What are the key elements of a compelling data narrative?

“Why should the audience care?” is the very first question to ask when creating a data narrative. Once you find answers, you can shape the narrative towards their needs, their language, their ways of making decisions, and their knowledge about data. Data should bring people together after all to work towards common goals, not create distance between them to work each in isolation.

You wouldn't read Tolstoy to a 2-year old at bedtime and expect them to appreciate it. If you're trying to inspire your audience to act, you need to know how they will engage and understand the language they speak. Funnily enough, the easiest way to do this is simple - talk to them.

Simon Sinek's book "Start with Why" resonates when contemplating goal definition. It mirrors my approach to initiating any data project – determining the added business value, extracting insights for the data team, and ensuring plans are agile for responsive changes aligning with the business strategy. In implementing audience inputs into our data solutions, the focus is on achieving a high adoption rate and actionable insights. Going beyond the requested solution demonstrates a thorough understanding of the strategic future, impressing stakeholders with a comprehensive grasp of the overarching strategy.

Stephen Covey's advice to "begin with the end in mind" applies here. I like to start by answering the question - what is the one thing I want my audience to remember? Based on the answer to that question, we can make sure that every element of our data story supports that goal. If it doesn't directly support the one main point of the story, remove it. By ruthlessly editing our data story to its core elements, we can ensure that every word and picture is adding value, and we make it far more likely that our audience will remember our main point.

You should be informed about business issues or inquire. This instills trust and builds a solid foundation with business stakeholders, ensuring their full understanding of the direction they intend to take with the strategy. Following this, provide guidance on additional data points that can be available to support and future-proof the objectives. Continuous data quality checks are required, with updates to business rules applied to ingested and ever-evolving data strategy. To derive business value from data professionals within an organization, constant interaction with stakeholders and posing thought-provoking questions is essential.

Choosing data that directly supports your narrative is critical. Vanity metrics or trivial data detract from your story. It's better to have a single powerful data point that supports your story than to have five data points that don't. It can be tempting to load up a presentation with all available data to show that you've thoroughly researched a topic. But honestly assess if each metric or visualization is critical to conveying your core message. If it's not, move it to the appendix.

Target simplicity and relevance to the outcome. The number of presentations I've seen that have become derailed by complex visualisations that need explanation, or that are related to methodology and discovery... Rather than a generic title, try using the takeaway. Minimise the effort a participant has to put in to understand your story. For example: Revenue by Product per Month, 2019-2023 -> September 2023 saw our highest revenue, driven by Product X Target a time-to-understand of 5 seconds or less.

The data story must be interwoven around the corporate or organisation strategy. Without this the story will hang in a vaccuum and likely start collecting dust quickly. As with any story/presentation start with the end in mind….what do you want the data users to be thinking about, how do you want them to feel, what connections are you enabling them to make (without necessarily actually spelling out those connections)? The story should contain logos, pathos and ethos….in other words appeal to logic, emotion and the audience ego/status.

Story telling should start with an impactful "Why" in the first 2 - 3 seconds. This would capture the audience's attention. Second item to keep in mind is to pick the story relatable to the audience. Finally, need to keep it short and sweet. Do not overload the audience with too much information. Keep the cognitive load in mind. Two takeaways which are repeated throughout the story experience is ideal based on my experience. Hope this helps.

One of my learnings early in life is not to keep refining the story so many times that you have a totally different takeaway after a few iterations. Keep in mind the two or three takeaways and repeat it during the story telling. The refinement can be done to the scenario of the story but not the takeaways. Hope this helps.

I find it useful to do a trial run with a trusted colleague, especially if they are not familiar with the subject matter. I'll walk through the presentation and ask them what they believe was the key takeaway. If their answer differs from my intent, the story clearly needs some work. I also ask for honest direct feedback about the story, delivery, and supporting data. This step takes time, but it definitely can help refine your narrative and delivery.