Bring Data to

life

The adage that “our

world runs on data”
means that
decisions are being
based on vast
amounts of
statistics. Data-
derived insights
drive what time
trains stop running,
when Starbucks
introduces holiday
cups, and the temperature of the building you might be sitting in right now.
Even though most corporate roles now work with data, it’s shockingly easy to forget
that people generate most of it. When a user clicks a link, gets blood taken at the
lab, or sets up a smartwatch, that person generates data. As people move, buy, sell,
use, work, and live, their actions nudge numbers up or down and drive
organizational decisions, big and small.

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If it’s your role to communicate data insights and persuade people to change their
behavior, you’ll have more influence and promote better decision-making if you
emphasize the people behind the numbers. In a story, we root for the hero as he or
she maneuvers through roadblocks. To use data to steer your organization in the
right direction, you need to tap into the human tale your data can tell.
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By leveraging four techniques from storytelling, leaders can bring a richer, more
human understanding to the problem that the data reveals and better understand
the opportunities it presents. Those techniques are identifying the hero and the
hero’s adversary, speaking with people generating the data, identifying and
addressing conflict, and sharing context.
Search for the Hero and the Adversary in the Data
Because most organizational data is generated by humans, the first step toward
insight is to empathetically understand the people whose actions generate that
data and who can turn slumps around. People are persuaded by drama — a
compelling narrative, a sympathetic hero, a mighty challenge to overcome.
These data-generating people are the characters in your story. In any story, myth,
or movie, we get to know various characters and grow to love some and revile

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others. Some become heroes who overcome the obstacles in their paths and
eventually defeat their adversaries.
In a data story, the hero is whoever can play a role in moving the data in the
desirable direction. For businesses, the heroes could be employees, customers, or
partners.
Consider the scenario of a CEO at a midsize software company where sales
dropped 30% in the previous quarter. As she’s faced with the task of course-
correcting this sharp decline, she needs to dig into the question, “What
happened?” To find out, she’ll have to understand the people behind the
company’s numbers and who the hero is who can reverse the sales slump.
In this scenario, the CEO’s determination is that the sales team is the likely hero
in the turnaround. The data shows that they have been working harder than ever,
and the decline isn’t due to their lack of effort. But perhaps the team has an
adversary, something or someone causing the numbers to go down. Or perhaps
new inefficiencies have been introduced by a change in process or added
bureaucracy.
Speak With the People Generating the Data
Data tells you what has happened in the past, but it doesn’t always tell you why.
Talking to the people generating the numbers can help.

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To help a hero get unstuck, a leader has to go straight to the source. Reading
forums, conducting surveys, analyzing customer comments, and hiring
consultants are all tools to help learn what is in the hero’s way. But the best way
to really understand people’s issues is to speak with them directly.
To do so, identify a random sampling of data heroes. Speak with them, asking
about their concerns, opinions, and motivations. Empathetically listen. You’ll hear
things that surveys and Salesforce data simply can’t tell you.
By talking directly with a senior manager, the software CEO from our sample
scenario might learn that her sales team has been struggling to fully adapt to new
sales software that was designed to streamline a previously sticky process. While
half of the sales team has wholeheartedly embraced the change, more senior team
members are feeling frustrated. They’re fumbling to learn the new tool and still
leaning on a legacy process.
This is a human element of the story that may not have been revealed through
data alone. But after speaking with the people behind the numbers, our CEO
knows who to work with in order to reverse the trajectory.
Identify and Address Conflict
All heroes in a story face conflict. Having a hero to root for makes a tale engaging.
Heroes typically face some classic encounters: discord with another character,
clashes with nature, tension with a social group, war within themselves, and
struggles with change.
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In a business context, heroes can be in conflict with a system (as some of the
sales team has been with the new software in our scenario), conflict with another
person (a change in leadership could be causing issues within the organization),
or conflict with themselves (maybe they’re struggling with burnout or didn’t take
the training they were asked to).
By identifying the type of conflict people are facing, a leader gets a clearer view of
how to communicate information that will help the hero get unstuck.
Share Context
Current data points, though significant, don’t exist in a vacuum. Data collected
over time creates a bigger picture of victories and defeats. Sharing context can
help leaders motivate their organizations and move their heroes forward and on to
victory, especially after a defeat.
More on This Topic
Listen to Duarte talk about how “Every Number Tells a Story” in the Three Big
Points podcast.
In the sample scenario, if the CEO were to share just the most recent data, her
team might not feel that they can recover the lost sales to date. Seeing a 30%
decrease could demoralize them. But if the CEO zooms out a little and looks at a
longer time frame, she might discover that sales bounced back after a similar
decline five years earlier.

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Sharing the details about how the sales team recovered in the past demonstrates
to them that if they could make a turnaround then, they can certainly do it again.
We should never let our data speak for itself. With big data as pervasive as it is
today, it is easily classified as noise, and that’s especially true when there is no
real context to support it. Productive people help data move in a desirable
direction. In every shocking statistic, hockey-stick growth curve, or line chart that
hits the x-axis like a lead balloon, there’s a heroic story waiting to be revealed.
Learning to curate and tell stories within an organization can become a kind of
superpower for a leader. By humanizing the data, leaders bring a greater
understanding to the problems that data initially reveals. When they take the time
to speak with the data story’s characters, get to know the hero-in-waiting’s fears
and motivations, address the conflict that the hero is facing, and put the data
challenge into an appropriate context, leaders develop a deeper, more human
connection to their opportunities for moving forward.
1. You need to have the guts and intuition to create a point of view from your
data.
2. You need to understand the three-act story structure and use it to frame how
you communicate the actions you want people to take.
3. You need to understand who the humans are who are driving the numbers
and communicate with them in a way that helps change the numbers in the
future.

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Reference
DataStory: Explain Data and Inspire Action Through Story (Ideapress Publishing, 2019).