Do you need to know how to tell stories with data?
Ask yourself how often do you use data in your daily job? Or maybe how many times do you use data to convince others to your ideas? If your answers range from rarely to often, then this post is for you.
One scene from the movie “Silver linings playbook” stuck in my memory. The main character after having an explosion caused by hearing his wedding song, is sitting in the therapist’s office, and complaining that it would not have happened if that song had not been played in the therapist’s office. The response of the therapist was clear and brief “You need to build your own strategy how not to be afraid of that song”.
Building strategies helps us to be more productive and perform better, whether it is in our work environment or our private life. Our brain just loves mental shortcuts, and strategies are those shortcuts. Especially when we are in a hurry and need simple solutions which always work.
Let’s see what strategies we can prepare to make data communication more effective and efficient.
Comparisons
Comparisons are always a good choice when we want to present the progress of initiatives, outcomes of introducing new processes, or showcase sales performance in different markets. People compare things in their brains all the time, so any story based on comparison will be easy to understand. But it needs to be well-crafted.
Before and After
This strategy works well when delivering outcomes of recently introduced new initiatives or processes. Old state data is the best background to emphasize big change or the success of a new approach. You can present benefits or results in several dimensions: process, employees’ satisfaction, increase in a number of clients etc. Anything you deem valuable for your business.
As an example, we can put together two dimensions: employee’s satisfaction and a number of human errors. In Picture 1, it is easy to see that changes have improved the employees’ satisfaction and resulted in a decrease in human errors. Simple column charts displayed side by side will suffice to represent this data. Adding lines connecting columns makes visualizations more suggestive.
Us vs. All
Every good manager should brag about her or his team and highlight what a great job they do for the organization. If your team, the product, sales, or converted leads are the best, show how they stand out from the rest of the company.
To draw attention to your data, you can change its colour. This simple trick will distinguish your data from the others and push it to the foreground. See Picture 2.
Where are my stars?
When analysing revenue growth, we consider what is pushing it forward and what is holding it back. A very popular concept is to present leaders and laggers. The popularity of this concept stems from human nature. We admire and envy the best, but love the worst because they are worse off than we are!
C-Levels managers like to see contributors of the growth on the waterfall chart because this visualization shows at a glance which contributors have made money for the company and which have lost. For our revenue growth example, we can use two different colours to indicate leaders and laggers.
Changes over time
Changes over time are the next group of strategies which use the familiar comparative idea with a whole story set in time. We can present how something develops over time and what is more appealing for our audience how it might be in the future. For such stories, we use line charts.
Show me the bright future!
Who would not want to know the future? Well, I do not… But, when it comes to the business environment the answer is always: everyone. When I work with clients, the trend of any phenomenon is a must. Many decisions within an organization are based on current trends and an estimation of future outcomes.
However, every data scientist will warn against relying too much on historic data. There is a strong tendency to predict future business performance behaviour based on past results. To temper expectations, we can provide several scenarios based on the same dataset. This approach will add value to our analysis if we introduce factor parameters to each scenario. Typically, three scenarios are provided: optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic.
To illustrate the technique, I will use an example with revenue growth (every CEO cares about revenue growth). The main factor in the example could be the launch of product A in a new market. As we all know, launching a product on a new market can be a huge success, but on the other hand, it can also be a spectacular failure. Using sales of product A as a parameter, we can create three separate revenue scenarios for the upcoming fiscal year.
Factors of success or failure.
Another story which is attractive for the audience is about factors which influenced the results of the phenomenon. This narration is based on our natural tendency to look for cause and effect relationships. Maybe if we knew what had triggered results in the past, we could use it in the future to prevent bad impact or use identified factors to achieve better outcomes? This strategy is great when you want to convince senior managers to spend money on the next marketing campaign. Simply show them the periods with and without marketing campaigns on the line chart, where they can easily observe the ups and downs of the line representing sales. Do not forget to add some call outs to strengthen a message. See picture 5.
Connecting dots
The last strategy which I want to bring closer to you is about presenting the most crucial business metrics on the one-pager. This strategy is a master level, because whoever prepares it must be aware of connections between separate metrics and the overall influence which they have on the business health. This is very practical when trying to understand which processes drive others. The one-pager can show usual suspects, threats, and opportunities. For instance, if your core business as a company partner is selling services to the specific hardware, you can expect a drop in sales if hardware sales fall down.
Convince Me with Data 