Some leaders use fairy tales to frame their communication if they want to engage and entertain their employees.  This article is a folkloric gathering of fairy tales, enriched by Big Data.

“Once upon a time, in a far far land, a poor peasant was in the tooth doctor hut – the blame was on the tobacco in snake oil which gave him a rotten stump. Helped by a mouth speculum, the tooth doctor pulled the stump to prevent decay from spreading to the other teeth. The scream of agony could be heard all the way to the neighbor village, where yet another peasant found himself in a similar situation. With every soul added in heaven, the tooth doctors were learning how to be better doctors, until retirement, when new inexperienced doctors will take their place and gain their knowledge from trials on more poor souls.

Fortunately, today, Big Data changes the way we share and utilize knowledge. Hospitals and medical research centers share their data with all the “villages” and doctors, in order to learn from their experience and nobody needs to die in the name of science.

Data changes our fairy tales – Think of how Hansel and Gretel could’ve checked Trip Advisor and the bad recommendations would’ve kept them away from the witches’ candy hut.”

These are the stories that Søren Pind – the Minister of Higher Education and Science in Denmark opened his presentation with, at the “Join the Data-Driven R(e)volution – Unlocking the Business Potential of Big Data” conference. Needless to say, the audience was engaged and amused.

His body language, voice, breathing, and pace contributed to the quality of his presentation and storytelling, but an advantage that digital leaders have is that they can focus only on the words they write.

The advantages of using storytelling

Stories are part of one’s upbringing, regardless of their interest in technology – or particularly Big Data in this case – thus, by using stories, leaders can create a bridge in communication and rapport with everyone. In this context, research has shown that a more authentic communication (openly sharing feelings and opinions) might make leaders feel more vulnerable, but that it is the vulnerability that makes employees feel more connected (Richter and Wagner 2014).

Using stories also makes it easier for people to remember a difficult concept, if that concept is drawn as a parallel to something already known.

Examples

Here are some more ready-made stories that you can adapt or be inspired by, based on industry and message, to assemble an engaging text. In a previous blog post, I have provided you with tools on how to assemble multiple types of text – in this blog post, we focus on Story Line and Anecdotes.

The stories below have an educative purpose as well, and that is to provide an overview of industries and businesses that were revolutionized by Big Data, all wrapped up in fairy tales.

E-commerce and market intelligence

Do you remember how The Snow White opened the door to the evil Step Mother and bought the poisonous apple that was recommended to her? Today, a product recommender system could’ve also predicted that she likes apples, based on her previous purchases, and the reviews would’ve kept her away from the poisonous recommendation of the evil Step Mother. (Chen et al., 2012, Adomavicius and Tuzhilin, 2005).

Package Delivery

The Little Red Riding Hood could’ve used UPS’ advanced package delivery system to deliver food to grandma. UPS is only one of the package delivery companies revolutionized by the use of Big Data. They are very well known for their use of statistics to anticipate the movement of the package, identify sources of problems (such as the Bad Wolf) and optimize delivery times. (Davenport, 2006).

Security and Public Safety

The 40 thieves from “Alibaba and the 40 Thieves” would’ve been discovered earlier with Big Data. Today, agencies appointed to secure public safety and security are able to gather and combine data from multiple sources, such as criminal records, cyber security threats, and multi-lingual intelligence. Crime and terrorism can be fought by applying models such as criminal network analysis, criminal association rule mining and clustering or cyber-attack analysis. (Chen et al., 2012)

Science and Technology

Once upon a time, Jack was surprised by the magic bean that grew into a Beanstalk all the way to the clouds – but with precision farming, we could’ve measured the right amount of magic spices and we would now all have magic beans that could grow to the clouds.

There are many scientific areas that benefit from the usage of Big Data and tracking of sensors and instruments, such as astrophysics, oceanography, genomics, environment research. To support the transparency and sharing of research, organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) mandate that the investigation projects need to provide data management plans. As an example, in biology, NSF founded iPlant, which enables biologists to track plant biology, learn, share and take decisions. (Chen et al., 2012). Would we all live on our Beanstalks today?

Image recognition and Deep Learning

I would imagine that the vane and mean stepsisters from Cinderella, would’ve posted a lot of selfies on Facebook, and there is also a high probability that Cinderella would’ve been captured in the pictures, sweeping the chimney in the background. With face recognition and deep learning, the Prince would’ve been able to find her faster. Today, the advancement in deep learning allow computers to recognize patterns and identify the objects or faces in unlabelled images. (Singh, 2017)

People matching algorithms

Do you ever wonder whom would’ve Belle chosen, if she was presented with more than two potential romantic partners: Gaston or The Beast? Big Data algorithms make it possible for us to find “The One” online through functions and algorithms that learn our preferences and prompt us with potential matches. Our romance is backed up by statistical discrimination and adverse selection.

The Frog Prince could’ve really needed a dating algorithm as well, then he wouldn’t have ended up with a princess that throws him against a wall – and maybe he could’ve met Belle instead.

Human Capital

Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather were appointed to take care of the Sleeping Beauty and make sure that Aurora never pricks her finger in the spinning wheel – but unfortunately, the fairies got distracted and Aurora did prick her finger. With the use of Big Data, her parents could’ve chosen the best employees for this particular task (from the many working for them in the kingdom) at the right compensation level, through expert use of statistics and modeling. (Davenport, 2012)

Automotive

Although the rest of the fairy tales can be upgraded by the use of Big Data, I must say that Aladdin and the magic carpet is a bit ahead of us because it escaped the long debate on whether self-driving cars need a wheel or not, and it can freely navigate in the environment. Self-driving cars (and the magic carpet) depend on Big Data – “it’s really all about processing Big data, and the road is just another data set to be mined”.  (Vanderbilt, 2012) 

Construction building

The three little pigs would’ve had a better chance at predicting the risk of the Bad Wolf blowing their little house, with construction process risk analysis. Construction industry highly benefits from the use of Big Data, from analyzing team structure, budget, and schedule, to processing larger sets of data, such as drone footage. (McKinsey, 2017)

In I4L we focus on disseminating academic research through practical ideas and tools for digital leaders.

*I would like to thank my very good friend, Msc. Cand. In Digital Innovation and Management, Sonja Zell, and my good colleague, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Raffaele Ciriello, for contributing with fairy tales ideas.

Bibliography

1. Adomavicius, G., and Tuzhilin, A. 2005. “Toward the Next Generation of Recommender Systems: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art and Possible Extensions,” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (17:6), pp. 734-749.
2. Chen, H., Chiang, R., & Storey, V. (2012). Business intelligence and analytics: from big data to a big impact. MIS Quarterly, 36(4), 1165–1188.
3. Davenport, T. (2006). Competing on analytics. Harvard Business Review
4. Reinventing Construction: A route to higher productivity(Rep.). (2017). McKinsey & Company.
5. Richter, A., & Wagner, D. (2014). Leadership 2.0: Engaging and Supporting Leaders in the Transition Towards a Networked Organisation. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,7
6. Singh, A. (2017). Deep Learning will radically change the ways we interact with technology. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/01/deep-learning-will-radically-change-the-ways-we-interact-with-technology
7. Vanderbilt, T., (2012). Let the robot drive: the autonomous car of the future is here. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_autonomouscars/

Literary technologies for Leadership

This article explains how leaders can use literary technologies, such as summarizing, persuading and storytelling, to lead through writing.

A quick google search on leadership behaviour reveals many products, services and advice tailored to leaders, on how to act and talk in order to inspire and influence. But what can leaders do when their communication is mediated by technology such as Skype, emails or Enterprise Social Networks?

New media technologies allow for modelling, in other words, we can use technology to emulate behaviours we would have in real life. One of them is authoring, described as “the act of generating content and putting it online for a broad audience”. (Richter and Wagner, 2014).  Computer-mediated communication allows leaders to reach more people, thus broadening their influence and turn the traditional one-way communication, in engaging and online conversations. It is also important to note that employees prefer authentic texts authored by their leaders, as opposed to texts that were edited or written by someone else in the name of the leader (Richter and Wagner, 2014).

There are multiple literary techniques that leaders can use to assemble a text. As Jack Hart, former writing coach at the Oregonian says, a fundamental question to ask in the process of writing, is: “Just what sort of narrative are we talking about here, and what tools will I need to build it?” (Hart, 2012). Depending on the purpose of the communication/text, leaders can use different types of literary techniques to ensemble unique and authentic texts, to inform, motivate or engage:

Persuading techniques – can be used for motivating, persuading and motivating people, for example when assembling a text about disclosing a new direction for the company, a major change – when it is important to bring the employees on board with the message:

• Consultancy discourse – employing a future state (desired or feared) to gain/justify/convince that what we do in the present is exactly what we should be doing. Example: “Because of the new economy, every organization risks irrelevance unless it can keep its technology, people and business processes synchronized with a moving target strategy” (Bloomfield & Vurdubakis, 1994).
• Dynamic words will create a sense of urgency, such as rapidly, dynamic, accelerating, explosive, boom, movement, action, progress. 
• Glossy expressions and clichés can be used to put some aspects in the light and other concepts (for which no glossiness will be used) in the shadow. Example: “first-of-its-kind”, “state-of-the-art”, “breakthrough”, “one-of-a-kind”.
• Multiplicity – bringing in multiple views (research, influencers, journals) can convince your reader of the validity of your sayings. “Research shows that a success factor for digital leadership is transparency. We must therefor be transparent in our work”
• Including the reader: “as our level of acquaintance with the reader rises, so our ability to write something highly personalized – and persuasive – increases” (Camp, 2007).
• Being personal – Camp (2007) thinks it is more persuasive to be personal: this can be achieved by using pronouns in the 1^st person (I, my, mine), sharing your emotions, feelings, views, or opinions.

Summarizing techniques – these techniques can be used when assembling short updates about the company, projects, and/or changes within the organization, meeting minutes and other texts where brevity is important.

• Titled paragraphs: giving titles to paragraphs signals the importance of its contents (Bloomfield & Vurdubakis, 1994).
• Bullet points – “important points are often described as bullet points – presumably emphasising the notion of going straight to the heart of the matter” (Bloomfield & Vurdubakis, 1994).
• Re-read and remove words: A sentence should not contain unnecessary words and a paragraph should not contain unnecessary sentences. Interrogate every word in a sentence for its meaning and utility to your reader.
• Replace vague words with powerful, specific words. For example, replace adjectives with numbers: “Our company has a lot of experience in….” with “Our company has 50 years’ experience in…”.
• Combine sentences: Re-read and pay attention to whether some sentences are unnecessary and the information they convey can be incorporated in another sentence.

Storytelling techniques – can be used for engaging, amusing, and/or conveying difficult concepts and ideas – when it is important that employees remember. “Storytelling has such wide application because, at its root, it serves universal human needs. Story makes sense out of a confusing universe by showing us how one action leads to another” (Hart, 2011).

• Storyline: Explosion, Rising Action, Crisis, Resolution, Denouncement (also known as storyline) are the building blocks of any story.
• Metaphors and figures of speech appeal to the reader’s imagination and are an essential part of Storytelling. Examples: “Our company is like an oak tree – No matter the storm, it will keep standing “.
• Anecdotes are short stories that can be used to capture your audience, or to draw a parallel to a more difficult concept.
• Hyperboles are exaggerated claims that can be used to emphasise arguments. Example: “Our CEO read a million papers about innovation and concluded that…”.
• Juxta positioning of time: using past, present and future alternatively – Example: “Our journey started in 2010, today we are challenged by many technologies, and by 2020 we want to be the best in our industry.”

The realm of literary techniques that can be used for leadership communication is vast. They are even more important when it comes to digital communication for leadership. In I4L we are working on methods and tools to apply them in practice.

Bibliography

1. Bloomfield, B., & Vurdubakis, T., (1994). Re-presenting Technology: IT Consultancy Reports as Textual Reality Constructions. Sociology 28(2): 455-477.
2. Camp, Lindsay (2007). Can I Change Your Mind? The Craft and Art of Persuasive Writing. AC Black, London.
3. Hart, Jack. (2012). Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction. University of Chicago Press, Chicago; London.
4. Richter, A., & Wagner, D. (2014). Leadership 2.0: Engaging and Supporting Leaders in the Transition Towards a Networked Organisation. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,7.