028 - Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic On Data Storytelling, DataViz, and Why Your Data May Not Be Inspiring Action

When it comes to telling stories with data, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is ahead of the curve. In October 2015, she wrote a best-selling book called storytelling with data: a data visualization guide for business professionals. That book led to the creation of storytelling with data, an agency that helps businesses communicate more effectively using data, and she’s since followed-up with another best-seller: storytelling with data: let’s practice! Prior to her current role, Cole served as a people analytics manager at Google, was the owner and chief consultant at Insight Analytics, and held several positions at Washington Mutual, among other positions.

In our chat, we covered:

• Why sharp communication skills are integral to telling stories with data
• The skills data people need to effectively communicate with data
• Who Cole thinks  you should run your presentations by first, and the specific colleagues you should be sharing them with
• Why it’s important to practice presentations in informal settings first
• How looking at data in different formats can help you build more effective presentations
• The differences between exploratory and explanatory data analysis in the context of storytelling
• The important role of diction when presenting data
• Cole’s opinions on the skills many modern workers need around data storytelling
• Why data visualization and the ability to tell stories is not a nice-to-have skill
• What Cole’s approach to preparing for a presentation looks like and the format she uses to kick off the process

Resources and Links

Designingforanalytics.com/seminar

Twitter: @Storywithdata.

Company website:  Storytellingwithdata.com

Quotes from Today’s Episode

“I've always really enjoyed that space where numbers and business intersect and enjoy how we can use numbers to get to understand things better and make smarter decisions.” — Cole

“If you're the one analyzing the data, you know it best. And you're actually in a unique position to be able to derive and help others derive greater value from that data. But in order to do that, you have to be able to talk to other people about it and communicate what you've done to technical audiences and to non-technical audiences.” — Cole

“When it comes to communicating effectively with data, you can't take out the human part. That's the part where things can either succeed or fail.” — Cole

“There's no single right way to show data. Any data can be graphed a ton of different ways. And so when we're thinking about how we visualize our data, it really means stepping back and thinking about what sort of behavior we’re trying to drive in our audience. What do we want them to see in this? And then it often means iterating through different views of the data, which is also a fantastic way just to get to know your data better because different views will make observations easier or less easy to see.” — Cole

“As soon as we try to draw attention to one aspect of the data or another, it actually makes any other potential takeaways harder to see.” — Cole

“Words are very important for making our data accessible and understandable.” — Cole

“Depending on the visualization, what you're doing is you're teaching yourself not to assume that the information is necessarily clear. You're being objective. And it sounds like a dumb question, but that's kind of what I usually recommend to my clients: We need to be really objective about our assumptions about what's being communicated here and validate that.” — Brian

“The low-fidelity format—especially if you're working with a stakeholder or perhaps someone who's going to be the recipient—enables them to give you honest feedback. Because the more polished that sucker looks, the less they're going to want to give you any.” — Brian