Vast amounts of data are captured daily in every organization. To use data to change the direction of your business strategy or make the right decisions, you need to understand the story that data is trying to tell you.

By utilizing four different techniques from storytelling, you can engage with your business leaders by giving a more human understanding to the problem that the data reveals.

Find the heroes and data-generators in your story

Since most data in organisations is collected by humans, the first step is to comprehend the people who generate that data. You can consider these data-generating people as the characters of your story.

Like in any other story, there are several characters such as heroes or devils. The hero in your data story can be anybody, an employee, customer. It is the person who can move the data in the desirable direction.

Imagine a CEO of a tech company realising that sales have decreased by 45 %. In order change the course of the company or raise sales, the business leader has to first understand what contributed to the decrease. To understand that, the CEO would ask the Sales and Operations team what might have happened. In this particular case the hero are the Sales & Marketing department. The decrease could be due to new processes that have been implemented or some changes how customers are approached.

Talk to the data generators

Data gives insight about what has happened in the past but it isn’t always clear why specific numbers were generated. In order to understand the why you could talk to the people who are generating these numbers and have more specific information about the business that you might not know. Speak with them directly, ask about their concerns and motivations and latest insights/changes to the business strategy.

By talking straight with the responsible manager, the CEO might get to know that his team has been struggling to understand the processes of the new software system. The team members were feeling frustrated and not fully integrated with the implementation of the new software system what might have caused their anger resulting in less dedication.

This is an example that not everything can be revealed through data alone but that there could be a human element to the story that might be hidden if not talking directly with the senior managers or team members.

Identify the challenges and unravel the truth

All heroes in a story face conflict that they have to solve. Find out what the root cause is and display the problem and the challenges to the CEO.

In this context, heroes can have a problem with the system and by not being integrated (our sales team that is in conflict with the implementation of the new software without having being trained on and asked for their opinion ). It could also have resulted due to conflict with another person such as a change in leadership. The heroes could have been in conflict with themselves  ( maybe they are having personal problems or facing burnout since they did not receive the training that they needed- here the implementation with the new software.

By identifying the challenges and conflict that the business is facing, a leader can think of better strategies to communicate better and help the hero to get unstuck and solve the internal or external challenges.

Understand the context

Data points do not exist by themselves. They exist on a continuum and understanding the context can be helpful to make sense of the data that is collected over time. Sharing context can help leaders to find ways to move their heroes forward and help them on their way to victory and solving the conflict they may have.

In the given scenario, if the CEO did share the most recent data, his team might feel demoralised after seeing the 45 percent decrease. If the CEO doesn’t just focus on the decrease but might look at the bigger picture and zoom out, he might discover that a similar event might have happened three years ago.

Sharing insights about how the sales team did recover in the past would motivate his team and put emphasis on their self-efficacy  (raising their belief in their own capacity to change the outcome) what might have a more positive impact rather than sharing the most recent data with the hard facts.

It is important to accommodate your knowledge and language to the people you are speaking to and knowing your audience in this context. Sharing the same information in a different way dependant on the people you are sharing the context with can lead to different outcomes.

So last but not least know your audience and how to accommodate your data story depending on the people you are talking to.

Last but not least

Data should not speak for itself but always in a context. In every statistic, there is a heroic story to be discovered and a truth to be revealed.

Learning how to tell stories within an organisation can become your superpower. Humanize your data to get a better understanding of the challenges your organisation can face.

Unravel your data heroes, get to know them and understand their conflicts and challenges.  Put the data challenges into context and help your business leaders to develop a more human connection and understanding to their data.