Story Based Survey

We all know the traditional surveys. An expert thinks about what to ask, with luck (or not), the expert 'probes' first into the question behind the question, comes up with smart questions and interprets the results.

Great if you need a biased outcome. But what if you need an unbiased outcome?

Story Based Survey with the story teller doing the interpretation.


Story Based Survey is not just collecting stories and interpret them - any interpretation done by other than the story teller will add again a huge bias. No, collect stories that are interpeted by the storyteller.

Roughly it comes down to:

• Trigger the person in a certain mode
• Ask to write a short story
• Ask to interpret the story on certain predefined characteristics that are of interest to you
• Ask the demographic data you need

Next you will do first an analysis on the demographics and predefined characterstics. Once you find an interesting group ...usually a group is interesting when you have very homogenous scoring and/or subgroups that have distinctly different scoring ...then you start reading all the stories that belong to this group.

Of course what this does, is that it triggers sense making. You know all the stories, no matter how different, belong to a homogenous group of answers. Why? What is connecting all these stories?

And there are many different ways to do the sense making. Ranging from sitting down with a couple of people and trying to make sense out of it. To, look: I want to see more of these stories and less of these stories ....not because you like/dislike the stories per se, but because of the characterstics tied to those stories.

This Story Based Survey where the story teller does the interpretation is quite novell. If you have the budget for it, go for SenseMaker.

At the moment I'm trying out a less advanced but much cheaper version. So, if you don't have the budget for SenseMaker, give me a buzz. I might be interested in helping you out.