Did you ever see the Double Rainbow you-tube video?
One of the greatest things ever and a reason I’m thankful for the internet. I’ll post it below for you if you haven’t seen it.
But it’s basically a dude in the outdoors who witnesses a double rainbow in nature and he’s beside himself and overcome. He’s left to ponder the meaning of what he’s witnessing. So the phrases “Double Rainbow” and “What does it mean?” are repeated often amidst weeping. There may be other influences at work influencing his mood and mindset, but that’s another story. 🙂
“Double Rainbow” is really a metaphor for interpretation and hermeneutics and the often subjective quest to understand the significance and truth of something, especially when the “meaning” is hard to squeeze into a quantifiable box.
A senior ministry leader who has been around the block said to me a few months back, “You know, I just can’t trust statistics if I don’t know what they mean.” Seems like an obvious statement, but most of us probably have tons of examples of ourselves or others being quick to react to a statistic without really understanding what it might mean…..really.
So what do they mean? As mentioned in the previous post, sometimes the meaning can be obvious to all and close to self-evident. But there are dangers sometimes.
What about when we assume we know what it means, but we’re wrong or have too limited of a perspective to have a meaningful and realistic perspective?
What if we look at a stat and it just seems incredible and we start trying to interpret significance into something that might not be there? Double Rainbow!
I wrote recently that “Statistics without story usually create guilt and pressure.” That was in the context of motivating people to action – trying to get people to do things without the relational connections or underlying heart adjustments. But statistics without story also leave us in the “Double Rainbow” position because we can lack the contextual clues to draw out the meaning and significance of them.
Statistics need story to be meaningful measurements in organizations (and elsewhere as well). Without understanding story in and behind a situation, the way we use our measurements can become ethnocentric and maybe can even sabotage progress because of how we can try to squeeze others into our own structures and expectations. Without story, we actually can judge or even dehumanize those in the reality we’re looking at because numbers tend to take on a life of their own. When we think we know what something means, but fail to recognize what those things mean to those living other stories we do damage.
A general example would be when we measure specific and tangible results but fail to take into account power dynamics and the everpresent forces that create hardships, challenges, and barriers that others on the “right” side of power don’t face. Should you assess both situations equally? The stories are different and success will look different as a result.
Statistics can be used as a tool of power or they can be used to empower. Oftentimes the difference is the commitment to understand story. This means a grounding of our interpretation and our use of such measurements and results in a broader understanding of culture and context. That means learning, humility, relationships, and intentionality.
We have to do the work to understand the whole – and not just measure the parts. Otherwise, we might be left like the double rainbow guy to make up half-baked (in his case literally perhaps!) interpretations. Or worse – we’re left to make ignorant, biased, ethnocentric, or unethical interpretations or applications (See Pt 2: Tunnel Vision).
So let’s not get mesmerized by a statistic itself (Double Rainbow!), but let’s work to understand the whole so that our interpretations are informed by both the statistics AND the story.
How do you see story being important in measuring results and what does it look like practically to use both statistics and story to draw conclusions?
For the uninitiated:
And go here for a version that was turned into a song with production.
