When he compared marginally successful teams with consistently superior teams, he concluded that they were reasonably equal in terms of talent, motivation and at the ability to create realistic goals. They contend that both clarity and depth are required for trust to develop. And they conclude, as I do, that trust is not established through statistics alone, but rather through myth, through live storytelling. Telling stories, like poetry and other oral traditions, allow us to suspend judgment and listen to an experience as a whole. Of course, this is nonsensical.
Stories are about our human experience.
Essentially, they form the foundation of what we trust. They compared the persuasiveness of four different methods of convincing a group of MBA students in their study that a particular company practiced a policy of avoiding layoffs. In one situation, Martin and Powers used only a story to persuade people. In the second, they presented statistical data that showed that the company had significantly less involuntary turnover than its competitors. In the third, they used the statistics and the story.