Episode 4: Beyond the Data Dump: Put Heart Behind the Chart

The Storyteller's Mind Movie™ Makers Show

Hello everyone and welcome to the Storyteller's Mind Movie Makers™ Show where we discuss the science to the art form of storytelling, especially in the business realm. Because we in business, always have said that storytelling is an essential business skill and we need to be able to take numbers and create images and emotional connection to our audiences more often than we realize.
All right? And so I teach this on a daily basis and I have seen so much transformation from people when they realize that they don't have to rely solely on charts and graphs because that's actually kind of upstaging them. And I even think it could be slowing down some investors or donors or customer decisions because it's too flat. It's just all numbers and charts and people.
Yes, we need the numbers. That's what business is built on. It's built on data. It's built on metrics. It's built on successes and whatnot. KPIs, all of that. Those are charts. Those are graphs, right? But it's the emotional connection comes when you create stories that people can see and hear and smell and taste and touch. And that's the science that I break down for people, okay?
And so today we're gonna talk about something that's really, really important and that's data storytelling. All right? I like to say that when you see a chart, try to find the story and then tell the story and then show the chart. Because what you'll be doing is you'll be doing what I call putting heart behind the chart. All right? And so I'm gonna, we're gonna talk about this quite a few times in different episodes, but today I wanna talk about...
using your own personal story potentially as your opening story. So again, I work with a lot of founders. It's not the only thing I do, but I do work with a lot of founders and I help them with their investor pitches. And all of them are starting off with, you know, very busy slides. So let's talk about presentations for one moment. There are three types in my mind, okay, in my opinion. There are one, your internal deck. Okay, it's the deck that...
you're scientists, you're analysts, you're all trying to gather the data to find the story. So I always say, you're the story hunters, right? You're making sense of all this. And then marketing tends to be the story makers or the story writers. Like they start to formulate what the vision is and then they hand their presentations over to sales people or customer success people or your C-suite, obviously. And now they're the storytellers, but it's all based from data, right? The size of the market.
The size of the opportunity, the competition, the audience's opinions about something. Those are all facts and figures, but they're all pointing to people. And that's what we're gonna remember. Or they're pointing to animals, you're in something that has to do with animals. Or it could be Mother Earth, if you're doing something in climate tech. Mother Earth would be a character in one of your stories.
and how she's not doing so well right now, but because of you, she's going to get better. So there's a transformation right there just using Mother Earth for climate tech. So what I normally see is that once you have your data scientists building and then you have marketing creating, they tend to create the shared deck. They tend to create the deck where no one's talking. You're handing it either before a meeting,
or after a meeting and it has more words, it has those charts, it's easy to read and again, there are tensions on it and they're in control with a shared deck. They're in control. They get to say which page they're gonna go to. They get to decide if they're gonna stay on that chart and really analyze it a little bit more because they're in control of the time. Then it's the speaker's deck and the speaker's deck is the one where it's a totally different approach. It's where
The speaker must spoon feed the information to the audience for them to be able to take it in a digestible amount. But what do we mostly see up on slides? We mostly see speakers using shared deck slides. Sometimes even internal slides. Sorry, but that happens. You can tell. They're very black and white. They're very confusing. There are lot of diagrams and whatnot. Those are usually internal. I would say put those in the appendix.
And if you need to pull it out, that's fine. And you need to understand those slides, but it's not necessarily going to be your speaker slide because your speaker slides needs to support you. And so when we're doing heart behind the chart, we want to start with a story because it allows us to relate to the problem that is being solved for. All right. And so then when you do show the chart, it makes more emotional sense to them. That's what's happening.
So no one will ever remember your pie chart. They won't. But they will remember your story that the pie chart represented. I'm gonna say that again. They will remember your story that your pie chart represented. So that's the fun. That's the fun in trying to find the story. So I'm gonna share with you an experience that I had and we're gonna have different data storytelling episodes. So if this really resonates with you, there'll be more, okay?
And again, make comments. Let me know if there's a particular question that you have about data storytelling, because that could even spur an episode theme. But we'll do our best to try and answer whatever we can for you. So go ahead and make your comments. But I'm going to talk about when I was working with a gentleman named Jelani Jenkins. Absolutely fabulous person, and that wonderful writer. Absolutely wonderful. I follow him on LinkedIn. He's a great writer.
And his background was that he was an NFL football player for almost a decade. So he's been to the Super Bowl a few times and he's just a great guy and that was his life. And for many professional athletes, if you are one of them you might remember this, when their career suddenly ends or gradually has to end, their identity kind of goes with it.
Right? That's like all they knew. They got up every day. They trained. They ate right. They worked with people who understood their community and now it's gone. Right? It's gone. And so when that happened to Jelani, he decided that he wanted to create his next game in life and he created something that is called Post Season. And essentially it's helping new athletes come on board to the new world. I almost said the real world, but that doesn't make sense.
to the new world that they're going to be living in. And what are they gonna do? Are they gonna be filmmakers? Are they gonna be financial strategists? Are they gonna be teachers? Are they gonna stay and maybe become coaches and stay close to it? They don't really know yet, but he knew that enough people that had already gone through that door that he could create a community of other former athletes who were now teaching new things. Many of the subjects that I just shared, okay? But his story, normally when I'm meeting a founder, I don't look them up.
because I really want to see how a founder pitches themselves out in the wild. I don't want to have too many preconceived notions. However, with Jelani, it was a little bit of a different experience for me. I knew he was coming to be in the show, Athletes to Entrepreneurs, that Founders Live was putting on, and I knew he had been in football, but I didn't know anything about postseason. But I did know this. He wrote a story on LinkedIn, and he was mortified. He had frozen.
in the middle of a pitch froze. And it was really extra horrifying because he had promised God that if he got selected to be in this pitch competition that would have television cameras around him, that he would visualize it and he would be there and he would be great and please let him have this opportunity. And the universe brought it to him. And as soon as the lights were on, he steps up just like he'd imagined and the slide comes up and he...
absolutely freezes and he's writing about this. He's like, just, I didn't feel like I was in my own skin. He was disassociating, I think. And that can happen. That can happen because in that case, I looked at it and I was like, let's look at the slide. So I'm gonna show you the slide that he worked with. Now, please know, it's not a bad slide.
And for a shared deck, it's a good slide because it offers a lot of information about why he is creating postseason. So here's the slide. Now look at that, okay? I'm talking right now and I know what's happening to the viewers. If you're listening, you're fine, but if you're watching this, you are also trying to read the slide and I am not saying anything that the slide is saying. So I am now officially becoming annoying. I'm speaking.
you're trying to and you're trying to analyze.
because we've got that whole, you know, the circles and the bend and it's all, you know, former athletes, lots of competition, lots of support, feeling isolated, loss of identity, so much to read, so much to read. And the audience, you know, we can't, pretend that we can do all three, but we can't. And this is, we can't listen, analyze, and read at the same time. And everyone even like, so the listening might go back because now we're trying to read, but then we're going over to analyze and he's lost control of his audience because some
some people are analyzing and some people are reading, probably no one's really able to listen because of this slide. Okay? But this slide, this slide is rich. It has a lot of stories. So here we go, I'm gonna kinda walk you through what he wrote. I would take that out in a speaker's deck completely. First off, I'm gonna show you what we turned it into.
and I see those sentences like that I say take it out take it out because you've got a mouth and you can say these things without making the audience read the more you make us read the more we can't listen to you at a hundred percent and that's what I call the wonder-wander effect and it is extremely important
Because what that means is that the speaker has either said something like an acronym that they don't define and they just assume everyone knows what it is. You will lose so much of your audience's listening power because they wonder what it meant. And now they wander away from listening to you because they're wondering what that stood for. And so with this one, this is definitely a wonder wander effect.
trigger for sure this this kind of slide but how many of you you know as you're looking at that going I've seen so many people do that yeah me too but in here we had the 75 are they 70 and 85 in the 90 % so what they say is it 70 % went through some form of depression substance abuse or anxiety after sports okay that's that's a big number 85 % felt alone when they left the sports that's sad they felt alone I mean
That's sad. And then 90%, 90%, nine out of 10, were unsatisfied with their post-athletic careers. That makes a lot of sense. So I asked him, Jelani, did any of that happen to you? He's like, yeah.
I said, okay, tell me the story. Now in this case, this was the founder's story and many companies are founded on the founder's story. And so it was appropriate, but there's other characters and other stories that he can create from that one, but he opened with this one. And so I asked him, well, so what happened?
And he said, well, at first I was really happy to be retired because my body was feeling really good. I was sick of getting banged around and it was great. I could sleep in. It was awesome. And life was good. But like six months in, my wife came into the living room and she snapped a picture with a Polaroid and I didn't like it. I said, oh, what was it a picture of? He goes, well, I'm sitting on the couch and I don't like what I see. I have pizza boxes. I've got this stale bong water in front of me.
and I'm just playing video games. That's it. And I thought, is that all I have become? That's me. I used to be like the boss and this is me. And I said, really? Do you still have that picture by chance? And he said, I do, why? And I said, what if we opened with it? He said, what? Open with a personal story? And I said, yeah, because it's absolutely representing the 70%, the 85 % and the 90%.
on this graph, your personal story. And if you open with that story, you will have, you will, you will show us, not just tell us. And that's also a very big rule in data storytelling. Show us, don't just tell us. Because when you show us, then we get the oxy, oxy, cut, we get oxytocin into our brains and we are able to feel emotionally connected. So instead of him opening with this slide, when he
came to me we opened with this slide. We didn't have Jelani's story fruition up at the top it was just a picture of the blue part that was the full slide and it was the actual picture and he opens up he goes it's six months in and I'm sitting on the couch when my wife snaps this picture and I've got bong water and the reason why I said
Go ahead and say that is I want people to smell the bong water. Some of you might even taste it if you've ever had a bong, right? And he goes, old pizza boxes. I wanted him to say that because what we're doing is we're triggering taste and smell. So everyone's tasting pizza. I don't care what your pizza is. Maybe you're tasting pepperoni and you're tasting vegetarian. I don't know, it doesn't matter to me. But you're tasting pizza. And you might even be feeling cold, stale pizza.
Right? Or maybe some of you were like, no, my pizza was hot. Doesn't matter. Everyone's experiencing with it. So everyone is in the living room with him and they are sitting quietly in their imaginations on the couch looking at him. And they probably are even hearing video games. You know, like they're making noises like that. Brilliant.
That's what we want because now we have the oxytocin flowing. Okay. And he has just shown us he put heart behind the chart by opening up with some vulnerability and honesty. And then he moves into his next slides and he explains what postseason is about. Now postseason becomes the the character, the hero, right? The hero comes in and it's going to solve the problems and it's going to explain it. So all of his slides went from graphs and charts over to more images.
So we're gonna stop sharing. So that's just my intro to data storytelling. Okay, it's a very, very rich and very, very important aspect. I once taught this not too long ago, a couple times now. I taught it at Seattle U's data analytics course. And after I told them some stories and how to take the data.
One of the students walks up to me and he goes, you mean I can think in pictures? And I said, yes, if you do, you're going to be the winner of the idea seller. He's like, oh my goodness, this is really good. And so I've taught that, I've been a guest lecturer for that course now three or four times. So I know it's resonating and it's just.
Truth, right? We're not gonna remember the pie chart, but the pie chart has the story. So this is your homework assignment, if you will. Look at your presentations, especially the ones where you're speaking, okay? Or look at the ones where your team will be speaking. Are the slides data heavy? Where can you put the story?
tell that story and make sure that you're making the slides much more digestible by controlling the content. And we'll get into that a little bit later too. I'll show you how slide building is a game changer as well. I'm seeing it more and more, which is great. Now, when I see that from speakers, I know that they're very cognizant to their audience and I applaud them. Yay, yay, yay. Good job. But most speakers hate it so much, they hate speaking and they just want to get off as soon as they can from that stage.
They're selling their ideas short because they're relying on shared deck slides and they're data dumping on their audience and they're disconnected and they're not hitting the mark.
But the good news is, this is trainable. This is trainable. So smart that we're all here. This is what this show's about. Please like, comment, share. Keep tuning in. We love hearing from you. And this show is designed for all of us because we're all doing presentations. And this is the beginning of our talk on data storytelling. OK. So I will see you at the next episode. And in the meantime, tell your stories.
and tell them well. Thanks.