Plot, Line, and Sinker – The Power of Storying Data

To consider the human condition without the innate talent of telling stories is very difficult to imagine, if not impossible. As with a lone data point floating in space, letters are useless unless they pack together to form words, and those words are limited tools unless they line up to form coherent sentences, and those sentences are far more powerful if they congregate to form a critical mass of thought, and those thoughts provoke new thoughts or action or sorrow or excitement when language falls a little in love with rhetorical devices.

In Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, a book of lectures and essays on poetry and writing, he tells the beginning poet that he “caution(s) against communication because once language exists only to convey information, it is dying.” To illustrate his point, Hugo unpacks the purpose of language in a news story. The language in a news article, Hugo argues, exists to convey information, and “once you have the information, the words seem unimportant.” Ultimately, Hugo is picking on the news to help the poet understand that her relationship to the language in a poem must be stronger than her relationship to the subject of a poem.

So what does all this talk of poetry have to do with data storytelling?

For data leaders, there is a lesson in Hugo’s sentiment. Most data professionals are analytical thinkers – that’s what makes them good at their job – and when tasked with communicating complex and often challenging analytical ideas, their comfort zone is appealing to the logic and reason of key stakeholders. In the same way that communication kills language for a poet, facts and reason alone deaden the data.

Data is not a vision. Data does not influence. Data doesn’t know how to relate to the world. Computers may hold the power in crunching the decimal points of pi, but it is the human who makes meaning out of complex data sets and who makes a data-driven decision from it. And while telling stories visually, verbally, or in writing has been with us for millennia, converting rich data sets into a narrative that inspires and influences is a fairly new invention.

To make your data matter, it must become a story. Stories are sticky. Stories persuade. Stories go viral. Stories compel us to do something. To create more engagement, understanding, and action around your data, consider the following storytelling techniques:

Appeal to the emotions – When identifying a problem or making a business case with your data, logic and reason will only get you so far. Make your data matter to key stakeholders by connecting with them emotionally. What is the context of the problem you are trying to solve? What personal experiences – or the experiences of others – can you bring into the presentation to speak to the heart and not just the mind?

Avoid complex data at all costs – It’s been said that 50% of your time should go into crafting the story of your data. While data analysis is the backbone of the presentation, leave the data complexity at the door. The best way to lose your audience is to bog down your presentation with technicalities.

Visuals + narrative structure = a story to remember – We all know it’s not a best practice to write short stories on slides. Using visuals and relying on your voice (and not bullet points on a slide) has been a top Powerpoint tip for years. But to tell a good story you also need to consider how you begin, where you end, and the element of time. We’re time-bound creatures, and how you link data and time is critical to how you hook your audience and help them understand why your data matters.

In the beginning, humans told stories through visuals, and then we progressed to oral traditions, and those oral traditions found their way into writing. A good data story brings all these rhetorical powers together into 15 (maybe 20) slides!