Effective Data Storytelling: How to Drive Change with Data, Narrative and Visuals

by Brent Dykes

Insight and change go hand-in-hand. Whenever we uncover an insight, it inescapably leads to changes if the data is acted upon.

if you want to be insightful and introduce change, you can’t just inform an audience; you must engage them.

An essential underpinning of both the kaizen and lean methodologies is data. Without data, companies using these approaches simply wouldn’t know what to improve or whether their incremental changes were successful. Data provides the clarity and specificity that’s often needed to drive positive change.

In fact, the Achilles’ heel of any analyst is a lack of context—something most business users have in spades. A sharp analyst can miss something in the data that is easily spotted by the seasoned eyes of a business user, who can draw on years of domain expertise.

If literacy is defined as the ability to read and write, data literacy can be defined as the ability to understand and communicate data. Today’s advanced data tools can offer unparalleled insights, but they require capable operators who can understand and interpret data.

As inventor Thomas A. Edison highlighted, “The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” If your amazing finding is confusing or not compelling to others, they won’t be motivated to act on it. The more people who are capable of driving action from their insights, the more positive change and value we’ll see from data. Without action, insights are just empty numbers.

Starting with the origin of the word, insight comes from Middle English for “inner sight” or “sight with the ‘eyes’ of the mind” (Online Etymology Dictionary 2019). Psychologist Gary Klein defined an insight as “an unexpected shift in the way we understand things” (Gregoire 2013). These “unexpected shifts” in our knowledge can occur as we analyze and examine data. For example, we may uncover a new relationship, pattern, trend, or anomaly in the data that reshapes how we view things. While most insights are interesting, not all of them are valuable.

Ideally, insights don’t just shift our thinking but inspire us to do things differently. They convert data into direction that takes us to new, unforeseen places.

Only through skilled communication will an insight have any chance of persuading someone to re-evaluate their opinions and beliefs.

If you are determined to have your insights understood and acted upon, you must shift your approach from simply informing to communicating.

“The two words ‘information’ and ‘communication’ are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.”

Numbers have an important story to tell. They rely on you to give them a clear and convincing voice.

“When it comes to inspiring people to embrace some strange new change in behavior, storytelling isn’t just better than the other tools. It’s the only thing that works”

While storytelling is commonly associated with entertainment, stories served a more foundational purpose for human society—learning. Storytelling became an effective way of passing along life-saving knowledge, reinforcing cultural standards, instilling moral values, and building social bonds—all essential to communal living.

As human beings, our brains are inescapably hardwired for stories. Unless you’re presenting your insights to robot overlords—let’s hope you’re not—your human audience will be innately receptive to storytelling. If you wish to convey your insights more effectively, it’s essential that you learn how to tap into the power of storytelling.

In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one student in ten tells a story. Those are the speaking statistics. The “remembering” statistics, on the other hand, are almost a mirror image: When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63% remember the stories. Only 5% remember any individual statistic. (Heath and Heath 2008) Regardless of how highly some of the students were rated by their peers, the articulate speakers’ ideas were no more memorable than those of the poorly rated ones. In the moment, the other students enjoyed their eloquent pitches, but their ideas evaporated and were easily forgotten without a story to anchor them. Even though statistics were an integral part of the students’ pitches, they are nowhere near as memorable as stories.

When your insight runs into resistance, it is because the new information you’re sharing challenges or disrupts the prevailing story in your audience’s minds. It’s never as simple as replacing an outdated or incorrect fact with a new, better one. When you dislodge a particular key fact, you can also dislodge or break the narrative that surrounds and encompasses it.

Data storytelling involves the skillful combination of three key elements: data, narrative, and visuals.

Explain. When narrative is coupled with data, it helps to explain to your audience what’s happening in the data and why a particular insight is important. Ample context and commentary are often needed to fully appreciate an analysis finding. The narrative element adds structure to the data and helps to guide the audience through the meaning of what’s being shared.

Enlighten. When visuals are applied to data, they can enlighten the audience to insights that they wouldn’t see without charts or graphs. Many interesting patterns and outliers in the data would remain hidden in the rows and columns of data tables without the help of data visualizations. They connect with our visual nature as human beings and impart knowledge that couldn’t be obtained as easily using other approaches that involve just words or numbers.

Engage. Finally, when narrative and visuals are merged together, they can engage or even entertain an audience. From an early age, much of our learning and entertainment is based on a combination of narrative and visuals in the form of illustrated story books and animated television shows. Even as adults, we collectively spend billions of dollars each year at the movies to continually immerse ourselves in different lives, worlds, and adventures. While the cutting-edge specia...

Whether you’re working with data, narrative, or visuals, each element can be powerful individually. You can achieve some level of success with a thought-provoking statistic, a compelling narrative, or stunning data visualization. However, it’s the skilled blend of data, narrative, and visuals in a data story that can harness the unique contributions of all three elements. When you combine the right visuals and narrative with the right data, you have a data story that can influence and drive change

When you combine the right data with the right narrative and visuals, you have a data story that can drive change.