Storytelling with Data - Rationality alone cannot win arguments

You know that feeling when you are sitting in a meeting and someone is presenting a weird combination of pie, bar and line charts with data written all over the place? People nod intelligently while surreptitiously checking their WhatsApp groups to break the monotony while the person presenting drones on. I am sure most of the readers would have experienced this feeling at least once over the last week or so. Listening to a data-laced presentation can be very boring if the presenter does nothing to enhance understanding of the material being presented. And there are very few bean-counters who can make data sound interesting.

Last week, at the TechHR conference in Delhi, there was a wonderful talk by Indranil Chakraborty of Storyworks on how to make your data tell stories. He gave a wonderful example of the Safety Head of an organization, let’s call him Ganesh, making a presentation in front of the executive committee after a particularly accident-prone year for the firm. He started by listing the number of workplace accidents, deaths, and safety incidents over the past year and showed how there was a dramatic increase in incidents over the last year. After going through a couple of slides on further breaking down the numbers, he ended up requesting a significant increase in the safety incidents for the next year.

I am sure most readers would agree that a narrative like the one above followed by a request for an increase in the budget would have drawn fairly predictable responses – mostly one of anger, disappointment and a dull shaking of the head before the said manager was escorted out of the board room. Indranil then gave a different take on this same story by asking the audience to imagine what would have happened if the manager had started off by talking about and showing pictures of Ramesh, who had died while on duty or Suresh who had lost his hand and how their families were coping with their loss. If at the end of this, Ganesh had asked the committee members to ensure an increase so that their employees and their families could be taken care of, it is quite possible that he would have walked out of the room with the desired result.

What the story illustrates is the triumph of emotion over rationality or logic. All of us are more susceptible to a well told story than facts for the most part. Ensuring that our facts come out in the form of a story is a powerful way to get people to buy in to what we are saying. The same applies to data visalization. Most of us reach for the standard set of tools available to us when putting together some form of a visualization of our data. Most of the charts that we see are either pie, bar or line charts, primarily because modern tools like Excel make it easy for us to come up with these visualizations. However, what we need to do is to stop and think about whether the visualization fits into the narrative of what we are trying to communicate.

One of the first truly great examples of data visualization was done by Florence Nightingale after the Crimean War. Apalled by the number of military men dying even during peacetime, Florence under the tutelage of William Farr, the father of medical statistics, painstakingly compiled data on the deaths over the next few months and the causes for those deaths. While she was shocked at the number and reasons for her death, she realized that unless she made it more understandable, Queen Victoria might not understand the import of her investigations. Hence she put together what is now known as a coxcomb plot, a variant of the well known pie-chart that shows the number of deaths over time as well as the reasons for those deaths with the blue, black and red arcs representing deaths from preventible diseases, wounds and other causes respectively.

Read the full article at: http://www.nfactorialanalytics.com/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words/

For more posts, please visit http://www.nfactorialanalytics.com/blog/

nFactorial is a HR Analytics company that has developed a SaaS based real-time, anonymous employee feedback platform called n!Gage. For more information, visithttp://www.nfactorialanalytics.com