Storytelling comes to the conference podium

The first two presentations at the conference this morning have helped me to understand what it is that I'm finding so disquieting about this conference. What we are hearing is not the usual kind of research conference presentation. What we are hearing are stories. No data. No experiments. No hypothesis testing. Just stories. Oral blog posts from the podium with some neat visuals by people who are smart and articulate. 

OK, so I probably am exaggerating some but it makes me wonder whether this is where the current emphasis on "storytelling" is taking us as an industry. And, of course, is that a bad thing? Are we really connecting the dots or just making unconnected leaps of logic to get to a view point? In my previous post I worried that we are too focused on "just the facts, ma'am" as a deliverable. We probably should be just as worried about wonderfully-sounding insights that are disconnected from those facts.