Last month, The New Yorker published an article called ‘Why facts don’t change our minds’, in which the author, Elizabeth Kolbert, reviews some research showing that even ‘reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational’. Kolbert’s popular article makes a good case for the idea that if you want to change someone’s mind about something, facts may […]

Companies often mistake planning for strategy. This seems to be particularly true of large organisations. A few years back, we got a call from a large company headquartered in the Netherlands. Their head of strategy felt that their people didn’t understand the company strategy – a common concern across most big businesses. The strategy group […]

Since starting Anecdote in 2004, I’ve been lucky to meet a bunch of inspiring people. One of them is Paul Costello, who I’ve written about in my book, Putting Stories to Work. Paul is an amazing story practitioner and has been in the field for decades. He’s an Aussie who moved to America about 20 […]

Last week I returned to Australia from the US after a three-week business tour. (It was a remarkable time to be there, though my sense is that while emotions are understandably running high over the election result, there is also a feeling that the US system is resilient.) I started the trip in Seattle, working […]

Twenty years ago, psychologist Anders Ericsson conducted research on what it takes to build expertise. Mere practice is not enough. If practice is all it takes to be great, taxi drivers would be the best drivers in the world. Ericsson discovered it takes a special type of practice to build better skills. He called it […]

Last week I was in London and had the pleasure of catching up with Ian Rodwell from Linklaters, one of the largest law firms in the world and part of the magic circle of elite legal companies headquartered in the British capital. Ian has been a long-term advocate of our work and we spent an […]

I’ve had the pleasure of delivering Storytelling for Sales for companies in Europe, Asia and the US and I just love how sellers quickly work out that it’s those times they tell a story that the sales start to go well. I remember asking a group of sellers in Florida what stories they tell to overcome […]

Billy Crystal steps forward on stage, smiles and in that familiar way a relative walks into your house and asks for a cup for tea, Billy says how much he loves Melbourne and launches into his first story (this is how I remember it). “You guys are so good with your cell phones. So respectful. […]

As Edward R. Tufte published each of his beautiful books on the visual display of complex data – The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983)1, Envisioning Information (1990)2 and Visual Explanations (1997)3 – I became more and more fascinated by the question of how to grab the attention of decision-makers and inspire them to act […]

In 2015, a quartet of researchers from universities in the United States and Spain conducted a series of experiments to understand the moral basis of attitudes. There had already been a lot of research confirming that people put a great deal of stock in the moral component of their own attitudes – that if people […]