Forecasts and the future may be important to accountants and marketers but are best determined by the storyteller who bridges the present and the future by using a tool called a Persona or the representation of how someone might act in the future according to objectives important to them at that time.

How can a storyteller understand the future?  By using stories, pure and simple.

People depend on stories to understand their environment and processes important to them.  In our current techno-oriented world processes are or rather need to be accelerated by software.  Likewise stories create brand value which is then measured by numbers.  I call this sentence my ‘Story Lens’–tell a story twice and it becomes a process, tell it again and someone writes software, tell it again and it becomes a brand value and tell it yet again and someone creates a measure or KPI.

The Story Lens is a tool that provides perspective to a person.  Now it gets interesting.

Consider that perspective can be change at will and that perspective depends on what is being measured.  Typically measures involve two elements, a data set and a formula–this is also called a KPI.

A KPI is pointed to a process which is also a behaviour exhibited by a Persona.

NOW…to understand the future we set TARGETS, usually numbers, that we use to compare our performance and help us adjust to our customer, competitive or market circumstances.

WHAT is the commonality between today and tomorrow?  Stories, Numbers and Personae or people.

Understanding Persona behaviour allows us to understand what will happen in the future.  The relationships between Numbers, Stories and the future is explored at www.scenario2.com or www.marketstory.com