Data isn't persuasive by itself - Nancy Duarte shows you how to use it to tell a compelling story
Rita McGrath
C-Suite Strategist | Thinkers 50 Top 10 | Best-selling author | Columbia University Business School Professor
I've long admired Nancy Duarte's skill at finding the narrative behind the data we all seem to be drowning in! She has a just-released book out which I can highly recommend, and some ideas from the book are captured in a brand-new article in the Sloan Management Review. She makes the important point that many of us treat data as some kind of objective fact, forgetting that it is very human, biased and emotional people who generate the data in the first place.
She recommends considering the data-generating people in your world as actors in a story. The "hero" in the data story is the one you (and hopefully your audience) are rooting for, to overcome obstacles and emerge from the story victorious. In the article, she shares ideas on how you can listen empathically, find out what the data are telling you and create the right context for a picture-perfect finish. Have a look.
This is a great article, but at its heart lies a conundrum. All of the elements that Duarte calls out for the creation of the story are qualitative in nature - context, why things happen - these are found outside of the data. At the same time, in business, we put more and more faith into technical solutions and a mindset that ascribe only quantitative values to data. This discussion dovetails nicely with a recent article on Linkedin from Shawn Kanungo (https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6631687085629800448/) that talks about a fear of losing creativity because of reliance on technology. If we are to tell stories, then we must embrace the requirement for an imaginative component that understand the business imperative, in conjunction with technological, data driven solutions.?