Four Levels of Data Storytelling – Where Do You Perform?

In this post, you will find out the four crucial skills to become a data storytelling master and why you should improve them.

Firstly, I have good news for you. Everyone can be a data storyteller and possess the required skills on a “good enough” level. Of course, each of us starts from a different position, and the time necessary to reach a “good enough” level will differ. There is scientific proof that you need about 10 000 hrs to be professional in any picked field, but only 20 hrs to have a basic knowledge of a subject. There are four fundamental skills that made you a data storyteller.:

1. Analytical skills
2. Data visualization skills
3. Communication skills
4. Subject comprehension

Analytical skills

This skill is a basic of basics. Without understanding numbers and reading them, you cannot adequately prepare a story about them. Even when you are not a “data person” – someone who already has had the skill to transform and interpret massive data sets, you still can learn it.

Our brain is divided into two halves – left and right. The left half is responsible for analytical, logical and sequential thinking. In this part of the brain, the centre of language is located. The right half gives us the ability to perceive in a non-verbal way: see objects in space, compare similarities, have intuition, have a holistic view of something. Most people experience domination of one of the halves. However, it does not determine that you are an artist or an accountant. If all humans have both halves, all of us can analyse and interpret data. Naturally, some of us are more gifted than others, but I would be far away from the opinion that you cannot learn analytics unless you suffer from solid dyscalculia.

But where to start your journey with data analytics if you do not have previous experience?

Foremost, understanding descriptive statistics is a game-changer. Descriptive statistics are methods for organizing and summarizing information. Having those statistics in place, we can start asking the right questions that help us reveal some insights. Mostly, we do analytics to see some trends, picks and falls, a contribution of factors or distribution of one of the characteristics within the population.

Data Visualization skills

Ok. We gathered all required data, organized and summarized them using descriptive statistics. But how make them readable for others?

In lots of companies still, a primary tool for performance reporting is MS Excel. And still, in those companies, the primary manner to present numbers is an excel table. There is nothing wrong with using tables, and sometimes they are even the best way to communicate results. However, we have much more tools to select to communicate numbers effectively. There is quite an impressive range of available data visualizations in any common software like Excel, Power BI or Tableau, just to name a few. Visualizing numbers is a skill like any other. You can learn it and master it.

Nowadays, this skill is more important than ever when we are submerged in the data ocean. Data visualizations are often the only way to make sense of data, find patterns and understand the surrounding world. Data visualization utilize human perception to communicate and receive data. If we do it without proper diligence and mindfulness, we can mislead our recipients, and as consequences, they will draw wrong conclusions. The worst-case scenario would be misleading the audience on purpose. Regardless of designer intentions, it is an ignorance of using and presenting data in an unethical way. There is plenty of sources that provide rules and best practices on how to use data visualizations correctly. So do not miss this opportunity and earn credibility.

Communication skills

So, two first steps in a process have been already done. You found interesting patterns and insights in the data and prepared their visual representation to make it visible to others. However, how to convey the message?

As a species, we are designed to communicate complex ideas and theories because we have speech apparatus, unlike any other animal. And vocal communication is a basic one for us. Thanks to our ability to pass complex ideas and theories, we have built an advanced civilization. But even when we speak the same language, we often cannot efficiently articulate our thoughts, and the receiver can misinterpret our message.

From a data storytelling perspective, there are two crucial components of communication. The first one is to use language adjusted to the audience. It is easy to overwhelm the audience with technical jargon, lose their attention and, in the end, lose their interest in the subject. The second one is the ability to make simple explanations. There is good exercise, at least when you have kids. When you explain your thoughts in a way that a seven-year-old kid can understand, you are the master of communication. To achieve it, try to use as many as possible comparisons, examples and metaphors from your audience experiences.

Subject comprehension

On top of the three essential skills, there is one more. I have already emphasized several times how crucial subject knowledge is. As Steven Covey said, “firstly understand to be understood”. You will not be a convincing storyteller without knowledge of what answers your audience is looking for. There is a simple rule: people always are interested in their business and problems, not yours. So, when you want to persuade them, you must present benefits or threats for them. From my experience data analysts are overloaded with ETL jobs and do not have enough room to talk with business people about business pain points and challenges. Those conversations would significantly enhance provided information. Data without context and understanding what is behind the scenes are useless.

Apart from mastering analytical, data visualisation, and communication skills, try to become a true partner for the business that you support. Build strong relationships with your internal or external customers and listen to them actively. Most people are willing to talk if you are pleased to listen. There is no better source of knowledge than subject matter experts. With those competencies, your ability to have a real impact within the organisation and building your personal brand will grow.

From Beginner to Master of Storytelling

In each discipline, there are levels of mastery. There is no difference with data storytelling. Check out where are you right now and what your aspirations are.

Beginner

This is entry-level. You even do not know that there is something like data storytelling and you can learn it to enhance your data analysis. I often meet beginners as young people who have just started their career. Their heads are plenty of theory, but they lack practice. In the first place, Beginners should improve business knowledge to prepare better and relevant data analysis. In most organizations, there is plenty of internal training and materials that bring closer inner business processes, rules and characteristics.

Recruit

I would say that those are mostly data analysts with excellent analytical skills and data visualization skills who do beautiful data visualizations that often are totally useless. The pitfall here is that when you are experienced in one very narrow specialization, you can have the delusion that you know better than others what they need and how to present it. However, they produce products for their customers and should listen to their voice. Maybe your customer does not know how to analyse data but for sure know what questions are interesting and show you in which direction data analyses should go. Recruits are typical data people, and they put too much focus on technical aspects, and they too often use very technical language when they communicate with non-technical people. They should focus more on the business side of analysis and less on the analysis itself.

Leader

As you can see on the matrix above, I valuate communication skills and business acumen more than data visualization skills in data storytelling. People who already know what the pain points of business are and can draw the audience attention do not need to know advanced data visualisation techniques to impact. However, there is a potential risk to easily mislead the audience if someone uses data without proper knowledge about basic best practices of data visualization. As I have mentioned earlier, data visualization techniques are based on human perception, which is a very fragile cognitive apparatus. Leaders have a special mission in spreading data culture across organizations because they feel comfortable with data, know how to use and present them, and, thanks to their position, can make or influence data-driven decisions.

Master

Masters have proficiency in all four skills. What is more, thanks to the linkage of business knowledge and analytical skills they are true advisors, who can set directions of future growth.

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Convert your data visualisation into data storytelling

Hans Rosling, the master of data storytelling, once explained that data visualization is like looking at musical notes, but you will not hear music just by looking at them. This great metaphor in a simple way differentiates data visualization from data storytelling.

When I think about how data serve us, they are only a bridge between our imagination or expectations and reality. They need a guide who reveals their shape and meaning to unlock their full potential. Everything depends on how comfortable we feel with numbers. Our main goal when we work with data shouldn’t be presenting numbers but highlighting the situation behind them, problems to address or opportunities we can leverage. Some people don’t have a natural instinct to read between data lines, while some do. Some people need a guide some don’t.

But at the beginning, I would like to dig into concerns about the differences between data visualisations and data storytelling. Many times, both terms are used interchangeably which is misleading. The biggest distinction between those two terms is that the first one focuses on displaying data in readable form, and the second is communicate insights and conclusions.

Data visualisation is simply displaying data. Our intention here is not to communicate information but to show data to receivers and give them the possibility to build their insights and conclusions. Data storytelling, on the other hand, is something totally counterparty. We, as authors, want to sell receivers one of the possible stories around a particular data set. However, that story can be more or less ethical or trustworthy, but I won’t touch that sensitive topic here – to go deeper into ethics in presenting data read this post.

Of course, like in the marketing world, we have some tips and tricks to sell our stories.

Narration

Narration is a game changer in communicating data findings. It is the heart of data storytelling. One data set can contain dozens of stories. What we pick up and how we tell about them depends on our goals. Storytelling is a very successful tool in communication or marketing. Humans crave stories from the beginning of our species. This is our natural way of passing messages mainly because it activates many parts of our brain like language processing, movement processing, and emotion processing. Due that engaged processes we can remember things easier.

Visual attributes

How we frame the story will affect how this story will be displayed. Yes, displayed. In data storytelling, we use all visual attributes to get a message across to our audience. The main part is to properly link the message with what is presented. We use colours, shapes, positions, and text to focus or guide the audience’s attention.

Let’s get through the basics of visual narration.

In the above picture, the same data set is displayed. However, with a totally different intention. On the left side, data is presented by categories (social interactions) on the timeline (age). Interpretation is on the audience’s side. The audience can craft their own stories based on their feelings, expectations, and experiences.

On the right, the data set is filtered by author lenses. The author focuses only on one of the categories – time spent alone and presents the positive aspect of the fact that when we age, we have more time for ourselves. To promote this thesis, she exposed the category “Alone” with orange colour and combined the rest of the categories into one and painted them with neutral grey colour. Due to this technique, the category “Alone” is pushed out to the foreground for paying the viewers’ attention. Furthermore, the category “Alone” is placed first from the visualization baseline, so we can see the increasing trend over time. A thoughtful title is important as well to influence how we interpret the whole visualisation.

Narration over narration

The author’s thesis presented above is positive. Can we turn it into a negative one? Let’s compare below two examples.

Again, the same data set is used. By implementing various techniques, we can play on people’s emotions to evoke different outlooks of the presented information.

On the left, the bright, optimistic colour orange is used to emphasise the advantages of the situation. However, the example on the right gives us another impression. Blue colour, often joined with sadness, bars falling as streams of rain from the sky upon someone’s head, and the pessimistic title leaves us without a doubt that being alone when you get older is nothing pleasant.

Is it manipulation? I didn’t change here data set or axis scale. I just move viewers’ focus and show another perspective. Nevertheless, I can leave the audience with counter feelings.

So, I’ll repeat here once again, it is your decision how to sell your data storytelling.

Manage your business with Key Performance Indicators for Growth. My #7 principles.

Everyone has heard about key performance indicators – measures which give you a brief understanding of how your business operates and creates value for customers. Three essentials that each CEO is watching are revenue growth, costs and cash flow. But those KPIs are on the top of the iceberg. Underneath there are many other, much more strategic KPIs which can be revealed and can serve as a lighthouse to help you sail on restless seas and oceans to strengthen your resilience and reduce vulnerability. But the key question here is how to find them.

Have you heard about the concept of a strategy map? The strategy map is a simple visual tool that helps you decompose strategy objectives like “cost reduction by 5%” into smaller and manageable ones like “waiting time reduction by 3%”. It presents logical, cause-and-effect relations between objectives and clarifies the value stream through domains like finance, production, people, technology etc. The power of this tool is to present business strategy on a very tangible level and what is more, provide a transparent way to achieve it.

https://balancedscorecard.org/bsc-basics/what-is-a-strategy-map/

However, you will not be able to control your objectives without proper measures. Those measures we call Key Performance Indicators – KPIs. Below I am presenting my top seven principles for KPIs that must be met.

KPIs are like a compass

Do you have your strategic objectives already shaped? Wonderful. Do you know how to measure them for driving growth? Each of the established objectives should be followed by one well-defined and tailored KPI. I would be far from creating various KPIs for one objective and then linking them for making sense of it. Simplification is a buzzword here for not losing crucial metrics from your radar.  Too many will only distract you and blur the straight interpretation.

KPIs reflect business dynamics

The next thing worth remembering about KPIs is that they must be dynamic. KPI which doesn’t change frequently is totally useless, especially in a fast-moving business environment. Your resilience is as good as you can react to appearing obstacles and disruption. Ideally, you should be able to track progress daily to make adequate decisions.

KPIs are standardized across the organization

Standardization is your ally to ensure that people are looking from the same perspective or seeing the same picture. Keep handy, for all users, KPIs’ descriptions, and examples of how they can leverage them at work to improve performance. Due that people within your organization can use a common language and easily discuss chances and challenges in achieving similar results.

KPIs show what “good enough” means

Maybe it is not very political, but targets or goals should not be stretched. They should be realistic. Maybe you would say that to be successful you must be very ambitious, but frequent setbacks might have a very negative influence on your and others’ motivation (read more about the topic in my previous post). The experience of achieving goals strengthens people’s confidence, which might flourish as an improvement for future performance.

KPIs are easily accessible

If you want people to start using a specific tool or device, you do not hide it, do you? On the market, there are plenty of reporting platforms or software that can provide people with direct and easy access to information. Links to those tools should be placed on the intranet in a visible place. In addition, the information about reporting system should be included within onboarding materials.

KPIs are communicated

Sounds obvious, right? Often, it is not. Many times, even though we have KPIs and strategies in place, our employees are not aware of them. Some ideas stay on the management level, and they are not cascaded down. Regarding the strategy and goals, the organization should keep in the loop all employees, because everyone participates in its growth, and everyone is needed to create a value stream for customers. Because success is nothing more like the sum of small efforts and small steps achieve daily by individuals.

KPIs are used on daily basis.

Last but not least. Finally, people must feel the benefit of checking KPIs daily in making better decisions and choices. This is the hardest part of the entire process. Changing people’s habits and behaviours is not piece of cake (here you will find some strategies for change management). Design processes in a way to force people to use KPIs. Otherwise, you can spend billions on developing a new strategy and implementing new technology, and all those efforts would be a waste, just because nobody is interested in using it.

How a daily dashboard can boost the motivation of your team.

I learnt a new concept – inner work life. Inner work life is the confluence of perceptions, emotions, and motivations that individuals experience as they react to and make sense of the events of their workday. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer (read an interview with authors) did research on 238 employees in 7 companies and studied nearly 12 000 diary entries to find out how a mix of daily mood, emotions, self-perception, and interactions with other people in an organization can influence progress at work. The results of research and strategies for managers are described in the authors’ book “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work”.

Many managers try to solve the puzzle of how to boost the motivation of their subordinates. Many employees struggle with their own demotivation and lack of engagement which ruins their sense of purpose. Research shows that there are two main triggers that influence positive inner work life – progress and setbacks. Even small daily progress at work has a tremendous positive impact on our mood and motivation at work that can last for a few days, however, it is a double-edged sword. Small losses or setbacks can have negative effects. Nevertheless, except for those triggers to maintain positive inner work life, people need additional stimulants called by the authors: catalysts and nourishers. Catalysts are actions that directly support work like proper tools, help from colleagues or well-designed processes. Nourishes relate to interpersonal interactions like getting respect and recognition and being encouraged by managers or colleagues. But those stimulants don’t have a such critical influence on bad vs good mood day as an experience of progress or setbacks (more to read about research result).

Now we know the concept of inner work life in a nutshell. This concept is much more important for jobs where people have to deal with complex tasks and need to leverage their problem-solving skills or rely on their creativity. Of course, there are jobs where this idea can be hard to implement for instance in easy repeatable work, but I believe that in such cases introducing some elements of concepts can significantly impact the quality of the work and people’s well-being. However, before we can benefit from positive inner work life as an organization and individuals, we must rethink how do we understand progress and which tools we would like to use to track it.

How the power of progress can be leveraged in organizations

Establish what progress means for you and your team

Many of us see progress as something like a milestone, a tremendous change from one state to another underestimating small changes which in fact summarize into those larger ones. But exactly those small daily steps bring us closer to achieving the most ambitious goals. To run a marathon, first of all, you must put your shoes on and step out of your house. Many organizations are too focused on their goals, and they are forgetting about the road that leads to goals. But in fact, that road enables those organizations to learn and grow.

Chunk long-term KPIs into manageable pieces

Another thing to be concerned about is how goals are defined in the organization. Of course, there are annual goals, which from the bottom of the organization can be seemed as abstract and hard to achieve. To make them more tangible for employees, they should be chunked into small, manageable pieces. For instant. It’s great to have an annual sales goal of $2mln but to hit this target each employee must at least calls 10 clients per day. Those daily calls can be treated as progress.  

Plan work in daily iterations

If your organization works in weekly cycles, shifting toward finishing daily tasks will be a challenge. Especially when you must change the behaviour of planning. Planning daily tasks is more demanding because you must think deeply about what you can do and when, what should be done first, and which tasks are critical or can occur as bottlenecks. It is much easier to set weekly or monthly goals and then pray to accomplish them. Someone would say that such granularity is micromanagement. But the devil is in the details. Those tasks should be prepared by the team, not by the manager.  People should have the autonomy to plan their own work and feel responsible for the plan execution.  Otherwise, the power of progress won’t work.

Use the Kanban board to track and visualize progress daily

One of the great tools that show how teams and individuals are moving forward is Kanban Board.  Kanban board is widely used in any type of industry, where some products are produced like in manufacturing or IT. But there is nothing against leveraging it for other fields like HR or even accounting. This board is designed to visualise workflow to identify and limit work in progress. The secret of this tool is its simplicity. The board consists of a minimum of three columns: to-do, doing, and done, where tasks are moved from left to right to show progress and help perform a work (more on Kanban Board). The huge power of this board is to give team members the physical ability to move their own tasks forward from to-do to doing, from doing to done. It creates in people a true sense of accomplishment when they can see in front of their eyes how tasks are getting status done.

Remove obstacles and toxins

Ok, we can see with our eyes of imagination how we are moving tasks on board without any interference, but it is not a reality. Most of the time during the day we must struggle with many obstacles like not responsive people, irrational procedures or not working processes and tools. It is even worse when the success of our tasks depends on others’ work, and whether we want it or not, we need to wait for their availability. All of those can in a magician’s way turn progress into setbacks. Setbacks can be more powerful than progress because of their dark nature of experience. Managers should be aware of that force and support their subordinates to solve those issues to reduce as much as possible any frustration. Longer setbacks weaker people’s motivation and lead to a negative inner work life that destroys someone’s efficiency.

Celebrate daily progress

How about starting a new brand day with recognition for yesterday? If you made yesterday’s progress, why not celebrate it? For that, you can introduce a daily stand-up meeting, when you share with a team yesterday’s achievements, ideally in some visualized form. Present such metrics as won deals, new prospects, number of processed documents or produced products, created new ideas for marketing campaigns or resolved incidents. Anything that is meaningful for your team and can represent their engagement in work.

Leverage data

Most of the data which can serve you for this purpose are already available. Currently, most organizations don’t have issues with obtaining data but with making sense of them. You just need to ask yourself and your team, what should be displayed on the daily dashboard? What are the main factors or triggers that give them sense of purpose, generate progress, and bring them closer to achieving committed goals? What data they would like to see because they can alert them that things are getting out of track?

Principles of the daily dashboard for progress tracking

Focus on daily tasks

If your team supports customers’ incidents maybe, they are not interested in the first place what is a customer satisfaction rate but for sure they are interested in how many incidents were resolved and in which handle time. Customer satisfaction rate can be displayed as beside metric, which gives them sense of purpose and shows the direct impact of their work. But, essential for them are their own tasks, that are mentioned in the job description, because at the end of the day they will be accounted for them.

Design dynamic KPIs and goals

I’m static poses lover as practising yoga is one of the key elements of my lifestyle. However, many do not share my passion. If you want to use KPIs (key performance indicators) as a tool that helps you monitor daily work and makes better decisions, those metrics should be designed to reflect changes on a daily basis if possible. We must keep common sense in here, of course. If work is in weekly cycles, we won’t be able to present any accomplishments during the week, but it doesn’t mean that we can not display progress. Maybe we can present how many issues were open during the day? Or maybe we can present how many of them moved into another status? With that approach, we can track how our work is moving from one point to another and have a chance to notice any blocks or unwanted behaviours.

Design daily benchmarks

Where possible, I encourage creating and using benchmarks. This reference point can act as an alert or goal and its evaluation provides meaningful information about the quality and performance of your work. This benchmark can be designed based on the average performance of previous days or weeks or established as the desired goal.

Show critical alerts

What should be included on a daily dashboard, in addition to progress, are metrics monitoring critical processes. Many companies have commitments that translate into specific actions. One such is, for example, the SLA (service level agreement). Most of us have experienced those SLAs when complaining or returning a product to an online shop. In both cases, the deadline for consideration of the complaint and the return of funds is agreed upon. Look for those critical KPIs and don’t miss them from your radar.

Create positive narration

Last but not least, remember to design a daily dashboard in a manner to boost people’s motivation not the opposite. Focus more on team effort than individual performance (see my post about the cooperative vs. competitive approach). Try not to overwhelm them with details. They should see a clear path to their success. Give them actionable metrics which can be managed and improved by the team. Most people like to feel that they are sitting behind the driving wheel.

Can reporting influence the cooperative vs. competitive culture in organizations?

I’m continually amazed when I hear about the importance of building cooperative culture and what I can mostly see is still reinforcement of a competitive one.

New trends across all industries are putting more stress on promoting employees’ team-player characteristics and glueing the teams for better outcomes. There are many talks inside and outside companies about building such an attitude. The shift in mindset is mainly required on the leadership level where change can be driven and cascade to the rest parts of the organization.

Why leaders should care more about cooperative culture?

The aggressive competitive culture for many years was recognized for delivering overperformance results, but the question is it in fact true? Why promoting individuals over entire teams is the better strategy for the company? Most companies have common goals and vision, and they strive to make any single employee shares those principles. Does it not sound like one huge team of people who must collaborate to achieve one goal? So why do managers on lower levels often act differently and throw people into competitive situations?

Once, one of the managers told me that employees like to compete and this is how they are driven to be better at work, but I remember that team mostly as frustrated and surly people. Of course, we hold the competitiveness in our nature. We compete with our peers for better jobs or with co-workers for a rise or promotion. But looking from a helicopter view, I am questioning its positive impact from the company’s growth perspective. To illustrate this, imagine a soccer team. You can have one or two spectacular stars, but you need eleven players to win a game. Even those two superstars will not win a game for you. You need the effort from the rest of the group. What is more, your team is just as strong as the weakest player. And here we are touching on the pros of a cooperative attitude.

What makes cooperation better than the competition?

I worked in many industries and companies with different cultures, and I can honestly admit that the more stress was put on collaboration, the better memories I have about the atmosphere and delivered results. Of course, some people may raise their voices that if you did not track individuals’ progress, people would be tempted to cheat and not put in as much effort as they could. But my point is not against tracking individuals’ progress for people management purposes, just not presenting those statistics to the team.

Learning from others

The undoubted advantage of a strong collaboration approach is the overall greater capability of the whole team as a group due to sharing between them best practices. To translate for the business purpose an old proverb that says you need an entire village to raise a child, people can learn from other experiences and discuss with colleagues how to approach problematic clients. They can even participate together in meetings with clients just to observe the behaviours and responses of more experienced colleagues. Learning on the job has been proven to be the fastest way for people to acquire new skills or master existing ones. Sharing knowledge would be beneficial for all, younger and more senior members, while younger can exchange their energy and fresh look on things with balanced manners of seniors.

Supportive environment

Many times, private life interrupts professional. You can be accidentally sick just before closing a deal with your key client, or you immediately must be on the second end of the country to help your parents with their health problems. As we are all humans and most of our business partners will understand the situation, in consequence, the business processes will be on hold. Would not you feel much calmer knowing that in your absence your cases are moved forward, and customers are still pleased? And what about solving problems? How to leverage brainstorming sessions if people have in the back of their heads that they should not reveal their best ideas? To maximize outcomes you need to build trust. Trust will not grow in a competitive environment.

Business continuity

Both above-mentioned potential advantages are crucial to ensure business continuity. Just think how the image of your company would suffer in the eyes of your customer if you can not replace smoothly the employee who suddenly got sick for a longer time.  As a manager, one of your goals is to mitigate risks and make sure that all your processes are covered and fully operated. Having a group of people with similar skills and knowledge is a guarantee of stability from the company’s point of view.

What role does the reporting play here?

The reporting reflects vision, strategy, expectations, and corporate aspiration or at least should. If your reports do not provide supportive information to drive a business, it literally sucks, and you should do homework on how to force your data to work for you. However, before you leverage data, you must think about what message you would like to convey.

I’m always emphasising that by having the same data set you can tell several different stories and draw other conclusions. The factor here is a perspective and an end goal. The management must ask themselves if they would like to support a culture that creates stars that can shine very brightly but for a relatively short period or prefer to invest in a team which takes part in relay-race and win together.

To depict how we can promote cooperative or competitive culture by reporting tool let us compare the two below sketches (BTW, sketching is a great tool when you are working with clients, but it is a good topic for the next post).

More competitive dashboard

• Design the dashboard for a sake of the possibility to compare team members’ performance.
• Create an overall ranking where you can present the undisputed leader of the race.
• Colour laggards in red or orange to emphasize them even more.
• Keep records daily to present the progress and gaps of each team member to the leader. You can even present the historical dynamics of the race.
• Display dashboard on a wall screen.
• Keep a record of the best performers from previous months on the Wall of Glory.

More cooperative dashboard

• Forget about individual performance. Focus on the Team performance.
• You can use natural competition drivers toward other groups like teams from the same department but serving other markets, teams from different departments or if you have an opportunity towards your market competitors. Show them a common “enemy” to reinforce them as a group.
• Show the team’s current progress in comparison to goals or targets.
• Highlight “good news” like positive growth of KPIs or faster pace of attaining the target.
• Display the daily progress to emphasise and award daily work.
• If your company culture is promoting giving KUDOS present them on the dashboard. That great recognition from peers for someone’s hard work shouldn’t be unnoticed.

I have only scratched a surface of the topic, but whatever approach is closer to your HR strategy remember that how you use, and display data will amplify some underlying behaviours and attitudes.  For organizations that aspirate to be data-driven, there is no escape from thinking about data at a strategic level and using them to serve specific purposes.

Make more impact by empowering your one-to-one meetings with data.

COVID-19 was a game changer regarding our ways of working. Many companies were forced to change a typical on-site work style for remote work. That shift had pros and cons like everything does. On the pros surveys reveal better work-life balance, commuting time savings, or performance increase. On the other hand, managers notice risks in a higher rate of employees leaving. One of the biggest cons of remote work is that employees lose attachment with the company. The main reason is a lack of social interaction with peers and involvement in creating specific organisational culture. But the second is weak identification with the brand that often relates to the office and office events. Managers are brainstorming how to bring back people again to the offices and gain their loyalty, but in the post-pandemic world, it is not so obvious how to achieve it. Rules changed and nothing remains the same as it was.

I believe that everyone needs to feel purpose in life and feel that his work is meaningful. For me understanding how I contribute to the overall strategy, goals or company’s vision is essential. Many times, we lack those connections because of poor communication from the management side and a vague understanding of our role in the entire organization. Fortunately, we have a bunch of communication tools that can be used to improve mutual understanding and keep employees satisfied with their positions.

One of those I find helpful is one-to-one conversations. The one-to-one conversation has great potential in tracking performance, and most of the time they are only used for that. But what is much more important is having a deep and honest discussion with employees about their thoughts, sentiments, and aspirations. That knowledge gives managers the opportunity to react fast when a loss in interest is observed. However, be honest with yourself, how often do you have a feeling that your one-to-ones are not effective as they could be? What are they still missing?

From my long record, I rarely recall that those discussions were supported by some good information. In the majority, discussions were driven by opinions rather than facts. Wouldn’t be great to have evidence for our gut feelings? That precious time is too often wasted simply because companies don’t provide adequate tools to make those meetings more valuable and beneficial for organisations, managers, and employees. Writing “tools”, means collecting, analysing, transforming, and presenting relevant data to make sure that people are talking about facts, and not opinions. And yes, nothing stands in the way to use data for one-to-one meetings.

Of course, the selection of data and KPIs will differ across industries, businesses, and roles. However, some of those remain the same. The biggest challenge is asking the right questions and finding data that respond to them. The great starting point in the journey of creating KPIs that give you meaningful data-based one-to-one conversations are:

1. Company strategy & goals,
2. And the job description.

Company strategy &goals

As I wrote above, people like to feel purpose and connection. Why not use a narrative from the big picture down to the bottom and show employees how does he or she participate in the company’s growth? The more tangible connections between the employee’s daily work and the company’s performance you can find, the higher satisfaction the employee can have. Most organizations cascade down their goals. Thanks to that, we can simply provide proper KPIs and data visualizations to present departments, teams, or individuals’ contributions.

So, before the next one-to-one, if you do not do it already, would be good to talk with the business intelligence team, the sales team, or the finance team to get some shareable data about the business growth and current progress toward goals and the contribution share of your team.

Job description

The job description includes all expectations toward a specific role that can be converted into questions tracked by data. Typically, the job description has two parts that we can use for our purpose. First are responsibilities, second qualifications and skills. Responsibilities can shape our questions about current performance toward goals, finding challenges and their proper solutions or give us a clue on how to prioritise hot issues. Qualifications and skills are a great introduction to talk about employee directions of development, their ambitions and future career paths.

Business case

As a business case, I’ll use the Product Owner role. Depending on the industry’s and an organization’s characteristics main responsibilities, qualifications and skills can differ. However, for the purpose of this post, I’m picking those:

• Develops, owns, and executes product roadmap.
• Prioritizes and maintains the sprint backlog for assigned products, balancing the requirements of stakeholders.
• Translates product roadmap features into well-defined product requirements including features, user stories, and acceptance test criteria.

Expectations reflected in data

The product roadmap is one of the key drivers of success in delivering products. Without a strong and clear vision of what the product is and which characteristics and functionalities it has, it would be hard to develop anything. As a Product Owner, you should often review and update the roadmap to make sure that the vision of the product still reflects the market demands. On the other hand, the product roadmap is a base for the product backlog that consists of features or /and user stories that workload estimation gives the Product Owner a feeling about timely delivery. So, what kind of KPIs should we track to make sure that the roadmap is still valid?

Do all milestones are on the product roadmap?

The product roadmap usually includes milestones or bigger chunks that are broken down into smaller pieces like features and user stories. Tracking something that is not visible is a complicated task. Having one big picture of what is planned gives you the opportunity for proactive conversation. Having the possibility to see all relevant tasks for each milestone makes you ensure that you didn’t forget anything highly important.

Does the product backlog cover the product roadmap?

The first measure that could be interesting to track is the number of tasks under each milestone. The alert could be set up for those milestones without any created tasks. If you have the possibility to track the progress of the task, it gives you a feeling that pace of work is aligned with assumptions or is it faster or slower. You can then discuss options.

Do we have enough resources to deliver the agreed functionalities on time?

Time and money are always tied together. Looking at the roadmap we need to guess somehow the amount of work that is needed for development. For that, we can use story points, or man-days, or any other measure that allows us to compare team capabilities with the required workload. As a result, we can have a positive or negative gap. We wouldn’t trouble ourselves too much as long as we had a positive gap, but the questions would arise with a negative one. Should we narrow the scope or maybe find other people to help us?

Do features/user stories well-prepared for developers?

This question can reveal if tasks for developers are ready for development, or if some issues must be clarified still. We can use here RAG (Red for not ready, Amber for those in progress, Green for those that are ready) approach that gives us the status of tasks’ readiness. This status review opens a discussion about issues and challenges on a very low level that in the end can have a tremendous effect on the entire product development. To create RAG status, think about the most important entries, or fields on your feature/user story template. Then you can use a simple sum or a weighted one to calculate the indicator. Add conditions to differentiate between red, amber, and green (or not ready, in progress, ready). Now you have KPI to see which task needs more of your attention or has some issues to address.

To track these data, you do not even need fancy tools. The Excel spreadsheet will work perfectly. Of course, if you have the possibility to use more advanced business intelligence tools, please do not hesitate 😊

Addressing aspirations and ambitions

Most people I have known have their own aspirations and desires regarding professional and private life. Most of them if they cannot fulfil them in the current workplace are starting to look around for more favourable conditions. That is why the manager should remember to leave enough space for one-to-one conversations for discussing topics regarding employee growth. But again, the discussion is an exchange of opinions. Can we find some data to visualise how much time and effort is spent on learning and mastering skills activities?

More and more companies offer their employees learning platforms just to name a few Udemy, Coursera, and EDX. They are perceived as tremendous benefits by employees but only when they are allowed to allocate some time for learning. In the interest of any organization should be staff development. It has so many positive aspects for both sides, the employer, and the employees. I have an experience among organizations which had entirely different approaches to peoples’ growth. Some of them didn’t care at all about these needs, some of them gave the opportunity to learn but after working hours, some of them understood it as an investment and some of them required upskilling but without providing any courses or giving room for learning. But it totally different topic.

My point is that if you have such platforms in your organizations, maybe you can leverage them for:

• Verify together with your subordinate which courses would be relevant for mastering skills required in her/his position,
• Prepare together learning path,
• Agree on timelines,
• Allocate time per day/week/month for learning.

Most learning platforms share data or even provide built-in reports about users’ activity like a list of chosen training, amount of time spent in the application and on training, or progress on lecturer or practical activities. Isn’t it a great mine of information? Armed with such knowledge we can bring to the table tangible insights and have a proper conversation about employee growth. What we can definitely review in the first place is whether a person has the opportunity to use the dedicated time for learning or is snowed under with daily tasks. Or the exact opposite if you are sure that a person is not overloaded with work why she or he doesn’t take classes as is agreed? Another point for discussion can be reviewing new learnings and figuring out how this fresh knowledge can be applied to business, or if the subject is still relevant or should be changed. As you can see having those data we can start even think more strategically about the development of teams, departments, and entire organizations.

The above examples are only a small sample of enriching one of the processes within the organization. The huge challenge in making organizations data-driven is to design relative key performance indicators and create a habit of using them unconsciously by people. The main strategy to achieve that is simply to weave data into almost every process. The result can be that employees won’t think about data as something separately but as an integral step for achieving their goals. Establishing that common culture in the organization will support gaining market advantage like never before.

The doom of pre-defined dashboards. True or false?

A few days ago, I read an article¹ about trends for 2022 in data analytics. One of the opinions paid my attention more than the rest. The thesis was that in 2022 we can observe “the death of predefined dashboards” which sounds odd to me.

Maybe it is only some kind of over-interpretation of what is happening in the industries and an attempt to call it controversially. Nevertheless, decision-makers can take it for granted and start a revolution in organisations harming analytical processes, workflows and widely understood data culture.

Let me touch more deeply on why I bare such an opinion.

The case with data literacy

I would love to see legions of employees who are able to read, interpret and work with data fluently at every level of the company’s hierarchy. But we are not there yet, as all surveys of all consulting companies show us.

For years we have been observing how companies have been putting a large focus on data democratization. The main evidence of that is an evolution towards a data-as-a-service direction by using cloud-based solutions to empower different users in data analytics. However, most of that significant potential can be easily lost just because of the immaturity of the organization’s data culture and the data literacy level of each, single employee.

Frankly speaking, too much focus is on the technology side and too less on people. Companies still mainly invest in training improving technical skills or ability to use specific tools.  Training which teaches how to use data for a specific purpose is in minority, even on the market is hard to find such offers. We must remember that employees have different backgrounds and different skills. Some of them would always need assistance in data analytics, just because their core skills are allocated somewhere else and there, they bring business value. We shouldn’t require them to waste their time learning how to work with data, while they should master other skills.

Challenge with an approach data as a product

The next point to cover is how those organisations are advanced in digital transformation. Before introducing a new strategy, some basics must be prepared. Many companies would like to be data-driven, however still suffer from a lack of integrated, automated, and accessible databases that provide high-quality data. And it is not a completed wish list.

Efficient and business valuable data sets serve specific business areas. In most cases, it means that different business areas have data prepared differently including data aggregation, hierarchy, and perspectives. The huge challenge for organizations is to provide an environment, structure, and infrastructure to approach data as a product. It requires investment in hiring an adequate number of professionals and changes in existing processes and technology. Apart from that, DaaP is still a fresh concept and companies need time to get familiar with it and step in on this journey.

Underdevelopment of tech-savvy

I’m writing above about too much focusing on tech training. However, some companies don’t have any vision of how to support their employees in their tech-savvy journey while still expecting results.

I was the victim of such an approach gaining access to the tools without any training and vision of employee development and setting a clear learning path. Worse, I was required to figure out how to upskill myself. That was a horrible experience, both for the employee and the organization that ends up in frustration and lack of results.

Mature organizations employ professionals who take care of the technological development of employees in accordance with the company’s long-term strategy and vision. They make sure that the skill set of employees can shift the company from point A to point B. Without them or similar roles, no major changes can take place.

The hell of multi-sources of truth

If you are a fan of Marvel like me, you know what chaos can be brought by having multi universes. The same risk can be a case when we allow separate business units to use databases without supervision. Business units may report the same metrics differently only because they understand or define them differently. From the inside, we can observe that data retrieval is processed in a different manner.

This generates a bunch of problems. Especially in proofing whose numbers are correct ones, and this requires additional time and resources that could be spent on more valuable tasks. Not to mention ruining trust and mutual relations between departments and employees.

As a key conclusion, I would say that giving employees the freedom to create their own dashboard places a huge responsibility on their shoulders and requires them to have various sets of technical skills. Such a strategy may be similar to throwing the baby out with the bathwater if companies do not invest time and money in ensuring that their employees acquire the skills they need, are equipped with the right tools and data sets can be used without worrying about the disinformation.

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/top-10-data-analytics-trends-for-2022/

How to present numbers involved in people tragedies?

Every day, we have been bombarded with news about people cruelty toward other people or animals and natural and unnatural disasters that result in many deaths. It is now even doubled because of COVID-19 and its death toll. You could say that there is nothing spectacular in it. From the first time man set foot on Earth: Famine, Plague and War are our inseparable companions, and in the era when we plan to conquer the Universe, they are still not defeated.

However, most of these terrifying scenes are somewhere long distance from our safe and cosy homes. In addition, we are overwhelmed by violence presented in mass media. That gives us the impression that those situations are unrealistic and abstract. We hardly attach them to real people, victims and it is going to be even worse as we learnt from the latest studies about decreasing empathy.

For instance, I experience the same feeling of indifference when looking at COVID-19 statistics. These are ONLY numbers. Dehumanized numbers like production series or kilometres run in your tracking app. And that scares me a lot.

A situation when people (or any other living creature) are presented as a sequence of numbers scares me. When we use some abstract forms to identify persons, there is a danger that we will perceive them as objects and not as subjects. I witnessed behaviours involving the use of employee numbers in internal communication and it was a part of the culture. For me, this approach detached living people from their formal functions and roles. Roles become impersonal. There are no people, there are only cogs in the machine or resources to use and to get rid of when used.

So how to present numbers and communicate real people tragedies?

Language

Another thing is the language used to describe victims. Many times, the word “case”, “deaths” or “fatal accident” replaces words “wounded people”, “died people”, “victims”. Especially in medical statistics like presented in Figure 1 number of people who died and recovered from COVID-19 (statistics for a particular point in time).

Using abstract forms do not help in building vivid pictures in the mind of our audience of happy people, who recovered from the awful disease and went back to their families or plunged in grief over the loss of their loved ones. And this is what we would like to achieve – move their imagination to evoke their feelings.

Which of those subtitles in Figure 1 are more dramatic?

Figure 1

Numbers

People, in general, have problems with understanding big numbers, statistics and abstract visual forms presenting the information. The numbers in Figure 1 are so enormous that is hard to imagine them. To convey information effectively we must downsize it and chunk to the well-known, familiar, and easy to interpret elements.

In Figure 2 we can see the percentage of how many people died vs recovered from COVID -19. I used the abstract visual form to present information – pie chart and impersonal, medical description – death rate, closed cases. Nothing about victims.

Figure 2

How can we interpret this picture? If we are good at maths and understand the concept behind percentages, we can have the impression that 2% is a quite low chance to die of COVID-19 and there is no big deal (I won’t vaccinate myself! It’s a mystification to implant a chip on me!). And again, using the word doesn’t help us understand a real, current threat. “Death” for most of us is a metaphysical conception that lies somewhere in the far distant future.

Iconographic

To downsize information and present it in a more readable format, we can use graphical representation, small objects that symbolize humans. This approach lets an audience understand the range of coronavirus death toll because the big number was chunked into small pieces (1 out of 50). Number 50 is much closer to our imagination than 5 613 594. Using human symbols I emphasized that numbers are related to people.

Do you feel now more or less certain that COVID-19 is not a big deal?

Figure 3

Time

We can use the time to strengthen our message significantly when we embedded our audience into the present moment and convert statistics into occurrences. With this tactic, we can easily emphasise how human life is fragile because when you are reading this text every nine-second someone passes away because of the corona virus (again I used a 2% death rate). You can use animated gifs to be more dramatic.

How do you feel now with this knowledge?

Figure 4

I do not say that standard data visualisations are bad, and we should not use numbers or statistics. I just want to challenge anyone who communicates information to a wide audience to tailor better channels to make sure that a message gets properly understood, and people will start looking again at those who suffer… with appropriate respect.

Map your maps.

During the holidays season, I’m having more time to catch up watching movies. On that long list a film “Another round” can be found. In a nutshell, the plot is about four friends and their unexpected alcohol experiment. Everything is done in the spirit of science, of course. In truth, this dark comedy-drama touches on a very sensitive social problem that affects many people around the world.

I’m wondering how Poland looks compared to other European countries and if Poles on average drink more or less in comparison to Danes? According to WHO (World Health Organization) data from 2018 average Pole drinks 11.71 pure alcohol and Dane 10.26 (15+ years). The difference is 1.45. Is Poland near or far from Denmark? Depending on the colour palette and applied scale we can perceive it differently, and consequently, convey different stories or draw misleading conclusions.

5 stepped colour

I used Tableau Public to visualize data. This visualization is automatically chosen by Tableau. According to the visualization, Poles are not in the lead for European countries and Danes are somewhere in the middle of the scale.

3 stepped colour

But wait a minute. What a shame! Poles are heavy drinkers. Now I can see it clearly.

7 stepped colour

OMG… how much beer average Czech had to drink to win this competition? When it comes to Poland, it is not so bad. Poland is near the middle of the range.

Reversed 3 stepped colour

Hm… I’m a little bit confused. I have the impression that Poles don’t avoid occasions to celebrate the fragility of life, but now I can see is opposite. (Who would check legend description? Waist of time, data visualizations are intuitive!)

Attention: Remember in our culture stronger colour saturation means increased occurrence of the phenomenon.

As we can see, each of the four above examples depicts the same information differently, and that difference can be significant.

Maps are commonly used in public media and people like them. The same is in the business world. However, knowing it from experience, it is very easy to manipulate information presented on maps. Before you publish or share your map ask yourself:

• Does scale represent the statistic bins,
• Are colours adjusted to the topic,
• Is reverse scale justified?

Data source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.ALC.PCAP.MA.LI?view=map

Develop these four skills to be more successful in any domain.

It is a chilly morning. I stand in the middle of the kitchen and look at my lovely daughter after our regular morning battle to get her ready for school. Apart from all rage that she carries right now inside, she is like a delicate flower torn by the wind. I ask myself where is the point to force her to get up so early and expose her to all these frustrations that will come for sure today when she tries to remember all useless knowledge. The Polish education system sucks.

My daughter, as the next generation of humans, will face many new challenges in the near future. Climate crises, energy crises, increasing inequality, overpopulation, the collapse of democratic rules … just to name a few. The current education system does not prepare our children for any of the challenges of the 21st century.

Experts agree that for our kids to be able to adapt to the new environment and face what the future will bring, they must master four basic human skills. They are called 4C’s for the 21st century: Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity. And what is more! According to the experts’, 4C’s are the cornerstone skills learners of all ages need to be successful in life^[1].

What the hell, do these 4C’s have in common with data storytelling?! You would ask. Well, I got an idea for this post asking myself how can I support my daughter in developing 4C’s. Then I asked myself if I was using 4C’s and how beneficial it would be.

4C’s for Future, 4C’s for Today

If you’re wondering where the future starts, the simple answer is today. It doesn’t matter how old are you and what challenges you face in your daily life; these four skills definitely help you achieve more in less time.

Critical Thinking – foremostly

In the past century, people have struggled with collecting and obtaining data for their studies. We are now reaching the point where anyone with access to the web has access to a large amount of data and can do their own analysis. Data democratization, like everything else, has two sides of a coin. Unfortunately, the dark side of the common usage of data is to mislead people and create fake insights.

I love the TV series “Ancient Aliens” but the level at which they treat and interpret scientific facts is very innovative – gently speaking. For me, it is a piece of good entertainment, but we can imagine how that trivial approach to science and what is worse mass-broadcasting this approach, can implicate damage in some people understanding of ancient history without questioning that “revealed truth”.

Critical thinking has its roots in curiosity. Before you judge or draw a conclusion based on information, you should dig deeper to make sure that your conclusion is not skewed by shallow analysis or dubious data. Similarly, to “Ancient Aliens” you can create the most breath-taking story about your discoveries, but where is a meaningful value from this fairy tale?

Critical thinking is a habit of questioning others and yourself and the good news is that everyone can learn it. To develop this habit:

1.Ask the right questions and validate your own logic.

“There are no stupid questions!”. I hope that you’ve heard that many times. If you haven’t – change organization! Asking questions is the simplest and the best way to verify your or others reasoning. Use the below questions to warm up your critical thinking:
“Where data came from? Do I trust data sources?”
“What is data quality? Are there any missing entries?”
“Does the data sample is big enough? Does it present only a small part of the bigger picture?”
“Do all factors are included in the analysis?”
“What business questions does this analysis cover?”
“Do I not overcomplicate things?”

2. Deal with your (or others) biases. Remember we too often look for evidence that supports our prior beliefs.

All of us have some kind of the burden of biases. It strongly affects how our brain interprets information and draws conclusions. Studies show that we have a natural tendency for ensuring that we already believe. That tendency can be very harmful to the recommendations which we provide. To understand better how our biases play tricks on us read the book “Mindware. Tools for smart thinking” Richard E. Nisbett.

3. Take time to evaluate the topic from different sides and seek diversity.

Most of the time we are in rush and that hurt our reasoning and the quality of work we deliver. So, hold your horses and invest time in finding out other people opinions. One question about “What causes revenue decline” can have multiple answers depending on the point of view. These points of view can be very valuable and let you create a story with a wider spectrum.

Collaboration

The self-made man is a myth. No one is one hundred percent accountable for his/her success or failure. We are the result of many factors like genetics heritage, family relations, culture constraints, environmental influences, and life experiences. All together constantly have a huge impact on how we perceive ourselves and make sense of what surrounds us.

Have you read a biography of Bill Gates? Bill Gates maybe wouldn’t be so successful in his field without a few coincidences like exposure to the computers in the earlies ’70s as a teenager (what kid had that opportunity!) and mother who served in IBM board and helped in securing his first big deal with IBM. Of course, he used those opportunities very well, but would he have been the same Bill Gates without those chances?

We as humans operate in tribes. Without other members, we wouldn’t survive. If you want to be successful in your life collaborate with other people and leverage their skills and knowledge, especially because domain specialization is so deep that it is hard to be a Leonardo da Vinci in the 21st century.

Some people find it easier to collaborate with others, others find it harder. And again, self-discipline and practice can help you develop habits:

1. Invite subject matter experts to discuss and review your data, analysis outcomes, recommendations. They can bring a new fresh outlook to the table and create together with you more valuable insights.

2. Ask other analysts how they would approach the analysis of particular datasets. Maybe they did something similar in the past and you can save plenty of time.

3. Gather as much information as possible from stakeholders to focus on what matters for them instead of waist time on general questions and findings.

Communication

No other animal has developed communication skills like humans. We wouldn’t be able to conquest the whole planet without that one unique skill. Due to that skill, we can build strong relationships inside our tribe and with other tribes, convey abstract ideas and pass on incredible stories about faraway lands.

Good communication starts with a good strategy. How many times have you failed to convince others even though you have done an excellent analysis and prepared actionable recommendations? Your message didn’t get through because it wasn’t appealing to them. Consider the below points and tailor your message to be more impactful with your audience:

1. Ask yourself what are the main pain points for your audience?
2. Are they data literal and how advanced?
3. Are they subject matter experts or do they need more introduction?
4. What can they expect from you? Raw analysis with insights or clear guidelines and scenarios with recommendations?

Creativity

I’m not a fan of getting too creative in the visual representation of data. Data visualization is already an abstract form and making it more complicated by adding non-intuitive graphic shapes does not make it better.
However, using creativity to look at a problem from a new perspective and consider new possibilities is a direction every data storyteller should take. Most of the time we stay within our standard thoughts or typical suspects. This leads us in the long run to

However, using creativity to look at a problem from a new perspective and consider new possibilities is a direction every data storyteller should take. Most of the time we stay within our standard thoughts or typical suspects. This leads us in the long run to intellectual castration, which has several serious consequences, such as missed opportunities for the organization, unrecognized in time threats, and a retreat in development.
Creativity is again a skill that can be acquired and mastered. Experts recommend the following exercises to strengthen it:

1. Learn from others and surround with inspiration
The more you collaborate with others, read a lot, and learn new things, the more creative you are. You need to have enough information gathered to connect the dots and then new ideas start appearing.

2. Enjoy what you do
Doing things with passion produces unexpected outcomes. You need to be truly dedicated to your work to be able to find new solutions or patterns. If you do not like what you do, you are not involved and interested, do not expect from yourself outstanding performance. Maybe it is high time to change profession?

3. Find time to do nothing
Give your brain a break. My best ideas show up mostly when I do something different like taking shower, doing exercises, drawing, or reading. When you feel overwhelmed, simply switch your activity, and focus on something else. Your brain anyway still processing that idea in the background and doing the magic.

4. Walk
Stanford study has shown that walking improves creativity. So, when you have a problem, simply take a dog for a walk. Many CEOs already have introduced walking meetings within their organizations to increase people ability to think out of the box.

5. Hypothesize
One of my co-workers taught me a great technique. It is a simple question to ask, “What would have to happen to achieve XYZ”. That simple technique removes any barriers from our brains and shifts from concentrating on constraints, what we naturally do, to focusing on possibilities.

^[1]Partnership for 21st Century Skills. http://www.p21.org/

Mind the Gap! – How visualizing missing data influences people’s trust in data quality and affects decision-making processes.

The ethical approach to data visualization has many faces. One of them is dealing with missing data and the way of communicating them to the audience. In the real world, we face situations that our databases are incomplete.  This is a common case of many reasons. Some are technical errors that can occur during ETL processes, others appear when data is collected manually, especially as a result of surveys, as people often fail to answer all questions.

Statistical procedures often eliminate entire records when only one variable is missing. This leads to a dramatic shortage of statistical samples. However, many times, even though our data is leaky like Swiss cheese, we have to present them and what is even worse, draw conclusions, because having 100% of data is in many cases ineffective and unrealistic in terms of costs and time.

Statistical approach

To stay honest with our audience and to present the observations or phenomenon to them in the most transparent way, we have only two options: to present gaps in the data or imputed data in place of missing data. There are several imputation methods widely used in statistics and statistic data modelling. The most common ones are:

• Case deletion – omitting cases with incomplete data and not take them to analysis.
• Zero-filling – imputation of value 0 for all missing data.
• Linear interpolation – replacing missing data with estimated values.
• Marginal means – the mean value of variable is used instead of missing one.

More explanations of the specific methods you can find here.

Nevertheless, what method we are going to use, we need to communicate to the audience about which data comes from observations and which ones are imputed. This communication should be given in voice and visual form to strengthen the message leave no room for presumptions.

Dilemma – show gaps or imputed data?

Many strategic decisions are data-driven and missing data impacts the overall understanding, interpretation and reasoning of a phenomenon if not properly addressed.

Recently I found interesting research by Hayeong Song and Danielle Albers Szafir that shed some light on how we visually communicate missing data, which has a significant influence on data quality perception and on confidence in drawing conclusions. Research emphasizes that visualizations that highlight missing data but do not break visual continuity are perceived by responders as those with higher data quality. The general conclusion is that imputation methods are better graphical choices than simply removal of information as they do not decrease perceived data quality as much that have consequences in the decision-making process. However, the very important aspect is to highlight imputed data by different shapes or colours. Another interesting graphical decision is to present imputed data as error bars. It gives our audience additional information about the likely range of values.

source

The research results in Figure 5 (b) clearly show that linear interpolation has the greatest positive impact on the perceived quality and accuracy of the data, and the visualization with data absent (Figure 4 (a)) is the lowest.

source

The research was carried out for two commonly known visualization: a line chart and a bar chart. Both graphical choices gave similar outcomes.

source

source

Conclusion

I have several books which are like a shining star that guides me through the darkness. One of them is “The Little Prince” Antoine de Saint-Exupery and quote from that book: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed”. I believe we should have exactly the same approach to our analyses and their graphical representations as data analysts or data storytellers.