The reason that we should aim to be better storytellers is
because by doing so, we're going to be able to communicate the
great work that we've done more effectively.
If we don't invest in this skill for ourselves, our work isn't
going to get the attention that it deserves.
When I think of storytelling in a business context, there's a
sense of time and place and characters, and tension exists
and builds over the course of a narrative that is cohesive.
There is typically a peak in tension, right, This climactic
turning point, and then a falling action that leads us to
a resolution. So the big idea is it's a single
sentence. That is the main thing you need
to communicate. It should articulate your point
of view, convey what's at stake, and it should be one single
complete sentence. AI can be a really helpful
brainstorming partner. It comes at things with a
different lens and a different, I don't know, point of view.
And it does that with such speed and gets you out of your own
head, your slide as a a helpful assistant.
It's there for if you need to be able to show something visually
so you can turn to it and do that help keep you on track when
it comes to the, you know, topic or moving from 1:00 to the next.
But not all the information needs to be there.
Hello everyone, welcome back to another new episode of the
Technician Now. So today I'm very excited to
have this guest with me today, Cole News, Bomer Nufflick.
I actually found out her books many, many years ago.
One of my friend actually referred that book to me and I
must say it is an insightful book to me.
Back then I was like a terrible data person, right?
Especially the visualization, but when I found out the book,
right, and I looked at some of the suggestions inside,
actually, it was mind blowing back then for me.
So I think I'm really excited to have this conversation.
Cole, welcome to the show. I love hearing that.
Henry, thanks for having me here.
I'm excited to chat. Yeah.
So Cole, I always love to invite my guest first to maybe share a
little bit about yourself. You can mention maybe any
turning points that you think we can learn from you.
Yeah, Maybe I'll start with the turning point, which if I think
back over the course of my career, which is taking a number
of twists and turns over time, as many people's has for me, I
think one that comes to mind was the subprime crash.
Basically that happened with the banks here in the States.
Because up until that point, I had been working in credit risk
management and building statistical models to help the
banks understand how much money to reserve and kind of really in
the line of work where things went awry.
And for me, there was a point when I, I'd gone to work for a
private equity company after the bank that had been investing in
subprime mortgage banks. And it just was not a fantastic,
not a motivating environment in which to be.
And so I said, what skills do I have?
What do I want to do? Where do I want to take the
analysis skills, the statistics, the graphing, the things that I
was starting to do, and where else might I apply that that
doesn't have to do with loans and credit cards.
And I made an inventory of the skills that I had and the things
that I wanted to be using and what I wanted to learn.
And as part of that process, I came up with an advertisement
that was for a role called People Analyst.
And I had never heard of this before, never thought about
applying math to human resources, which was basically
at the job. And I got that job.
It was at Google. It was one of those who was very
lucky in terms of I've submitted my resume online through the
portal and somehow it caught someone's attention and I moved
to California and started working at Google as one of the
first members of this new people analytics team that had been
brought together at that point. That was back in 2007 and really
a lot happened from there. My experience at Google, I, I
mean, I think I need to credit it with everything that's
happened since then because that's really where the Nuggets
of for the foundation for storytelling with data and
everything that's happened since really took footing and grew
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Was at Google as well back then, but I didn't know that the
course you have, I think your story probably is one of like
the typical Googlers who actually created a course back
then at Google. It turned viral and now it
becomes your, you know, kind of like profession, right, a full
time job. So I think that's really great
to hear. So you have written this book
Storytelling with Data. That's the first book of
subsequently storytelling with you.
So I think let's just go to the books, right?
So you mentioned about storytelling.
I think people have been mentioning this for many, many
times these days, right? Especially in the business setup
or professional setting. So maybe in the 1st place, I
would like to ask you what is the definition of storytelling
in your view, especially in the business context?
Yeah, and it's a great question because storytelling has
definitely become one of these buzzwords that gets thrown
around a lot, which I think on the one hand is fantastic
because it means people are thinking about it and paying
attention to it. On the other hand, it can be not
so great because a lot of times people are saying storytelling
when they don't really mean story.
And so that can undermine, I think, some of the power of it.
When I think of storytelling in a business context, I'm really
thinking of traditional story where there is a plot, there's,
you know, a sense of time and place and characters and tension
exists and builds over the course of a narrative that is
cohesive. There is typically a peak in
tension, right, This climactic turning point, and then a
falling action that leads us to a resolution.
And so you can map any great story basically against this
narrative arc. And I think it works beautifully
as a schematic for planning business communications as well.
Because anytime we're in a situation where we need someone
to understand something new or see things in a different light,
we need to motivate them to make a decision or have a
conversation or choose from a menu of options.
Those are the scenarios in which I think storytelling, they're
ripe for that sort of structure. Because we can think of it as
the journey that we take our audience along, where the
tension becomes the thing that matters to them that either
isn't going well or could be going better.
And then the resolution is the action that our audience can
take to resolve that tension that we've brought to light.
And anytime we have something important to communicate, we can
find this story and use that to frame things in a way that I
think can help us get attention at the work that we're doing and
really engage and drive understanding and hopefully
action in the people to whom we're communicating.
Yeah, thanks for sharing about that definition, right.
To me it seems a lot, you know, like having to think about, you
know, all these plot, you know, narrative climax, heroes and all
that. Well, you can.
Simplify, right? It doesn't always have to be the
full narrative arc. I think for anyone for whom that
sounds intimidating or it sounds like too big of a departure from
how things are typically done, you can start simple where you
can think of just plot twist ending, right?
Plot is what's the context, what is the basics of what my
audience needs to know? Then the twist is that that
interesting or important new insight and then the ending is
the action that you need them to take.
And you can plot almost any reasonable business scenario
where there's communication that needs to take place onto that
simple story mountain, I guess. Yeah, I think I like that
simplified approach, right? Because I'm sure many people
would have thought, OK, I'm not a storyteller.
I'm not like an awfulist or someone who create movie or
something like that. Because they typically associate
storytelling with those kind of things.
And that's why probably for some people, they kind of like
struggle and they hear storytelling being thrown
around, you know, like maybe for presentation or whatever that is
that you want to do in business settings.
Maybe give us a main reason why should we become a better
storyteller? I think the reason and
particularly the reason that I'll say people in technical
careers, because typically we haven't spent much time thinking
about this or doing this. We've doubled down on, you know,
the statistics or the programming or all of the things
that make us good at being an analyst or doing that.
The tech part of the job, the reason that we should aim to be
better storytellers is because by doing so, we are going to be
able to communicate the great work that we've done more
effectively. And the converse of that is if
we don't invest in this skill for ourselves, our work isn't
going to get the attention that it deserves.
And so as the storyteller, you become the voice for what you've
done, right, the analysis or the project.
And then you can lend that voice to get other people excited and
engaged. And that is an incredibly
powerful thing to do. And like, a lot of people throw
their hands up in the air and just say, oh, I'm not naturally
a good storyteller, so I'm not going to even try, which is so
sad because nobody or very few people are naturally actually
adept storytellers. I certainly was not.
And so I feel like if I've been able to learn this and been able
to teach my team and now, you know, write books and teach
others, really anyone can stand to gain from thinking about
themselves as a storyteller and thinking about themselves.
And that's too much. Just what journey do you want to
take your audience on? What do you want to move them to
do? Because if we can frame things
in that way of really putting audience first and foremost
front and center, which I think we'll talk about more than, it
enables us to communicate in such a more effective manner
than the way that we typically do, which is we communicate for
ourselves or for our data or for our project, sort of audience be
damned, which isn't a super effective way to approach
things. Yeah, I'm guilty of that.
And I'm sure many people in tech typically like that always fact
driven, you know, straight to the point.
There's no kind of like a story inside, right.
But I think one thing that I also learned from a few people
as well, like actually naturally we are a good storyteller if we
are telling stories about a certain situations that just
happened to us or past experience that we find really
exciting. But somehow putting it into
business context is kind of like weird and difficult, right?
And especially for the listeners as well, maybe, I don't know, in
tech, they kind of like feel a little bit maybe weird to put
story into what you're presenting or what you're trying
to narrate. Why do you think storytelling
works so well in the business context, even though you are
actually not coming up with a story, like a story book or
something like that, right. But why do you think
storytelling really works so well?
Yeah. And I think part of it is that,
you know, this doesn't mean so to tell a story in a business
setting. What I don't mean when I'm
talking about it is, you know, we're not going to go in and
craft some dramatic fairy tale. We take people through.
I think a way to think about it is just the connectedness in
your communication. And that's one of the reasons
that you mean. Your point is great.
Humans have been telling stories for forever.
I mean, that's how we pass information on to future
generations. And it's this the way in which
we can bring people to a different place through the
story and the way that events relate to each other, where you
you mentioned telling people about, you know, maybe something
interesting that happened over the weekend or where you can get
animated and you're telling your friend like this happened and
then this happened and then that lead to that and this other
crazy thing happened. And that's that part is key is
the connectedness where so often business presentations are a
collection of what seems like like totally disparate things,
right where we all right now we're going to move on to the
next slide and there's no connectivity.
And so I think if we think of our business presentations in
the context of story, one thing is just and I mentioned this
before, but what journey do we want to take our audience on?
How do we want to move them from slide or point A to B to C?
And it's really thinking about that narration of how do the
things relate? How can I put them in context so
that the things that I know will make sense to someone else?
And really thinking about leading someone else through the
story of your project or the story of the analysis that you
undertook, the research that you want to share.
There's just these slight reframings that I think can take
storytelling from being elusive or feeling too artsy or squishy
or markety to actually helping people see that we can be really
strategic in how we communicate with others.
And this is one thing that we have in our arsenal of potential
approaches to be able to take with an audience and that it
actually can have really great benefits a lot of the time.
But it takes practice and with time becomes easier and more
straightforward. And particularly if you start in
low risk places and start small and gain momentum from small
successes and just get more comfortable and credible as
you're doing things. Yeah, thanks for bringing up
that point. Right.
So I think your second book Storytelling with you actually
kind of like cover how someone can become a better storyteller
because for some people who are still thinking it's too hard for
them, I'm just not good at it. So I think you brought up a
point in the beginning that maybe you were not good in
storytelling as well. But over the time after you
practice, after you use it in some, you know, maybe use cases,
you become better it. So in your book, you cover this
treating plan, create and deliver, right?
I'm sure many people can learn from that kind of like
simplified framework. So tell us a little bit more
this kind of like framework for us to get started with
storytelling. Yeah, the, so breaking it into
the three sections, right, plan, create, deliver.
In the plan section, it's really about the low tech things you
can do upfront to really understand what it is you are
going to communicate, which sounds really straightforward,
sounds like something we don't need to spend time on.
But so often we just jump straight into making graphs or
making slides without really having a plan in place.
And that plan can help reduce the amount of time and
iterations that you have to spend later on in the process.
And so in the plan section, there's a chapter on audience,
another on message, one on crafting the pieces, which is
basically about storyboarding and really thinking about the
different aspects that you need to communicate.
And then there's a chapter on story, specifically how to use
the structure of story when it comes to structuring your
business presentations. And the books really set up so
that you could have a project in mind and basically work your way
through the chapters. There is a case study that I
introduced early on that we revisit at the end of each
chapter so you can see how the lessons and tactics and
strategies play out in a real world scenario.
But that first section is really all about getting clear on who
your audience is, getting to know them, really communicating
with them in mind, and then planning what you're going to
communicate in a low tech fashion.
This also can be a fantastic place to get feedback from
others, particularly if you want directional feedback.
If there's an important stakeholder or a manager who
could totally change your course of direction, it can be awesome
to show them something that is low tech, right?
It might be sticky notes that have been arranged on a piece of
paper or something that you can just talk your stakeholder
through so that they can either say, yes, that sounds great,
you're on track, go execute, or no, let's actually go in this
other direction. And now you've not spent time
finalizing a presentation or report in order to get there.
So can really reduce iterations when it comes to that piece as
well. And then once you have that plan
in place, next section is create.
And in this section of the book, there are chapters devoted to
create one just to bringing the low tech planning into your
tools and really setting up the structure for a presentation
down to really technical things or nitty gritty things like, you
know, how do you choose fonts and set a color palette in your
tools? And we have a number of videos
and other things to go along with the book that'll help
people with that process. And then there's a chapter
devoted each to developing content with words, content with
graphs and content with pictures and images, with the idea being
that your eventual communication, which is often a
presentation deck, will have some combination of those
things. There are ton of examples baked
in and the chapter on graphs basically takes the most salient
points I would say from storytelling with data and
condenses them into one powerful chapter.
So for people who ask me which book to start with, I always say
start with the yellow one, Storytelling with You, and then
see if you want more on the graph piece and then if so, go
back to the white 1. Then the final section of the
book is Deliver, and this is all about how you can prepare
yourself to communicate powerfully.
From tips on rehearsing your actual content, I share some
things that I do when it comes to practicing aloud and
practicing with slides versus without slides.
And this is I, I present probably the, the whole menu of
things you would potentially want to do for a really
important situation. You know, when it's a regular
meeting or something like that, you would scale back or focus on
maybe one or a couple of these things versus all of them.
There's a chapter on building your confidence and things to do
to become more aware of how you use your voice and how you use
your body and how you can modify those things in really
interesting ways and the impact that that can have on an
audience and how you're delivering a message.
The penultimate chapter of the book is all on crafting your own
introduction, which I played around with where to put that
chapter and was sort of happy to find a place for it at the end
of the book or near the end of the book, even though that feels
a little counterintuitive. But it becomes such an
interesting case study where anybody can take it and use it
to apply many of the lessons that are covered through the
rest of the book to a subject that they know very well
themselves. And I found it interesting that
I've read many books on topics in this space and never have I
encountered any material on how to introduce yourself
powerfully. And so I lead readers through a
process of thinking A, you know, over their history of stories
and experiences and work projects, and really being
cognizant about the perceptions that you want to create in the
people to whom you're introducing yourself, whether
it's in an interview or you're networking or at the onset of a
presentation. And then really using those
things together to craft the story of yourself, which is a
really cool thing to do. It's a cool exercise to do
because then you find that you can flex it in all these
different ways of, you know, your sentence introduction
versus you've got 5 minutes to take people through more of a
story, which can be really useful.
And then the final chapter is that actual delivery and tips on
things to do immediately before, during, and after your
presentation. And again, with the idea that
any of these things could be applied to a big presentation
you're giving a keynote from on a stage or just an important
business meeting. And you can scale things up or
down depending on how important The thing is.
But probably the more important it is, the more of all of this
stuff you should be doing. And really, the shift between
storytelling with data and storytelling with you is
Storytelling with data focuses almost entirely on the data,
which makes sense. It's all about perfecting the
graph. And it took over, I'd say, what
the past 10-15 years of spending a lot of time teaching people
about how to make graphs. It just has become increasingly
clear that the data, the graph, it's only part of the picture.
The person who's doing the communicating, whether it's
verbally and they're talking through their work or by virtue
of the design or what they put around it in the thing that gets
sent off. But the person is such an an
important part of that puzzle, and so the more we can think
about ourselves as a communication tool, the more
effective we're going to be when it comes to communicating.
Well, thank you for such a complete walk through, right?
So I think as you can listen the audience here, right?
So I think the book is kind of like a full package, right?
So if you think about I can't do storytelling code here has kind
of like outlined from the beginning when you plan the talk
that you wanna do, right? How do you create stuff
including some beautiful, you know, visualization that she
does really well? And then the last one is how to
deliver, right, including how you speak, the confidence and
including the delivery. So maybe we will not be able to
cover all of them, but let's start with the first one
planning. So I don't know about anybody
else, right? I think typically when I start
to plan for my talk, I always straight go into the slides, you
know, maybe Google Slides or whatever slide tool do you use,
right? And just, you know, put on stuff
you mentioned in the in the book and also just now right about
using low tech and also things about, you know, like not being
bogged down by the tools. So maybe tell us why it's very
important that we don't plan just like what I do typically?
I am a big fan of pen and paper and post it notes.
When it comes to low tech planning, there's something
different that happens. It engages a different part of
our brain when you have to actually put pen to paper and
write things down. And then the other cool thing
about is when you take the time to do that, now you've got an
idea that is now a physical thing in the world that you can
look at and assess and move around or group with something
else. And so the process of
storyboarding feels awkward at first if it's not something that
you've been doing. But overtime and with practice
can become both really efficient, but also a really
powerful way to get a jumble of thoughts and ideas out of your
head and bring order to them. Very quickly.
And I think just by virtue of doing that, of being able to see
all of the different things that you could bring into a
presentation or project review that you're doing and then
deciding which ones you're going to focus on is a really useful
reframing. Because I think one of the
things that happens often when we go straight from or an idea
or project to our tools is with that comes this idea that
whatever we create needs to answer any possible question
that might come up. And that's not a great approach.
Whereas if we are storyboarding, right, I'm writing down ideas on
Post it notes with the idea that maybe each of these becomes a
slide in my eventual slide deck. I can rearrange things, group
things together, I can put some structure around them and I can
assess each one to say, does this help me get my main message
across? Is this critical for my
audience? And I can choose to say no.
Maybe it was important for me to look at, it was important for
the analysis, but it if it doesn't serve the needs of my
communication, it means I don't have to spend time developing
content on it. And this is probably the biggest
time saver is because storyboarding upfront can help
eliminate those like 80 a hundred or more slide decks and
get you down to something that is both shorter.
So you have less content you have to develop and you have
more time to make that shorter content really effective.
Is part of the idea when it comes to creating effective
slides is when you're there communicating, you don't want
them to compete with you, then you should think of your slide
as a helpful assistant, right? It's there for if you need to be
able to show something visually so you can turn to it and do
that, or to maybe help keep you on track when it comes to the,
you know, topic or moving from 1:00 to the next.
But not all the information needs to be there if that's why
you were there, to answer questions and address the needs
that come up from your audience along the way.
But a little bit of time spent planning up front can make the
rest of the process a whole lot more efficient and help you
ensure that you create a communication that's going to
work for the needs that you set out to be.
Yeah, I think you brought up a great point, right, Because
typically when we prepare using the tools, the slides in the 1st
place, right, we tend to just put in a lot of data, a lot of
facts, you know, taken from many, many different systems and
we just put it together. There's no storyline, first of
all, right? And you kind of like feel wasted
if let's say what you have collected, you didn't use.
Hard to let go of it, right? You build attachment.
The other thing too is it's really you get a different level
of feedback when you are asking for feedback or getting feedback
on something that looks polished.
And as soon as you go to your tools, things are going to look
a little more polished. And that begs for feedback on
the design. So then you get feedback on
things like the color of your graph and you completely miss
the feedback of is this the right data to show in the 1st
place and the directional kind of feedback.
And so that's another thing to keep in mind.
It's when you're looking for more directional big picture
feedback, there's value in keeping things low fidelity.
Have it be a sketch or on paper and you can say you're on it's
or your stakeholders. This is rough.
It's OK. I just want to directionally
Orient and us because then you're not going to get feedback
on, you know, the intricacies of the design, which you don't need
at that point. You may need that at a later
point, but that can be an important consideration as well
as what do you actually show people to get the kind of
feedback that you want at the point when it's useful.
Yeah, that's also maybe one typical mistake that people did
as well, right? You know, putting the themes,
you know, making look pretty, but actually they don't focus on
the manges, which is the message itself, which one thing that I
want to ask the next, right. So in your book you have this
technique or maybe concept, right?
The three minute story and also the big idea.
So this is how like what kind of content that you want to convey
in your talk or presentation, right?
So tell us how we can use this technique to actually help us.
Yeah, I'll talk about the big idea, which is probably one of
the most useful things that we find when we teach.
It's it's funny because you know, we, we teach workshops
where we'll go into an organization or spend half a day
or a day with a company really teaching about communicating
effectively with data and beyond.
And I think we get brought in a lot of the time for the data
expertise and for that expertise of visualizing and, and yet at
the end of the day or at the end of the session, when we're
asking people what is one thing you're going to do differently,
often times it's a lot of the things that don't have anything
to do with data specifically. It's these general communication
things. It's I'm going to storyboard or
I'm going to use the big idea. So the big idea is it's a single
sentence that is the main thing you need to communicate.
So it should articulate your point of view.
It should convey what's at stake and it should be 1 single
complete sentence. And so we in the books and in
our workshops, we introduce something called the Big Idea
Worksheet, and it basically breaks things down into these
components because it's very difficult to go from everything
you know about a project to a single sentence.
That level of concision is very hard.
But by breaking it up into pieces where the pieces are,
who's your audience? Can you narrow that down to a
single person or a single group of people?
What do they care about? And thinking both from the
positive point of view of what are the benefits or what do they
stand to gain if they act in the way you want them to?
And the flip side of that, what are the risks or the potential
downsides if they don't act accordingly and really takes you
through these pieces. So at the end you have, it's
almost like a puzzle where you've got the components and
you just need to cram it all into a sentence.
And the sentence are the sentence restriction is
arbitrary, but it is purposefully short.
And that is both to enforce concision.
Other details will come in, but that'll be in your supporting
content. But it's also because of the
word smithing and the thought, the critical thinking that you
have to do in order to get it there.
It means you get to know your stuff really well and there's
extreme benefit once you've worked through this and you have
a big idea to then talk through it with someone else.
And the process of them asking you clarifying questions and you
answering them, It just helps you verbalize outwardly so many
important aspects of what you need to communicate that then,
you know, if we think full circle around to the delivery
aspect, even at that point, you are preparing yourself to be
able to talk more eloquently about your work and about why
it's important. And so the these little
practices up front do a lot, I mean they help with the
planning, but they do a lot more than that as well.
Yeah, I think for me, the big idea is definitely one thing
that we all can get good at, especially when you are giving a
presentation or talk, right, because we feel that there are
so many things that we have to convey, right?
But to put it into a single sentence, wow, that's maybe
difficult, at least for me. And I think the worksheet is one
place where we can try to use right and you know, maybe craft
the sentence really, really well.
And you have this three minute story as well, which if we find
one sentence is really difficult, start with like the
three minute story, right? So that you kind of like distill
what are the important things. And from there actually you kind
of like bring the big idea. So I think this thing is really
powerful if we can think about it, because sometimes we are
lost in our own narrative. You know, like we just put so
many slides, but we are lost and we kind of like don't convey the
main message that we want the audience to take away, which is
something pretty bad. So the other thing is, I think
I've learned so many other books, right, about this
structure of the story, right? So you mentioned what big idea
is typically advocated, right? So things like the pyramid
principle or bluff, you know, and then also TLDR, right?
So why this structure is so much important?
And do you actually always advocate people to give the main
message straight away? You know, like in the very
beginning? Not always.
So I think when we're when we're talking about different
structures, 1 is to lead with the big idea or the main
message. And I think that is a good idea
when you already have credibility with your audience
or if you aren't sure you're going to have time to get
through everything, you want to make sure you at least start off
with that so you can circle back around to it.
If you have an audience who you know, cares more about the So
what, then how you got there, then starting with the big idea
can be good. I think where it can backfire
and where you might want to take an alternate approach, which can
either be, you know, you share context first and lead up to
your big idea, or it could even be somewhere in the middle
depending on how you want to structure things.
But where it could backfire is when you have some fraction of
your audience or maybe the entire audience who is going to
disagree with you. And so if you start off with
that, you can end up at this point straight away where
there's tension and not the good kind of story tension, but the
bad kind of meeting tension where people are agitated and
not on the same page. And so I think if you can
anticipate that, then sometimes leading people along the path
that you took to get there, or finding a place where if you
know they're coming in with certain biases or certain
beliefs, finding a place where your belief and theirs are
congruent with each other before you bifurcate off that path into
something that's going to counter it.
Or if you can build your credibility and then bring
people around to it. I think also if it's a highly
charged emotional situation, then you want to be thoughtful
about how you approach that. And again, just back on
storyboarding, this can be excellent things to think about
when you are in that low tech phase.
Because now you can say, all right, but let's take this one
audience member. And I know you know he's going
to be loud and he's going to come in with this particular
frame of mind and he's going to challenge us on this.
If we can anticipate that doesn't mean we move it around
or the way that we bring up these other things 1st, or does
it mean things outside of that completely?
Does it mean that we sit with him ahead of time or separate
from the rest of the group and try to get him on the page or
try to get, you know, somebody who could influence him on
board? So it brings up a lot of these
other ideas, and this is really when we're thinking about our
audience up front and how we can make things work for them and
through that, make them work for us.
But where you can be strategic about how you're setting things
up so that it's not just about the deck that you're building.
It's about how do we make this a successful situation.
And I think for me, that's the bigger thing that I'm trying to
get people to think about through everything is to just
not allow yourself to fall in the habit of doing it the way
we've done it, because we've always done it that way.
But especially for critical situations, thinking about what
are the pieces of the puzzle look like this time?
Who are the players? Are they likely to agree or
where are they going to disagree?
How do I put this all together in a way that's going to
hopefully set me up for success, but also make things work for
the people who I'm trying to change or trying to get to do
something? Because the more we can do that,
the more we can find these middle grounds where we can make
it work for everyone. Yeah.
So I think the insight here is that there's no like one
structure that will work all the time, right?
So please feel free to 1st understand the audience, which I
think you also covered really well in the 1st chapter of the
book, right? So knowing the audience is
really, really important. And then maybe the narrative,
how you want to bring it, I think depends on that as well.
So let's go to the next section, which is about creating, right?
So I think we, we have come up with all the plan, the main idea
and maybe the storyboard as well creating presentation slides.
I think many people might like it or might dread for it, right,
Depending on their feel about creativity.
How much creativity at play here do you think we should do?
And does our slide need to look pretty?
Great question. So when it comes to creativity
it, it depends. And I think for sure I'm a
proponent of making use of what exists.
So if your company or your team has templates or other things
that you can use, do that because it means there are many
fewer decisions that you have to make when it comes to things
like font and color and those sorts of things.
Does it need to look pretty? So I would say pretty for the
sake of pretty, no. But do we need to spend time
with the visual design of what we're communicating?
Yes, absolutely. There's actually a really
interesting thing that happens when an audience or a consumer
looks at something and they can tell that time and attention was
spent on the design details. That actually makes this sort of
implicit contract where the user, the consumer has more
patience and more attention. Maybe if we can translate it to
that for the product. And so just translating that, I
mean and think about it, when you when you have the experience
of even just opening a good product right, where the boxing
or the packaging is thoughtful, you have a different set of
expectations, one for what's coming with it.
You have a different feel towards the product.
We can make excellent use of that when it comes to the visual
design of our graphs and slides as well.
So I would frame it as why would you not want to do that?
And it doesn't mean, you know, making things pretty.
It means paying attention to detail.
It means have there be alignment, so clean horizontal
and vertical alignment between different elements.
If you think of like text boxes versus a graph versus other
elements you might have on the page, you know, does it look
nice? Is there structure to it?
Is there visual hierarchy where more important things are bigger
or are contrasted in some way so my audience knows to look there?
Is it easy to interact with? Because when we can take the
time to do that, then we're now more likely both to get our
audience to want to engage with it, but then to get them to read
and remember it. And one of the most powerful
things that we can do there is really think about how we're
using words and graphs together. So studies have shown when we
title the slide or the graph with the main take away or a key
take away that we want our audience to know that they are
more likely to remember. That key take away so we want to
think about using words, take away titles so that our audience
knows what to look for when they see the graph.
Using color sparingly is something I've been a an
advocate of for a very long time.
So the audience, you know, they read and know what to look for,
and then they can see in the visual through sparing use of
color or other means of contrast, what they're meant to
see. And these things that you could
call it making it pretty, But I think it's more about making the
visual communication effective. And yes, we should be taking
time to do that because that's where what we need to get across
to our audience is either going to succeed or fail.
So it's worth every minute we spend on it.
Yeah, I think the visual design aspect, I fully agree.
Or even though I may not be always happy doing that, but I
think it's really important because it gives people
attention, you know, and then especially if it's beautifully
kind of like layout, right? Not necessarily the pretty
aspect. I think it kind of like captures
the audience better. And especially sometimes the
main message gets across faster, as well as what you maybe
outline in the other book, right?
Storytelling with data, because sometimes we just put everything
together, looks pretty. But actually the main thing is
actually missing from there, right?
And I think other things like typo color fonts, you mentioned
about it alignment, right? Sometimes people miss this, but
actually it's very important as well.
Let's go through this if. You don't feel particularly
creative, or you don't feel like you're good at this, Look for
examples to emulate. So if you see a well designed
slide from someone else, think about what works well in it and
how you can bring that into your own work.
Yeah, something that you can steal from Cole's book as well.
There are so many examples there.
So let's go to this storytelling with data aspect, right?
So you mentioned sometimes we need to present data, factual
data, numbers, whatever that is, right?
And sometimes in tech, we also need to kind of like maybe
present an incident or some charts where there are a lot of
data that we need to put the message across.
So when I saw your book, actually I was kind of like
laughing, actually, why all my charts by visualization look so
bad compared to what you show in the book, right?
And it's so simplified and all that.
So maybe I think this is very important to convey to the
audience here. How can we present data much
better in a visually appealing manner?
I think a lot of it, again, as with the entire presentation,
when we get down to a specific graph, it's being really clear
on what do you need your audience to know?
What are you trying to get across?
Because when you can put that into words, then that will help
you figure out what kind of graph is going to work.
And I'm a big fan of iterating through different types of
graphs. Any data can be graphed a lot of
different ways. And so seeing what your data
looks like as a bar chart or line graph or a dot plot or
slope graph, cycling through these different types can help
you get to know your data better and help you see what view of
your data might work for getting your message across to someone
else. So type of graph would be one
thing, I think identifying and eliminating clutter.
So anything that's visually present that doesn't need to be
or isn't adding informative value.
So when you strip away unnecessary grid lines and
borders, it just leaves you with a cleaner starting point so that
then you can get away with adding things to it.
When we think about adding words in the form of annotations or
creating contrast with color or through other means, you can do
that without it becoming visually overwhelming.
And that is the next thing is to be clear where you want your
audience to focus and do things to the visual design that help
achieve that. So sparing use of color is a
great way to do that. We think of making everything
Gray and then using one or two really strong colors.
And this is where you can type branding in, if that makes
sense. And then really thinking about
story, what's the take away? How do I put that into words?
How do I take this one view of the data now and connect it to
the things around it? So it's really bringing the
narrative piece into the data. Yeah, so I think that's really,
really important, right? Removing clutter.
So I think in the past I used to create chart.
You know, maybe there's so many clutters that I don't even see,
but I only think that it's important, you know, to present
all the data. And I think the cognitive load,
right? You mentioned in your book, the
cognitive load when people saw that kind of like visualization
is actually a lot, right? And sometimes they are lost.
Like what should I pay attention to because there are so many
things in the chart, in the graph itself.
And I think the other aspect that I learned from your book,
right, maybe discourage people from using pie chart, but I
still see so many pie charts out there.
So what is your take away about pie charts?
I think pie charts are. They are more frequently used
than they should be. Typically people humans like
circles for some reason, but we actually our eyes don't do a
great job of attributing value to two-dimensional space, which
means pie charts are hard for us to read.
There are cases where it'll make total sense.
So the use perfect use case for a pie chart is when you want to
show there is a total and you want to show something about the
pieces of that total. But as everyone is familiar
with, as soon as you get to have more than 3 or 4 segments and
you lose the ability to make any sort of reasonable comparisons.
So I always say to people, if you find yourself reaching for a
pie chart, just ask yourself why.
And if you can answer that question, then you've probably
put enough thought into it to use a pie chart.
But really, that's not advice that is specific only to pie
charts. We should be asking ourselves
that every time we are showing data.
Does this make sense the way I'm showing it?
Do I need this data? And we should always be asking
ourselves these sorts of things so that we can again remind
ourselves to be communicating for the people on the other end
of that versus just creating slides and graphs and things for
ourselves. Yeah.
And plus, there's so many things that you can do in terms of
presenting the data by using bar chart, you know, either
horizontal and vertical as what you kind of like showed in the
book, right. So don't always focus on the
different types of graphs. So it's not the fanciness of the
chart or the graph, but actually like the visual aspect.
Again, the visual aspect, the clutter is more important than
that, right? Actually working on a new book
now and I just finished a section that was titled Bar
charts are almost always a reasonable choice.
Nice. Yeah.
So I think it's really powerful just to consider a bar chart,
but in a different way, right. So one aspect about creating
these kind of a data visualization that I quite
dislike is actually using the tools to create them.
Because I understand like how all these visual design matter,
but actually it may take a while for me to present in that way,
right? So for people who are
struggling, maybe is there any tools or tips that you can teach
us how we can create these type of charts much better and
easier? Yeah.
Well, and again, this is one reason that starting low tech,
even with your graphs and just sketching things on paper can be
useful because you can often sketch things on paper where you
might have this great idea, but then you see it and you're like,
oh, that doesn't actually work. Whereas, you know, would have
taken a long time maybe to build that crazy idea in your tool and
then you become attached to it. So trying out things on paper
first when that makes sense. I think it's also about getting
to know your tools well enough so that they're not constraining
you in unreasonable ways. I will just mention all of the
graphs in all of my books, and really 90 plus percent of what
we do is in Excel and PowerPoint, right?
Because these tools are pervasive, anybody can pick them
up and use them to make a graph, which is a great thing.
Also can be kind of scary. But so it's really about using
your tools, getting to know your tools and using them well.
There is no magic tool that makes all of this super easy and
beautiful. And I think that's because any
tool is trying to meet the needs of so many different scenarios
simultaneously that it's never going to exactly meet any one of
those needs. Perfect.
And so get to know your tools, get to understand how you can
iterate through different types of graphs relatively quickly
because those can be quick and dirty.
They don't need to be beautiful. It's once you've found the graph
that now you're going to use to communicate something important
to someone else, that's when you want to spend time on the
design. And we have a ton of tutorials
and tools step by step kind of things on the Storytelling with
Data YouTube channel. So you can check that out
because it'd be like the worst kind of training ever where it's
like, you know, then you click here and then you click here,
you click here. But it's not bad in when you can
watch it in a self-directed fashion.
Yeah, I'm so relieved to hear that.
Right. So I'm sure everyone here used
something like a spreadsheet, Excel, PowerPoint, Google
Slides, whatever that is. I think we all can produce, you
know, great graphs just by using those tools, right?
And I think many people are not taught about this since they are
in, I don't know, like in school, in, you know,
university, right, Because we are always driven into the facts
and how we actually come up with the gist out of it, right.
And you wrote another book which is definitely draws data.
So I think you kind of like want to teach children to present
with data. Tell us some more about it.
Yeah. Well, I think in the, you know,
in the past 15 years or so that we've been teaching adults, one
of the things that we often hear people say is some version of
why didn't I learn this sooner? And so I think that combined
with having my own kids and just seeing how they learn and
develop language, and they're so curious and their curiosity is
such an amazing foundation for analytical thinking and building
problem solving skills. And so I for a long time had
been kicking around the idea of trying to bring the visual
language of graphs to a younger audience.
And so my new children's book, Daphne Draws Data, a
Storytelling with Data adventure came out earlier this year,
features a dragon named Daphne, who has this sort of strange
skill for drawing data, basically making illustrative
graphs. And she gets some fun poked at
her by her brother, who says this isn't draggony enough.
And so she leaves her cave and goes on a grand adventure in
search of a place where she can be herself.
So she travels to the jungle and under the ocean and outer space,
each time meeting some creatures, hearing about a
dilemma that they're facing, and helping them overcome their
challenge by collecting and drawing data in these really
pictorial forms. And then she eventually finds
that she is making friends. I won't ruin the ending of the
story only to say that it's a happy ending.
And then the story ends. But the book continues into a
glossary of graphs because the story itself is really just a
fun story. You know, she's drawing graphs,
but there's the word graphs isn't used anywhere in it.
And actually, one of my most fun things is when I have the
opportunity to go and read this to big groups of young students,
because I will, I'll build the graphs piece by piece on the big
screen. And before we reveal Daphne's
response, the kids are sort of vying to try to read the graph
and figure out like, oh, you know, where is the tree where
the bananas have been stolen or there are crabs really faster
than shrimp. And they're able to answer the
questions with the graphs without any explanation of
here's a bar chart, and here's what a bar chart shows.
And so when you build it right, it's just intuitive, which is so
much fun. And so the story itself is just
fun. But then in the glossary, it
goes through the four types of graphs that Daphne uses, bar
charts, line graphs, pie charts, and scatter plots, and gives
more information on what they're useful for, how we read them.
Shares examples from her adventures, and in each case
gives an activity that kids can undertake where they could
collect and draw their own data to answer a question that's
useful for them. So I think the other thing that
I've noticed in the few graphs that my kids have come home
with, they're not very interesting.
And I think we're missing an opportunity to teach kids about
the superpower of numbers for really being able to take their
natural curiosity and help them answer their own questions by
collecting data and drawing it. That if we can teach that
ability young, I think that could be so powerful for really
fostering the next generation of critical thinkers and problem
solvers in whatever field they go on to pursue.
So yeah, it's it's been a fun project and it's super fun to
see how excited kids get by Daphne and her data drawings.
Wow, I think it sounds really fascinating, right?
I'm actually interested, especially there's a story
aspect, right? You just actually narrate the
story, right? So we can kind of like feel the
build up, you know, like Daphne, the problem that he or she is
having, right? And then up to the end, right.
So I think for people who are interested, I think it's not
just for kids, I assume right, adults.
No, I've had, well, I've had a lot of people say I need to get
this book for my colleagues or yeah, adults saying that, yeah,
this will help me really get my kids to understand what I do for
a job. But yeah.
So for anyone who's interested in more there, and you can find
she can be ordered from wherever books are sold.
But at daphnedrawsdata.com, there are activities for kids,
support for parents, right? Because I imagine a lot of
people listening here are relatively data savvy, but not
everyone thinks of themselves as being so.
So have some support for parents and then also resources for
educators because one of our big goals is to get Daphne into
primary education schools. And I think one of the reasons
that I'm really excited about introducing graphing earlier in
this manner is math often gets portrayed as being difficult,
boring, and hard and turns kids off at such a young age.
I've seen this with my own kids and their friends already, which
is concerning for me. But I think part of it also is
just this idea that there's a right way and a wrong way, and
when graphs enter the picture, that goes away.
There's not one single right way to do things.
You can bring creativity into it, and actually what you can
learn from people approaching the same or similar data
problems in different ways is really fascinating.
And so I love it from the standpoint of it just being more
accessible and more open to different experiences and
different approaches. Yeah.
So I think first, I highly recommend Storytelling with Data
and I assume this book will also be as good, right, Especially if
you want to teach your kids or maybe someone who is like a
beginner in their data visualization journey.
So I think highly check out, highly suggest to check out the
book. I think that is something that I
would advise as well. Maybe let's cover the last
aspect, which is the delivery part, right?
So you mentioned one thing that you think that doesn't is not
well covered in so many other resources is about giving
powerful intro. Maybe give us one, maybe a few
tips here. How can we bring, you know, a
more powerful intro, especially in the beginning of our
presentation? Yeah, I think top for me would
be really thinking about what perception or what reactions you
want to incite in your audience. For example, if you think about,
you know, you give your presentation or you give your
introduction, your audience leaves the room and they're
talking about you, how are they going to describe you?
What sort of adjectives are they going to use?
Are they going to say, you know, oh, Henry was, you know, he was
smart and capable and confident or, you know, what are the
things that you we want? How do you want them to perceive
you? And it's fascinating to do this
with large groups of people, which I've done because you
might think, or I thought at least, well, everyone's going to
have the same adjectives. Everyone's going to want to be
these things, which is fully not the case.
Different people, and particularly as they're thinking
of introducing themselves in different scenarios, have a
completely different view on this.
And so this can be an interesting exercise to do
across teams or in groups as well, and just kind of learn
from each other through that process, because I think it it
helps remind us that not everybody is thinks the same or
is motivated by the same things, which is a very useful thing.
And so be cognizant of, you know, what are maybe two or
three reactions that you're wanting to create in your
audience? And then think about your life,
the experiences you've had, what makes you unique?
What jobs have you held? But go past the standard things
that are on your resume to think about.
What are the things that make you you and then connect those
things to the perceptions you want to create.
And with this, you can use post it notes as well.
One of my favorite tools. We'll talk about them again,
where you connect these things together.
And then that'll help you see of the different experiences you've
had or the unique things that make you you, right, The
challenges you faced or the successes you've had.
How can you connect them and use them to highlight?
So you're not saying to somebody I'm smart and capable.
You're showing it through eventually the story that you
tell and then really practicing talking aloud through.
And this is where you can get comfortable with the
storytelling aspect of it. And this is where I think you
could say, you know, this feels awkward always.
And so instead of imagine yourself in the scenario,
imagine you're telling this story to a friend or to, you
know, a long lost cousin or somebody who you know, you're
trying to bring up to speed on something.
But where I think that allows you to really think of it as a
story and how the pieces connect.
And so in the book, I walk through a way to do this and map
it out and then actually write the story and talk through the
story. And then you can decide how to
refine or cut things down or trim depending on the situation.
But it just, it puts us such a different lens on one's self, I
think because it forces us to try to see ourselves through
someone else's eyes. And it really comes back to a
lot of what we've been talking about where effective
communication is not only for you, it's by really trying to
meet the needs of your audience or your stakeholders.
And I think as we think about how we portray ourselves, that
there's opportunity to make use of that as well.
Wow. I think I learned about trying
to think about the reaction or the perception that you want the
audience to think about, you know, maybe the talk or even you
about you, right. So I think maybe sometimes we
just focus on the content, content content and the delivery
and the key message, but we forgot like the reaction or the
emotion that we want to bring the audience after the
presentation. So thanks for mentioning that.
And I think I also learned in my previous episode as well, right?
It's not all about, you know, giving the facts or maybe
promoting something, right? It's also about self expressing
yourself, right? So you mentioned about talking
to a friend or maybe just think what's something unique about
you that you can convey to the audience?
I think this is actually really key.
Any conversation this day, it will be a miss if we don't
mention about AI. So what do you think about the
role of AI in storytelling? Storytelling with data.
Do you know I did a reading at a bookstore the other evening?
I read Daphne Draws Data and even there it was like an 8 year
old boy who his hand up goes up in the air and he asked me about
Daphne and AI. It really is everywhere, I think
when it comes to storytelling and AI, I think where AI, where
I'm hopeful that things can be really powerful is in helping us
analyze data so that we can really speed up that part of the
process. Because I mean, I spent many
years, you know, doing hardcore statistics and it takes so much
time. And so to the extent that we can
use machines to do that heavy lifting, I think one incredible
benefit it. Is it then frees up more of our
time in one? We still need to be very what
careful consumers of data and learn how to interrogate and ask
questions to make sure that what we're getting out of it makes
sense and is robust. But assuming we get to that
point, it should leave us a lot more time for the storytelling
piece and for thinking about how we can make things connect with
our audience. Also, finding just in my own use
of AI that it can be a really helpful brainstorming partner
because it comes at things with a different lens and a
different, I don't know, point of view, which seems like a
weird way to characterize a machine.
But, you know, where my mind might go if I need an example
for something or I'm working on a story and wanting to figure
out how the pieces connect, my mind will go in One Direction.
But what I can say to, you know, ChatGPT or whatever I'm working
with is you give me 10 ideas for how this could be approached.
And it does that with such speed and gets you out of your own
head. Because I think there will be
useful scenarios where we can say things like, I'm facing an
audience that is like this. And we describe it and we say,
well, there's, you know, there's this one woman who's kind of
hard from this standpoint, but there's this other guy who's,
and we can feed it things that may be able to be a helpful
brainstorming partner on some of the stickier pieces when it
comes to how we communicate. I'm bullish that there are going
to be a ton of benefits. I know there are also dark sides
and risks that hopefully people smarter than me are spending
their time thinking about and guarding against.
But I'm excited for the beneficial things that we'll be
able to use AI to do. Yeah, I love the brainstorming
aspect, right? Because sometimes, especially
when we're creating presentation, right, So having
more options, maybe choice of words, maybe how we convey the
message is actually can be a creative aspect.
And you choose kind of the best way to present your talk, right?
So Cole, definitely, I think we all learn a lot, at least for me
as well. And I highly recommend your
books, you know, storytelling with you and storytelling with
data. And we also have definitely
draws data. So as we reach the end of our
conversation, I only have one last question that I would like
to ask you. I always ask this to all my
guests. I call this 3 technical
leadership wisdom, but I think for you, you can also spin it
into three data leadership wisdom.
I guess I'll leave it up to you to decide.
So three things. So I would say 1, and we've
touched on some of this already, but one would be don't assume
that everybody else is like you recognize that other people have
different motivations, different things they care about,
different biases. Because I think particularly
when we need to influence or drive someone to understand
something in a different way, really being able to step
outside of ourselves and communicate for that other
person and with their interests and needs and minds, we'll just
set us up to be able to communicate and influence more
effectively. Secondly, I would say find your
passion. Find something you are
passionate about and it doesn't have to be in the workplace.
Find it and just notice how you are when you talk about it.
What are you doing with your body language and your facial
expressions and your voice? And think about how you can wrap
the best parts of that into how you communicate in a
professional setting as well. Because not every data that we
touch, not everything that we need to communicate is always
going to be fascinating. But if we can't genuinely find
the interest ourselves in it and convey that to others, we're not
going to be able to get anybody to pay attention to what we need
them to pay attention to. So look for your passion.
Think about how you can fold that into how you're
communicating and find the interesting facets of your work.
And then I think my third would be when you want to influence
change and whether this is, you know, you want people to
declutter their graphs or stop using pie charts or you are
trying to move people towards some sort of broader change,
don't tell. This is where you need to show
and really lead by example. And I think if you can emulate
the change that you want to see in yourself and through your own
work, then people will see that and you'll be able to influence
better. And I think you take those three
things together and anyone can be an amazing communicator.
And as we've talked about, being able to communicate effectively
is really key for getting others to pay attention to us, pay
attention to our work, pay attention to the data and all of
the cool things that we've done with it.
Wow, really beautiful. So I think we all can learn from
that. I think the message is clear,
right? Be a better communicator and I
think it's really important so if people want to find you, you
know, learn from all your resources.
Is there a place where you would recommend us to go to online?
Yeah, the best place is going to be storytellingwithdata.com.
There you'll find information on our workshops, our books.
We have an online community where people can practice and
exchange feedback. We have a YouTube channel that I
mentioned. You'll find all of that there
and a ton of learning resources that I hope everyone will enjoy.
Thank you for that. I'll put it in the show notes,
right. So I think Cole, thank you so
much for your time. I really learned a lot.
So as I mentioned, right, so I think thanks for spending the
time with me today. Thanks Henry, I enjoyed it.