Football stats and personal stories can be unhelpful

We humans love a story. We love telling them, we love hearing them and we certainly love watching them on TV. In fact, we tend to think that everything has to have a story behind it, it makes us feel more comfortable. 

We do of course have our own stories. Our experiences, relationships and beliefs all coming together to make up our own personal story. It makes us who we are. This is normal but we need to be aware when that story is clouding our judgement and making us see things that aren't there.  

I find this a lot when talking to clients about their particularly experience of work. 

For me, football is a great example where this can happen.  

I’m a massive football fan. I’ve been to hundreds of games at all levels from the English Isthmian League to the Danish Superliga. I love it. But something that baffles me is the way some upcoming games and stats are talked about. For example, Manchester City are playing Chelsea away. Someone may come up with a stat that talks about Chelsea having not won in the fixture for ten years (this is fictional). It may sound good, but in reality, how insightful or useful is it?  

During those ten years both teams will have had dozens of different players and a handful of new managers. Very little will be the same over those ten years – so in reality what relevance does the fact that a team has not won somewhere for ten years have? Not much!  

The same can be said when we face a situation at work. For example, your manager has said something you’ve construed in a negative way. Subconsciously, this event will likely have your brain looking in your data banks for previous situations like this so it can work out how you should react. If it finds one that involved a previous manager that didn’t go well, it could take its own shortcut and set you on defensive footing, ready to react to ‘danger’.  

It’s often helpful to draw on experience but we need to remember that the company is new, the job is not the same and the manager is a different person. Like the ‘not won in 10 years’ football stat, while on first look it may seem relevant, is it?