My sister-in-law got married recently. It was a great wedding on a beautiful day in the coastal town of Ft. Bragg.
That’s not necessarily anything readers of this blog would care about. But at the wedding I witnessed a conversation that makes a good story.
Two of her uncles from opposite sides of the family were having a conversation about global warming. One is an anthropology professor who specializes in consumer adoption of alternative fuels and alternative transportation and lives in Santa Cruz. The other owns a paving company in Fresno. Clearly very different people and, not surprisingly, they had differing opinions–even about the very existence of global warming.
Dr. Uncle is, literally, an expert in the field. I’m sure he could quote statistics for hours straight to support his case, but instead he told a story about the mountains he used to be able to climb in Switzerland and France in his twenties that are now unclimbable because all the ice melted. This narrative-based tactic cut right through the other uncle’s griping about “all those academics” and their false ideas about coming catastrophe.
I think most of us are persuaded more easily by stories . Our species invented language way before it invented math and probably for good reason. So it’s easy to forget in the Information Age (especially when you’re in a career like engineering) that if you want to convince others there’s often nothing more effective than a really good story.