The urge to share stories is as old as humanity. Parents instinctively know this. It’s why the first, crucial connections they make with their newborn come in stories, hardwiring their rhythms into infant minds even before language is intelligible.
It’s how we begin to learn, how we begin to understand and interpret the world. And that hunger and need for stories never leaves us. People share knowledge, values and experiences through stories, and this principle is highly relevant in today’s business environment: facts inform us, but stories help us understand why those facts matter.
I have just returned from the Caribbean where we celebrated members with over 50 years of service to the profession. I was struck not just by the longevity of their careers, but also by the stories behind them – the decades of change they have seen, the inspiration they have provided.
Shaping success
Every career has a story. Behind every promotion, setback, opportunity and achievement lies a series of experiences that shape not only professional success but also a personal identity. Those stories matter because they demonstrate what is possible.
The same principle applies to organisations. Effective storytelling turns performance into understanding, allowing leaders to communicate not just results, but purpose, progress and ambition.
That was the inspiration behind ACCA India’s fascinating report, From numbercrunchers to storytellers, which describes why storytelling is such a valuable skill for accountants.
This seems counterintuitive. After all, we work with data, numbers, statistics. These are the raw materials of our trade. But to bring our work alive – to give it meaning and value for clients, colleagues, employers, or for any other human being for that matter – we need stories.
We create our stories by thinking hard about what our work means to people’s lives
That might sound strange, or daunting to achieve, but it really isn’t. Because storytelling for us doesn’t mean recounting long, intricate tales. To share what we want and need to share, we don’t require the same broad canvas as a best-selling author or a Hollywood screenwriter. We create our stories by thinking hard about what our work means to people’s lives, by turning theoretical concepts into real-world impacts, turning numbers into words that paint pictures – not with a literary flourish but in plain, simple language that people can easily understand.
Kushim’s barley
For instance, I could tell you that one of the elements of ACCA’s purpose is to give the world the accountancy profession it needs, and that our profession is an essential element for every healthy economy and community. It might be true, but it’s more memorable if we share the story of a man who lived in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago.
He lived and worked in the ancient city of Uruk by the banks of the Euphrates (in modern-day Iraq), and on one particular day all those millennia ago he scribed his name into a wet clay tablet in receipt for a cartload of barley. The tablet was dug up centuries later and, thanks to carbon dating, we can say that this man is the very first person in 250,000 years of human history whose name we know.
It was Kushim. He wasn’t a great king, mighty warrior or poet but an accountant. The story shows us that for as far back as we can ever know, society and business have always needed accountants, and they always will. And that is our story.
