Emergence of Data Storytelling in Data Science

Why stories?

We’re really passionate about storytelling. 

Why? Because stories are the only way to ensure that everyone actually understands data. Stories are how we, as humans, best communicate. It’s how we remember what matters, and how we incite action. It’s how we persuade and how we motivate. 

Data storytelling ensures that you and your team get the answer of what’s going on in your business – from anywhere and at anytime.

"The most powerful words in english are tell me a story."

What is Data Storytelling?

Data storytelling is the fastest and best way to empower your team to both understand and act on data through the power of stories. It builds a data-driven and transparent culture, creates conversations about what matters.

Data storytelling quite literally takes your data and turns it into plain-English stories. By providing insights in a way that anyone can understand, in language, data storytelling gives your team what they want—the ability to get the story about what matters to them in seconds.

How will data storytelling help you?

Imagine that you – and everyone you work with – had the story about what’s going on in your business, at their fingertips, all the time. How much faster could you make decisions? How much more confident would you feel every single day?

"With data storytelling, there are way less questions about how the business is doing, and way more about how to take action. You can move faster, have more productive conversations, and exceed more of your goals."

How Data Storytelling is Changing the Way Your Team is Making Decisions?

There’s a problem with how we’ve all been taught to interact with data—we are expecting anyone and everyone to be able to analyze and explore it. We assume they will make the time and acquire the skills to do this well but still expect the same out of them in their actual job.

Think about it—how do you interact with technology today? For most people, it looks something like Spotify, Alexa, and Netflix. People love these tools because they are easy, they are personalized, and you get what you want with zero work.

But most companies are still forcing people to jump through a million hoops just to get the story from their data. The emphasis on being data-driven, while excellent in theory, has become increasingly complex, time-consuming, and way more painful for everyone involved than it needs to be.

The fix? Data needs to start coming to us. Companies need to give their employees a way to understand their data without expecting them to learn data skills. Tools they use need to bring data insights to them, wherever and whenever they work. Data storytelling gives anyone, regardless of level or skill set, the ability to understand and use data in their jobs every single day.

It’s the Best Way to Give Your Team the Story About Your Business.

Instead of forcing people to learn how to analyze spreadsheets or explore dashboards, data storytelling uses simple, easy-to-understand language and one-step features to ensure that everyone in company actually understands data, all the time. This makes it easier for them to make the right decisions faster, which ultimately leads to happier employees and better results for your company.

How Data Storytelling Works?

Data storytelling doesn’t make you rip out anything you already have and start from scratch. It doesn’t require you to spend days or months configuring anything. It’s the fastest way to get everyone in your company focused on the right things, and making better and faster decisions than ever before.

It’s more like a cultural shift to bring data understanding and action to everyone in your company that complements your data exploration and analytics efforts. It’s the personalized, easy experience that you have come to expect in today’s world. It’s a new way for your employees to become truly data-driven.

So what happens when you start using data storytelling in your company? Let’s go through each step. Here’s how data storytelling helps both you and your team:

Step 1 – Instantly understand your data with plain-English stories instead of dashboards.

What happens when you give your employees a way to instantly understand the data that matters to them instead of forcing them to analyze spreadsheets or explore dashboards? For most companies, it means a radically transparent, data-driven culture is created, better decisions are made, and goals are met and exceeded faster. When your employees want to understand the business, or make a quick decision, you can use data storytelling to facilitate that instantly. But it doesn’t have to end there—they can start the conversation with other team members, if that’s what they want to do.

You can’t have a personal analyst writing reports for every single one of your employees. That’s why you have intelligent natural language technologies that make data storytelling work for your business no matter the time of day. You can empower your people to make decisions quickly by providing data insights a way that anyone can understand—a story.

Step 2 – Learn what you need to know to make better decisions every single day.

The typical approach to understanding data takes anywhere from minutes to days. Employees are poring over long spreadsheets, digging through dashboards, or simply asking their operations or analysis teams a million questions and waiting hours for a response.

With data storytelling, your team can read a personalized story that tells them what they need to know about their business, tailored specifically to their needs, automatically. Data storytelling technology is intelligent – it naturally articulates the most important and interesting information to each employee, every day. And, it allows them to share that information with each other, too.

Step 3 – Start the conversation with your team about how to take action.

Stories are the only way to ensure that everyone actually understands data. Stories are how we, as humans, best communicate. It’s how we remember what matters, and how we incite action. It’s how we persuade and how we motivate. Stories help us understand something new— creating new questions to be answered.

Instead of requiring employees to seek out answers, data storytelling ensures that relevant information is surfaced to your employees where they already are. Because data storytelling is literally stories in language, it enables things like commenting and collaboration, integrations with other communication tools like Slack, and robust sharing capabilities via email.

And, because data stories are in written language, they work just as well on mobile as they do on a desktop. Business doesn’t stop when you leave your desk. No matter where you are—on a plane, at your child’s soccer game, or just grabbing dinner, data storytelling helps you and your entire team keep the pulse on your business anywhere, anytime.

Data Storytelling: The interface of the past, present and future

For as long as there have been people, there have been stories. Storytelling is how we best represent, understand, and share our ideas and knowledge. Storytelling is how we inspire action; how we best communicate. All of which is why I believe storytelling is the most obvious and natural interface to data insights.

The Data Paradox

The amount of data collected every day is absolutely staggering, and it is expected to keep growing at an even faster rate. Analysts believe the size of our “data universe” doubles every two years.

With all of the time and money that is put into collecting, prepping, analyzing, and reporting on data, one would think that it would be easier than ever for people to use data in their day-to-day lives. In reality, we have all seen the opposite. Understanding data has become a skill – and a highly competitive one at that. Companies are scrambling to hire data scientists, analysts, and many other roles with data science skills.

In today’s data-rich world, everyone is expected to understand and use data to make decisions every day, regardless of position, function, or skill set. Now, we are seeing new trends emerge – roles such as a ‘data translator’ or data visualization tools that claim to make data analysis easy for everyone.

The Definition of Insanity

This is happening everywhere. Companies are hiring data scientists at an unprecedented rate, and the business intelligence and analytics market has ballooned to over $50 billion. But, these methods just aren’t working. Analysts are still spending over 50% of their time reporting instead of doing actual analysis, and according to Gartner, business intelligence adoption rates cap out at only 25%.

Companies are doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Why is this method not working? Because we’re expecting everyone to be a data person. But that’s just not the case. Spreadsheets require analysis, and dashboards require interpretation. Both require skills and time that many businesspeople just don’t have today.

Breaking the Cycle through Storytelling

Human brains are hardwired for storytelling – and have been for centuries. Storytelling is an essential part of human knowledge transmission. Through language – verbal, written, or even song or poetry – tradition, processes, and more have been passed on from generation to generation.

Even in modern times, we aren’t the only ones to recognize the profound effects of storytelling. Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint in company meetings, replacing it with “six-page memo(s) that are narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, and nouns.”

It is only in the past few decades that we have expected humans to learn another way of communicating – through the medium of data. We are trying to force humans to learn how to analyze and read numbers and structured data, instead of the other way around. We are trying to force people to speak the machine’s language, instead of creating technology that can speak ours.

This is Not Data Storytelling!

Data storytelling is this super trendy, super buzzwordy thing in the tech industry right now, and frankly, I’m done with it.  

Why? Because literally NO ONE saying they are doing data storytelling is actually doing it! 

Data storytelling experts lead us to believe that the tools we have today are as good as it gets. If we couple these tools with well-trained people who can do helpful, visual tricks and create better Powerpoint presentations, we’ll be able to get our data insights across to the people who need them to make decisions. And look, I just don’t believe it. 

Here’s my question: Is it working?

My vote: it’s not. Here’s the evidence.

Business intelligence (BI) is greater than a $50 billion market, yet usage of BI tools hovers at under 30 percent. What does this mean? That means seven out of ten people are uninformed. Let’s play out a scenario: I’m having a party, and I invite 100 people. Thirty of them get an invite sent directly to them, and 70 do not. How many people make it to my party? Less than 30 percent. We wouldn’t skip out on informing 70 percent of our guests about a party’s start time and location, so why would we find it acceptable that 70 percent of our company has no clue what’s going on with the business? 

Some may say: “Well, the tools aren’t the issue.”

To that, I would respond, “Listen up, mate, I know the issue is much bigger than just the tools themselves. But the tools have created a full-blown human capital crisis!”  

Data science is one of the fastest-growing careers in the U.S. As the demand for people in these jobs is accelerating and growing at an exponential rate, the supply is simply not keeping up. Yet, as in-demand as people in these jobs are, according to this Harvard Business Review (HBR) article from January 2019, one of the biggest gripes about today’s data scientists is that they do not have the skills to communicate insights to stakeholders.  

Executives, meanwhile, complain about how much money they invest in data science operations that don’t provide the guidance they hoped for. They don’t see tangible results because the results aren’t communicated in their language.

So now, we have issues with the tools and misalignment of the people’s skills who primarily use the tools. Really smart people, and publications like HBR, are saying things like, “Well, you should be formulating your data science team’s strategy to literally hire people who have certain skills.” This essentially suggests that if you can’t find a unicorn data scientist who has it all—one who gets the data AND gets the people—you should build an entire team of people in the data science profession and have unique single skills. For example, a data scientist who also specializes in project management, a data scientist who also has subject matter expertise, or a data scientist who also specializes in storytelling. 

My issues with this strategy?

1. Good luck hiring and retaining this team of in-demand professionals.
2. Why spend all this money solving for a tool issue that creates a human capital issue?
3. Why, in 2019, don’t we expect tools to do all of the above for us? 

We need to leverage our data to tell us stories that we can read and understand.

Let’s be real. It’s almost 2020, and Excel, charts, and graphs are so early 2000s. Anyone, including my mother, can read and listen to a story.

P.S. Do I actually believe data experts are trying to misrepresent me? Definitely not. 

I believe people who know data AND can communicate effectively (including those at HBR) are optimists. Everyone is trying to figure out a way to make the most out of the tools that exist today.

"Stories are just data with a soul."