If you read the story through the link, there is a great example of confirmation bias and narrative creation concerning a very well-known political consultant's observations that a huge bloom of yard signs in Florida supporting a presidential candidate in Florida before the 2012 election indicated a sure win in the national elections. In fact all the yard signs didn't mean anything at all, because, as everybody knows, the candidate ended up losing by a significant margin.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-19/the-alibaba-story-telling-failure
So what was the problem in believing that all those yard signs meant certain victory? As the author of the article writes; “What was the method for measuring those signs? How widespread was this nationally, and more importantly, in swing states? What is the past correlation between numerical signage advantages and election outcomes?”
The political consultant so badly wanted to believe that what she was seeing really meant something that she ignored any sort of empirical approach to the situation which would have provided her information to the contrary.
How can this possibly relate to our business of producing berries? A lot, as a matter of fact. Think about how one approaches diagnostics in the field. Evaluate your own attitude when approaching the problem - is there some given outcome that you are carrying around and will blind you to a truly empirical approach to the problem? Is one's sampling method correct for the issue being evaluated? What can we make of the problem from the samples we have taken? Is there a correlation between the samples we take and the problem as a whole?
Beware the narratives!