Data, the story
A few years ago, I led a storytelling event featuring data stories. I reached out to people throughout the company (and beyond) to tell stories about how they used data. Because the event was in October, and I wanted to get as big an audience as I could, I tied the event to Halloween and made it about data horror stories. So, you may ask, how would a corporate storytelling event about data failures work? Well, simple, I worked with all the storytellers to couch their data horror stories as lesson learned. I literally asked everyone to end their story with the lesson they learned from the experience.
The interesting part of the experience was working with people who didn’t think or know they had a story, or didn’t think they could tell a story. After some light coaching from me, they got to work on preparing their story for the event… On that day (way before we all even knew what the word pandemic meant) we got the chairs in a conference room arranged in a semicircle with a small lectern and a mic, and off it went!
People stood up and told stories, we played recorded stories (audio and video), some were streamed, but we all learned a lot about what people do when there are data failures. What was most gratifying to me was having the audience vote for their favorite story right on the spot; and I truly enjoyed presenting the award (ask in the chat if you want to know what it was) to the winner, who, I must say, was one of the people who was most concerned about their ability to tell a story.
Data storytelling is not just the charts and the visuals you see, it’s more than that. It’s the narratives, it’s the emotions, the effort, it’s life! In my data storytelling workshops, that’s what we emphasize: how to get people to connect emotionally with the data!
There are lots of data stories in our organizations; finding them, crafting them, and deciding when it’s the right time to tell them is part of a strategy that makes organizational storytelling a complex endeavor. What interesting data stories have you heard in your company recently? Do you have an interesting data story to tell?