How enterprises can build a successful data story

Storytelling is an ancient human skill but using data to tell stories is relatively new. Data storytelling is about creating a shared vision and call to action through influential communication.

Gartner research suggests that by 2023, data literacy will become an explicit and necessary driver of business value, demonstrated by its formal inclusion in more than 80% of data and analytics strategies and change management programs. Data and analytics leaders need to know how data storytelling works to ensure that their organization is using this form of insight delivery to engage business decision makers with data to its best effect. 

While data and analytics provide a major stimulus to take transformational action steps and enable business operations to be more quantifiably data-driven, a quantitative, analytical and evidence-based approach is inhibited by the fact that humans are predominantly emotional decision makers.  

Chief data and analytics officers (CDAOs) must create positive and impactful engagement that addresses stakeholders’ “hearts and minds”. Effective storytelling is an important communications tool for CDAOs to become stronger leaders, helping to engage employees and build commitment to acting on new ideas. It can help CDAOs capture attention, facilitate understanding, enable listeners to remember the message longer, and contextualize the story for the audience.  

There are three key areas that CDAOs need to focus on for effective data storytelling 

Use data as the stimulus for the story, the evaluation and the opportunity to learn 

“Supporting making better decisions” and “providing the right information at the right time to the right people” are related goals. Making better decisions requires the right information — there is a cause-and-effect relationship. To achieve this, CDAOs must overlay data and analytics findings against the classic three-act narrative structure and story arc.

The data (evidence) and the analysis performed upon it provides the basis for the outline, or the storyboard of the narrative. The way information is presented can have a material impact on how it is interpreted, understood and acted upon.  

Develop the data-driven narrative by finding your plot points 

To develop the data-driven narrative, the CDAO needs to consider the ‘plot points’ of the story, the specific elements of the story and how they fit into the narrative arc.  

Define the scenario: Identify your key stakeholders — the characters for your story. Who are your “heroes/protagonists” and “villains/antagonists?” This may require clustering stakeholders by typical common groupings or personas. 

Map the business moments and decisions

What are the business events or activities where the benefits will accrue? What are the decision points that occur? What problems, challenges or inhibitors need to be addressed and overcome if the desired purpose is to be achieved?  

Identify the desired outcomes

Expressed in ‘smart’ terms — success and business benefits should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound  

Recognize any undesirable consequences

Outcomes of change are almost never straightforward or linear. There may be other knock-on effects that need to be considered. What benefits one set of stakeholders may have detrimental impacts on another group. Confronting potential negative consequences is necessary. 

Actions to take

Benefits accrue (and negative consequences are mitigated) as a result of making positive and deliberate change.  

Address any complicating factors that could impede progress 

Even if the data is compelling, having the facts is not sufficient — it is almost the least important thing. In order to engage the audience with the data-driven story, underlying confounding factors also need to be addressed.  

There are three broad categories of confounding factors that CDAOs should give serious consideration:

Emotional and psychological influences

Neuroscience and cognitive psychology show us that most people are not equipped to engage with facts. Most humans are wired with mechanisms that inhibit the ability to interpret data. Overcoming these responses requires CDAOs to prepare and communicate evidence in a different way

Underlying biases

Cognitive biases are modes of thinking that distort the rational perspective and tend to steer people away from fact-based and systemic judgments. These biases are the result of the brain’s long-term conditioning and subconscious learning modes.

Ethical, regulatory and legal considerations and constraints

Awareness of the importance of digital ethics should help move discussions to the start of any initiative and prevent issues, instead of fixing problems afterward. Problems occur when digital ethics become an afterthought. In those cases, ethics are seen as a roadblock, in a phase where it is difficult to make changes. 

To conclude, prepare programs to develop and instill the mix of data visualization design, narration and presentation skills needed to support effective data storytelling. Identify a team of business analysts and citizen data scientists to act as a virtual team of data storytellers.

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