Good facts and good stories require investment
“Part of the job of making change is working to make sure a bad story doesn’t get in the way of good facts.” This is good advice from Seth Godin. And it is so hard. Especially when teams of well trained humans are well funded to make excellent stories to elicit actions and those stories are based on lies.
To really accomplish this we have to:
- Prioritize access to data and the tools and humans to find the insights in the data. The Data Innovation Lab at Tech Impact is doing interesting work in this area.
- Help people interrogate the stories put in front of them. This is some of the work IREX does.
- Give teams skills in developing engaging narratives based on truth and that debunk lies. TechSoup’s teams in Europe have done tremendous work in this area.
- Create media outlets, forums, and campaigns that get this out into the world. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good example of this.
That’s, of course, still too simple. It requires funding and infrastructure and it has to start with the data.