pick facts or fabricate causality, but rather highlight what already exists within our data.
Narrative Training Wheels
In closing, I’d like to recommend two methods I’ve found useful to promote a narrative mindset in research communication:
ABT (short for “And But Therefore”) — Look for opportunities in your talking points to replace a neutral “and” with a more appropriate and narrative-conducing conjunction, such as “but” or “therefore”. This serves to emphasize contrast (such as differences between prior expectations and how things turned out; what we hope to achieve and what stands in our way, etc.), and also allows us to draw and highlight connections (such as relationships of cause and effect, conflict and resolution, basis and recommendation, etc.). By aiming to structure our products according to this format, we can more easily compress our messaging into a concise and compelling elevator pitch. This story-telling device was originally conceived by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and further developed by marine-scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson.
Message Box — Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to plan (and re-plan) our products, and effective communication of our research findings requires honing our talking points before and throughout the drafting process. The Message Box framework, developed by Nancy Baron of COMPASS, offers us guidelines to develop our messaging by way of the following questions:
Who is our audience?
What big-picture issue are we addressing?
What specific problems within the larger issue are we focusing on?
Why should our audience care? How does it impact them? (“So what?”)
What solutions are we proposing? How do we suggest dealing with the problems at hand?
What are the benefits of addressing these problems?
Both of these techniques are worth giving a try, either habitually or when faced with a particularly challenging or important product requirement.