Sliding doors: Part 2

: P - That was an unintentional emoticon. And it stays there.

Brief memento of the part 1. Do you want people to act on your Data? You need stories. There is a whole explanation (Work in progress, last time I checked) on how the human consciousness prefers stories becauses we remember relationships between subject and object better than we remember numbers or facts. Well, crafting good stories starts with including 1. Imagination, 2. Emotion, and 3. Characters. But there's more to it:

4. Inspiration

It's not about the inspiration you get to compose your story around the Data. It's about what piece or pieces of your story are going to inspire your audience. This is closely related to the emotions piece, since inspiration may be one of the ways of calling some emotions that project to a future time, such as hope, fear, reminiscence, or longing. Still, the big difference here is that you will be trying to appeal to the rational layer of the mind by placing hints of where you are going to with the narrative.

Meaning, this is the element that you use when you place "Easter eggs" in the story. You drop pieces either of fiction or Data, depending on what is that you want to emphasize of the message, that you will recall upon after a couple slides. Drop pieces of a puzzle that you will get completed by the end of the presentation. Inspiring is a process of driving the attention of the audience to specific key elements of your story, and giving them hints on how to put them together.

5. Call to Action

Your story will be nice but not effective without this element. You need to speak clearly once or twice near the end of the presentation, about

1. What the full picture looks like. Sure, the inspiration element will help to make it look like the audience figured it out by themselves, but to remove ambiguity and enable a common ground, it has to be stated in the shape of a remark.
2. What you want them to do with that. Are they supposed to shock and gossip, evangelize? Are you inviting them to change a behavior, or implement a new process? Are you demanding them to give you more data to complete the analysis? How is this story that you told them any meaningful as they leave the room? I, for instance, hope that after you end reading this message, decide to take action and checklist the 6 elements in your next Data presentation

6. Try, try, don't give up

This is key. No matter how good we are at telling stories, every single conversation will be new and different from the others. Also, if you read this far and you've been subscribed for a while, you surely noticed that I've tried to start and revamp my newsletter a couple times. Also, finding my style has proved quite challenging.

But the only way to master storyttelling, is telling stories. Get a piece of Data, identify an action you want a specific someone to take based on it, and convince them through a good story. Measure, Evaluate yourself through the process and the result, and Repeat. Iterate. Try. (Yes, it's an acronym, find the MERIT in your storytelling)

P.S. About my wife and I, we've been together for a while now, and the stories with me, as you can imagine, rarely end. Not all of them are as funny as the one of the mistake with her name, but all of them making sense of our very specific ways to talk and perceive the world, and most of them mindful of the result that I intend with our conversation. And that is NOT manipulation, that is LOVE. It's knowing that an action without intention is random and dangerous.

The big difference? Transparency and being ethical about the action you want to drive with your Data. As a great storyteller wrote once, "With great power comes great opportunity!" (It's not a mistake, there is a separate story that goes like that)

Also, check this video from Jia Hwei:

https://youtu.be/Js5UMbD9r5U?feature=shared