A to Z of Business Storytelling -15

Sundararaman Chintamani
4 min readApr 20, 2022

Objectivity

In the past, I have tried to differentiate between personal storytelling and business storytelling on couple of occasions . In personal storytelling, most of the time, the main objective is to motivate or inspire people. This is where the storyteller takes freedom to twist the story to suit his/her needs. Sometimes even few unrealistic incidents are force-fitted to the story to meet the objectives. In business storytelling the intent is to come out with several aspects of corporate like such as Ethics, Team Building, Hard Work, Honesty, Integrity etc. Here it is important to maintain the credibility, so that the key message of the storyteller reaches the audience.

The moment you hear the term, objectivity, you also may think of it’s antonym subjectivity. Let us clearly understand both the terms from business storytelling perspective.

  • Objectivity refers to neutral statement which is completely true, unbiased and balanced, which is vital for business storytelling. In personal storytelling, the storyteller would be subjective which means he/she frequently would project an un-clear picture or just showcase his/her outlook or expression of opinion.
  • Objectivity revolves around facts and observations, while subjectivity is all about assumptions, beliefs and opinions.
  • Business stories told with objectivity in mind are verified and provable. Personal stories are unverified and not provable.

Let us how a business story can be narrated in an objective manner as well subjective manner. Following is the portion of a story that was narrated to group of managers to highlight the importance of Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) in an objective manner.

“On 29 October 2009 at 7:30 PM (IST) at the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), a fire broke out at the Jaipur oil depot. The oil depot’s giant tank was holding 8,000 kilolitres (280,000 cu ft) of petrol, in Sitapura Industrial Area on the outskirts of Jaipur, Rajasthan. In the immediate aftermath of the incident 12 people were killed and more than 300 got injured. The blaze continued to rage out of control for over a week after it started and during the period half a million people were evacuated from the area. The incident occurred when petrol was being transferred from the Indian Oil Corporation’s oil depot to a pipeline. There were at least 40 IOC employees at the terminal when it caught fire with an explosion. The Met department recorded a tremor measuring 2.3 on the Richter scale around the time the first explosion at 7:36 pm which resulted in shattering of glass windows nearly 3 kilometres from the accident site.”

Why do we call the above approach as objective manner? Here every bit of information is backed with facts, data and information. (Date, Time, Place, Dimensions, Nature of Product, Number of People, Duration, Intensity etc). All these information can be verified from multiple sources available in the public domain.

Now let us see how the above story can be told in a subjective manner and see its drawbacks.

“Two decades back, one of the leading oil and gas companies in India met with serious fire accident in North India. Many employees were caught in the fire. When they shouted for help, no one could come to their rescue. Some of them died while they were taken to hospitals in ambulance. Their condition was so pathetic. The fire was so huge and lasted for several weeks. People have to be evacuated from several villages. All the roads of the city were filled with shattered glass particles.”

In the above case, the speaker has used lot of subjectivity by distorting facts and information. Specific details like where and when the incident happened, how many were affected were missing. Instead, the speaker has mentioned details like “no one could come for their rescue”, as if he was an eye witness to the incident. Also the story comprises of lot of exaggerations.

Today audience are very smart who can check the veracity of what the speaker has spoken. Now you would have understood the superiority of objectivity over subjectivity. Then why not we start leveraging the same in our business storytelling sessions?

Kindly follow the hashtag #atozofbusinessstorytelling for others posts on this thread.

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