Coherent stories feel truer than messy reality.
More quotesMarketing has its own bloodletting. It just calls it best practice. The treatment survives because the previous patient eventually stopped complaining.
An old rule says customers need seven exposures, so seven become sacred. One salesperson wins with a script and the script becomes training. Growth follows a product change, therefore the release caused it; seasonality and competitor failure are told to wait outside. A founder remembers the customer who bought after a long lunch and suddenly hospitality has an attribution model.
Anecdotes are excellent scouts and dreadful generals. They reveal possibilities, supply language and point towards mechanisms worth testing. Then a comparison must arrive. Otherwise the memorable story wins by default while all the failed versions disappear. One vivid success can survive ten quiet failures because nobody invites the failures into the meeting.
Label confident claims honestly: evidence, informed hypothesis or folklore. The label does not ban action; it calibrates the bet. Test rules that move serious budget. Preserve failed cases, because myths thrive in deleted rows. Ask what observation would make the team abandon the rule; if the answer is none, it has become a corporate religion with a spreadsheet.
Changing a practice when evidence changes should look like competence. Organisations instead protect inherited wisdom because admitting uncertainty feels less expert than repeating a cure for another century. Experience deserves respect. Selective memory deserves supervision. “We have always done it” is useful historical information and a bloody awful conclusion.