#207 - The Art of Storytelling: Effective Communication and Data Visualization - Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

[00:01:39] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal. So today I’m very excited to have this guest with me today, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. I actually found out her books many, many years ago. One of my friends actually referred that book to me. And I must say it is an insightful book to me back then. I was like a terrible data person, right, especially the visualization. But when I found out the book, right, and I looked at some of the suggestions inside, actually it was mind blowing back then for me. So I think I’m really excited to have this conversation. Cole, welcome to the show!

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Oh, I love hearing that, Henry. Thanks for having me here. I’m excited to chat.

[00:02:17] Career Turning Points

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So Cole, I always love to invite my guests first to maybe share a little bit about yourself. You can mention maybe any turning points that you think we can learn from you.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Yeah. Maybe I’ll start with the turning point, which if I think back over the course of my career, which has taken a number of twists and turns over time, as many people have. For me, I think one that comes to mind was the subprime crash, basically that happened with the banks here in the States. Because up until that point, I had been working in credit risk management and building statistical models to help the banks understand how much money to reserve and kind of really in the line of work where things went awry. And for me, there was a point when I’d gone to work for a private equity company after the bank that had been investing in subprime mortgage banks, and it just was not a fantastic, not a motivating environment in which to be.

And so I said, what skills do I have? What do I want to do? Where do I want to take the analysis skills, the statistics, the graphing, the things that I was starting to do, and where else might I apply that that doesn’t have to do with loans and credit cards? And I made an inventory of the skills that I had and the things that I wanted to be using and what I wanted to learn. And as part of that process, I came up with an advertisement that was for a role called people analyst. And I had never heard of this before, never thought about applying math to human resources, which was basically the job. And I got that job. It was at Google, you know, as one of those who was very lucky in terms of I submitted my resume online through the portal and somehow it caught someone’s attention.

And I moved to California and started working at Google as one of the first members of this new people analytics team that had been brought together at that point. And that was back in 2007. And really a lot happened from there. My experience at Google, I mean, I think I need to credit it with everything that’s happened since then, because that’s really where the nuggets of or the foundation for storytelling with data and everything that’s happened since, really took footing and grew from there.

Henry Suryawirawan: I was at Google as well back then, but I didn’t know that the course you have. I think your story probably is one of like the typical Googlers who actually created a course back then at Google. It turned viral and now it becomes your, you know, kind of like profession, right, or full time job. So I think that’s really great to hear.

[00:06:22] What is Storytelling?

Henry Suryawirawan: So you have written this book, “Storytelling with Data”, that’s the first book. Subsequently, “Storytelling with You”. So I think let’s just go to the books, right? So you mentioned about storytelling. I think people have been mentioning this for many, many times these days, right? Especially in the business setup or professional setting. So maybe in the first place, I would like to ask you, what is the definition of storytelling in your view, especially in the business context?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Yeah, and it’s a great question, because storytelling has definitely become one of these buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot, which I think on the one hand is fantastic because it means people are thinking about it and paying attention to it. On the other hand, it can be not so great because a lot of times people are saying storytelling when they don’t really mean story. And so that can undermine, I think, some of the power of it.

When I think of storytelling in a business context, I’m really thinking of traditional story where there is a plot. There’s, you know, a sense of time and place and characters and tension exists, and builds over the course of a narrative that is cohesive. There is typically a peak intention, right, this climactic turning point, and then a falling action that leads us to a resolution. And so you can map any great story basically against this narrative arc. And I think it works beautifully as a schematic for planning business communications as well, because anytime we’re in a situation where we need someone to understand something new or see things in a different light. We need to motivate them to make a decision or have a conversation or choose from a menu of options. Those are the scenarios in which I think storytelling, they’re ripe for that sort of structure.

Because we can think of it as the journey that we take our audience along, where the tension becomes the thing that matters to them that either isn’t going well or could be going better. And then the resolution is the action that our audience can take to resolve that tension that we’ve brought to light. And anytime we have something important to communicate, we can find this story and use that to frame things in a way that I think can help us get attention at the work that we’re doing and really engage and drive understanding and hopefully action in the people to whom we’re communicating.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Thanks for sharing about that definition, right? To me, it seems a lot, you know, like having to think about, you know, all these plot, you know, narrative, climax, heroes and all that.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Well, you can simplify, right? It doesn’t always have to be the full narrative arc. I think for anyone for whom that sounds intimidating or it sounds like too big of a departure from how things are typically done, you can start simple where you can think of just plot, twist, ending, right? Plot is what’s the context, what is the basics of what my audience needs to know. Then the twist is that interesting or important new insight. And then the ending is the action that you need them to take. And you can plot almost any reasonable business scenario where there’s communication that needs to take place onto that simple story mountain, I guess.

[00:09:55] Why Become Better Storytellers

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think I like that simplified approach, right? Because I’m sure many people would have thought, okay, I’m not a storyteller. I’m not like a novelist or someone who create movie or something like that. Because they typically associate storytelling with those kind of things. And that’s why probably for some people they kind of like struggle when they hear storytelling being thrown around, you know, like maybe for presentation or whatever that is that you want to do in business settings. Maybe give us a main reason why should we become a better storyteller.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: I think the reason, and particularly the reason that I’ll say people in technical careers. Because typically, we haven’t spent much time thinking about this or doing this. We’ve doubled down on, you know, the statistics or the programming or all of the things that make us good at being an analyst or doing the tech part of the job. The reason that we should aim to be better storytellers is because by doing so, we’re going to be able to communicate the great work that we’ve done more effectively. And the converse of that is if we don’t invest in this skill for ourselves, our work isn’t going to get the attention that it deserves.

And so as the storyteller, you become the voice for what you’ve done, right? The analysis or the project. And then you can lend that voice to get other people excited and engaged. And that is an incredibly powerful thing to do. And I think a lot of people throw their hands up in the air and just say, oh, I’m not naturally a good storyteller, so I’m not going to even try. Which is so sad because nobody or very few people are naturally adept storytellers. I certainly was not. And so I feel like if I’ve been able to learn this and been able to teach my team and now write books and teach others, really anyone can stand to gain from thinking about themselves as a storyteller, and thinking about themselves.

And if that’s too much, just what journey do you want to take your audience on? What do you want to move them to do? Because if we can frame things in that way of really putting audience first and foremost front and center, which I think we’ll talk about more, then it enables us to communicate in such a more effective manner than the way that we typically do, which is we communicate for ourselves or for our data or for our project, sort of audience be damned, which isn’t a super effective way to approach things.

[00:12:25] Storytelling in Business Settings

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I’m guilty of that. And I’m sure many people in tech typically like that. Always fact-driven, you know, straight to the point. There’s no kind of like a story inside, right? But I think one thing that I also learned from a few people as well, like actually naturally we are a good storyteller if we are telling stories about a certain situations that just happened to us or past experience that we find really exciting. But somehow putting it into business context is kind of like weird and difficult, right? And especially for the listeners as well, maybe I don’t know, in tech they kind of like feel a little bit maybe weird to put story into what you’re presenting or what you’re trying to narrate. Why do you think storytelling works so well in the business context, even though you are actually not coming up with a story, like a storybook or something like that, right? But why do you think storytelling really works so well?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Yeah, and I think part of it is, you know, this doesn’t mean… So to tell a story in a business setting, what I don’t mean when I’m talking about it is, you know, we’re not going to go in and craft some dramatic fairy tale that we take people through. I think a way to think about it is just the connectedness in your communication. And that’s one of the reasons that, I mean, your point is great, humans have been telling stories for forever. I mean, that’s how we pass information on to future generations. And it’s this way in which we can bring people to a different place through the story and the way that events relate to each other where you mentioned telling people about, you know, maybe something interesting that happened over the weekend. Or where you can get animated and you’re telling your friend like this happened and then this happened and then that lead to that and this other crazy thing happened. And that’s, that part is key, is the connectedness where so often business presentations are a collection of what seems like totally disparate things, right? Alright, now, we’re going to move on to the next slide, and there’s no connectivity.

And so I think if we think of our business presentations in the context of story, one thing is just, and I mentioned this before, but what journey do we want to take our audience on? How do we want to move them from slide or point A to B to C? And it’s really thinking about that narration of how do the things relate? How can I put them in context so that the things that I know will make sense to someone else? And really thinking about leading someone else through the story of your project, or the story of the analysis that you undertook, the research that you want to share. There’s just these slight reframings that I think can take storytelling from being elusive, or feeling too artsy or squishy or markety, to actually helping people see that we can be really strategic in how we communicate with others.

And this is one thing that we have in our arsenal of potential approaches to be able to take with an audience. And that it actually can have really great benefits a lot of the time. But it takes practice. And with time, it becomes easier and more straightforward. And particularly, if you start in low risk places and start small and gain momentum from small successes and just get more comfortable and credible as you’re doing things.

[00:15:51] Plan-Create-Deliver Framework

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, thanks for bringing up that point, right? So I think your second book, Storytelling With You, actually kind of like cover how someone can become a better storyteller. Because for some people who are still thinking it’s too hard for them, I’m just not good at it so I think you brought up a point in the beginning that maybe you were not good in storytelling as well, but over the time, after you practiced, after you used it in some, you know, maybe use cases, you become better at it. So in your book, you cover these three things, plan, create, and deliver, right? I’m sure many people can learn from that kind of like simplified framework. So tell us a little bit more of this kind of like framework for us to get started with storytelling.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Yeah, so breaking it into the three sections, right? Plan, create, deliver. In the plan section, it’s really about the low tech things you can do up front to really understand what it is you are going to communicate. Which sounds really straightforward, sounds like something we don’t need to spend time on. But so often we just jump straight into making graphs or making slides without really having a plan in place. And that plan can help reduce the amount of time and iterations that you have to spend later on in the process.

And so in the plan section, there’s a chapter on audience, another on message, one on crafting the pieces, which is basically about storyboarding and really thinking about the different aspects that you need to communicate, and then there’s a chapter on story. Specifically how to use the structure of story when it comes to structuring your business presentations. And the book’s really set up so that you could have a project in mind and basically work your way through the chapters. There is a case study that I introduced early on that we revisit at the end of each chapter so you can see how the lessons and tactics and strategies play out in a real world scenario. But that first section is really all about getting clear on who your audience is, getting to know them, really communicating with them in mind.

And then planning what you’re going to communicate in a low tech fashion. This also can be a fantastic place to get feedback from others, particularly if you want directional feedback. If there’s an important stakeholder or a manager who could totally change your course of direction, it can be awesome to show them something that is low tech, right? It might be sticky notes that have been arranged on a piece of paper or something that you can just talk your stakeholder through so that they can either say, yes, that sounds great, you’re on track. Go execute. Or no, let’s actually go in this other direction. And now you’ve not spent time finalizing a presentation or report in order to get there. So it can really reduce iterations when it comes to that piece as well.

And then once you have that plan in place, next section is create. And in this section of the book, there are chapters devoted to creating. One just to bringing the low tech planning into your tools and really setting up the structure for a presentation, down to really technical things or nitty gritty things like, you know, how do you choose fonts and set a color palette in your tools. And we have a number of videos and other things to go along with the book that will help people with that process. And then there’s a chapter devoted each to developing content with words, content with graphs, and content with pictures and images, with the idea being that your eventual communication which is often a presentation deck will have some combination of those things. There are a ton of examples baked in. And the chapter on graphs basically takes the most salient points, I would say, from Storytelling with Data and condenses them into one powerful chapter. So for people who ask me which book to start with, I always say start with the yellow one, Storytelling with You. And then see if you want more on the graph piece, and then if so, go back to the white one.

Then the final section of the book is deliver, and this is all about how you can prepare yourself to communicate powerfully. From tips on rehearsing your actual content, I share some things that I do when it comes to practicing aloud and practicing with slides versus without slides. And this is, um, I present probably the whole menu of things you would potentially want to do for a really important situation. You know, when it’s a regular meeting or something like that, you would scale back or focus on maybe one or a couple of these things versus all of them. There’s a chapter on building your confidence and things to do to become more aware of how you use your voice and how you use your body and how you can modify those things in really interesting ways and the impact that that can have on an audience and how you’re delivering a message.

The penultimate chapter of the book is all on crafting your own introduction, which I played around with where to put that chapter and was sort of happy to find a place for it at the end of the book or near the end of the book, even though that feels a little counterintuitive. But it becomes such an interesting case study where anybody can take it and use it to apply many of the lessons that are covered through the rest of the book to a subject that they know very well themselves. And I found it interesting that I’ve read many books on topics in this space and never have I encountered any material on how to introduce yourself powerfully.

And so I lead readers through a process of thinking about, you know, over their history of stories and experiences and work projects and really being cognizant about the perceptions that you want to create in the people to whom you’re introducing yourself, whether it’s in an interview or you’re networking or at the onset of a presentation. And then really using those things together to craft the story of yourself which is a really cool thing to do. It’s a cool exercise to do because then you find that you can flex it in all these different ways of, you know, your sentence introduction versus you’ve got five minutes to take people through more of a story, which can be really useful.

And then the final chapter is that actual delivery and tips on things to do immediately before, during, and after your presentation. And again, with the idea that any of these things could be applied to a big presentation, you’re giving a keynote from on a stage, or just an important business meeting. And you can scale things up or down depending on how important the thing is. But probably the more important it is, the more of all of this stuff you should be doing. And really the shift between Storytelling with Data and Storytelling with You is Storytelling with Data focuses almost entirely on the data, which makes sense. Uh, it’s all about perfecting the graph.

And it took over, I’d say, what, the past 10, 15 years of spending a lot of time teaching people about how to make graphs. It just has become increasingly clear that the data, the graph, it’s only part of the picture. The person who’s doing the communicating, whether it’s verbally and they’re talking through their work or by virtue of the design, what they put around it in the thing that gets sent off. But the person is such an important part of that puzzle. And so the more we can think about ourselves as a communication tool, the more effective we’re going to be when it comes to communicating.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, thank you for such a complete walkthrough, right? So I think as you can listen, the audience here, right? So I think the book is kind of like a full package, right? So if you think about, you know, I can’t do storytelling, Cole here has kind of like outlined from the beginning, you know, when you plan the talk that you want to do, right? How do you create stuff, including some beautiful, you know, visualization that she does really well? And then the last one is how to deliver, right? Including how you speak, the confidence, and including the delivery.

[00:24:01] Low Tech Planning

Henry Suryawirawan: So maybe we will not be able to cover all of them, but let’s start with the first one, planning. So I don’t know about anybody else, right? I think typically when I start to plan for my talk, I always straight go into the slides, you know, maybe Google Slides or whatever slide tool do you use, right? And just, you know, put down stuff. You mentioned in the book and also just now, right, about using low tech. And also things about, you know, like not being bogged down by the tools. So maybe tell us why it’s very important that we don’t plan just like what I do typically.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: I am a big fan of pen and paper and post it notes when it comes to low tech planning. There’s something different that happens. It engages a different part of our brain when you have to actually put pen to paper and write things down. And then the other cool thing about it is when you take the time to do that, now you’ve got an idea that is now a physical thing in the world that you can look at and assess and move around or group with something else. And so the process of storyboarding feels awkward at first if it’s not something that you’ve been doing. But over time and with practice can become both really efficient, but also a really powerful way to get a jumble of thoughts and ideas out of your head and bring order to them very quickly.

And I think just by virtue of doing that, of being able to see all of the different things that you could bring into a presentation or project review that you’re doing, and then deciding which ones you’re going to focus on is a really useful reframing. Because I think one of the things that happens often when we go straight from an idea or a project to our tools is with that comes this idea that whatever we create needs to answer any possible question that might come up. And that’s not a great approach. Whereas if we are storyboarding and writing down ideas on post it notes with the idea that maybe each of these becomes a slide in my eventual slide deck, I can rearrange things, group things together. I can put some structure around them.

And I can assess each one to say, does this help me get my main message across? Is this critical for my audience? And I can choose to say no. Maybe it was important for me to look at, it was important for the analysis. But if it doesn’t serve the needs of my communication, it means I don’t have to spend time developing content on it. And this is probably the biggest time saver is because storyboarding up front can help eliminate those like 80, 100, or more slide decks and get you down to something that is both shorter, so you have less content you have to develop, and you have more time to make that shorter content really effective.

Because part of the idea when it comes to creating effective slides is when you’re there communicating, you don’t want them to compete with you. Then you should think of your slide as a helpful assistant, right? It’s there for if you need to be able to show something visually, so you can turn to it and do that. Or to maybe help keep you on track when it comes to the topic or moving from one to the next. But not all the information needs to be there. That’s why you were there, to answer questions and address the needs that come up from your audience along the way. But a little bit of time spent planning up front can make the rest of the process a whole lot more efficient and help you ensure that you create a communication that’s going to work for the needs that you set out to meet.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think you brought up a great point, right, because typically when we prepare, you know, using the tools, the slides, in the first place, right? We tend to just put in a lot of data, a lot of facts, you know, taken from many, many different systems, and we just put it together, there’s no storyline, first of all, right? And you kind of like feel wasted if, let’s say, what you have collected, you didn’t use.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Hard to let go of, right, you build attachment. The other thing too is it’s really, you get a different level of feedback when you are asking for feedback or getting feedback on something that looks polished, right? As soon as you go to your tools, things are going to look a little more polished and that begs for feedback on the design. So then you get feedback on things like the color of your graph. And you completely miss the feedback of, is this the right data to show in the first place? And the directional kind of feedback. And so that’s another thing to keep in mind, is when you’re looking for more directional, big picture feedback, there’s value in keeping things low fidelity. Have it be a sketch or on paper, and you can say to your audience or your stakeholders, this is rough, it’s okay, I just want it directionally orient us. Because then you’re not going to get feedback on, you know, the intricacies of the design, which you don’t need at that point. You may need that at a later point. But that can be an important consideration as well as what do you actually show people to get the kind of feedback that you want at the point when it’s useful?

[00:28:57] The 3-minute story and the Big Idea

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. That’s also maybe one typical mistake that people did as well, right? You know, putting the themes, you know, making it look pretty, but actually they don’t focus on the main gist, which is the message itself. Which one thing that I want to ask the next, right? So in your book, you have this technique or maybe concept, right? The three minute story and also the big idea. So this is how, like what kind of content that you want to convey in your talk or presentation, right? So tell us how we can use this technique to actually help us.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Yeah, I’ll talk about the big idea which is probably one of the most useful things that we find when we teach. It’s funny because, you know, we teach workshops where we’ll go into an organization or spend half a day or a day with a company really teaching about communicating effectively with data and beyond. And I think we get brought in a lot of the time for the data expertise and for that expertise of visualizing. And yet, at the end of the day, or at the end of the session, when we’re asking people, what is one thing you’re going to do differently? Oftentimes, it’s a lot of the things that don’t have anything to do with data specifically. It’s these general communication things. It’s, I’m going to storyboard, or I’m going to use the big idea.

So the big idea is it’s a single sentence that is the main thing you need to communicate. So it should articulate your point of view, it should convey what’s at stake, and it should be one single complete sentence. And so we, in the books, and in our workshops, we introduce something called the big idea worksheet. And it basically breaks things down into these components, because it’s very difficult to go from everything you know about a project to a single sentence. That level of concision is very hard. But by breaking it up into pieces, where the pieces are, who’s your audience? Can you narrow that down to a single person or a single group of people? What do they care about? And thinking both from the positive point of view of what are the benefits or what do they stand to gain if they act in the way you want them to?

And the flip side of that, what are the risks or the potential downsides if they don’t act accordingly. And really takes you through these pieces. So at the end you have, it’s almost like a puzzle where you’ve got the components and you just need to cram it all into a sentence. And the sentence are, the sentence restriction is arbitrary, but it is purposefully short. And that is both to enforce concision. Other details will come in, but that’ll be in your supporting content. But it’s also because of the wordsmithing and the thought, the critical thinking that you have to do in order to get it there. It means you get to know your stuff really well.

And there’s extreme benefit once you’ve worked through this and you have a big idea to then talk through it with someone else and the process of them asking you clarifying questions and you answering them. It just helps you verbalize outwardly so many important aspects of what you need to communicate that then, if we think full circle around to the delivery aspect. Even at that point, you are preparing yourself to be able to talk more eloquently about your work and about why it’s important. And so these little practices up front do a lot, I mean, they help with the planning, but they do a lot more than that as well.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think for me, the big idea is definitely one thing that we all can get good at, especially when you are giving a presentation or talk, right? Because we feel that there are so many things that we have to convey, right? But to put it into a single sentence, wow, that’s maybe difficult, at least for me. And I think the worksheet is one place where we can try to use, right, and, you know, maybe craft the sentence really, really well. And you have this three minute story as well, which if we find one sentence is really difficult, start with like the three minute story, right, so that you kind of like distill what are the important things. And from there, actually, you kind of like bring the big idea. So I think this thing is really powerful if we can think about it. Because sometimes we are lost in our own narrative, you know, like we just put so many slides, but we are lost and we kind of like don’t convey the main message that we want the audience to take away, which is something pretty bad.

[00:33:06] TLDR and BLUF

Henry Suryawirawan: So the other thing is, I think I’ve learned so many other books, right? About this structure of the story, right? So you mentioned about big idea, yeah, it’s typically advocated, right? So things like pyramid principle or BLUF, you know. And then also TL;DR, right? So why this structure is so much important? And do you actually always advocate people to give the main message straight away, you know, like in the very beginning?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Not always. So I think when we’re talking about different structures, one is to lead with the big idea or the main message. And I think that is a good idea when you already have credibility with your audience. Or if you aren’t sure you’re going to have time to get through everything, you want to make sure you at least start off with that so you can circle back around to it. If you have an audience who, you know, cares more about the so-what than how you got there, then starting with the big idea can be good. I think where it can backfire and where you might want to take an alternate approach, which can either be, you know, you share context first and lead up to your big idea. Or it could even be somewhere in the middle, depending on how you want to structure things.

But where it could backfire is when you have some fraction of your audience or maybe the entire audience who is going to disagree with you. And so if you start off with that, you can end up at this point straight away where there’s tension. And not the good kind of story tension, but the bad kind of meeting tension where people are agitated and not on the same page. And so I think if you can anticipate that then sometimes leading people along the path that you took to get there or finding a place where, you know, if you know they’re coming in with certain biases or certain beliefs, finding a place where your belief and theirs are congruent with each other before you bifurcate off that path into something that’s going to counter it or if you can build your credibility and then bring people around to it.

And also, if it’s a highly charged emotional situation, then you want to be thoughtful about how you approach that. And again, just back on storyboarding, this can be excellent things to think about when you are in that low tech phase. Because now you can say, alright, but let’s take this one audience member, and I know, you know, he’s going to be loud, and he’s going to come in with this particular frame of mind and he’s going to challenge us on this. You know, if we can anticipate that, does it mean we move it around, or the way that we bring up these other things first? Or does it mean things outside of that completely? Does it mean that we sit with him ahead of time, or separate from the rest of the group, and try to get him on the page? Or try to get, you know, somebody who could influence him on board? So it brings up a lot of these other ideas, and this is really when we’re thinking about our audience up front. And how we can make things work for them, and through that make them work for us.

But where you can be strategic about how you’re setting things up, so that it’s not just about the deck that you’re building, it’s about how do we make this a successful situation. And I think for me that’s the bigger thing that I’m trying to get people to think about through everything, is to just not allow yourself to fall in the habit of doing it the way we’ve done it because we’ve always done it that way. But especially for critical situations, thinking about what are the pieces of the puzzle look like this time? Who are the players? Are they likely to agree or where are they going to disagree? How do I put this all together in a way that’s going to hopefully set me up for success, but also make things work for the people who I’m trying to change or trying to get to do do something. Because the more we can do that, the more we can find these middle grounds where we can make it work for everyone.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I think the insight here is that there’s no like one structure that will work all the time, right? So please feel free to first understand the audience, which I think you also covered really well in the first chapter of the book, right? So knowing the audience is really really important. And then maybe the narrative how you want to bring it, I think depends on that as well.

[00:37:09] Creating Slides

Henry Suryawirawan: So let’s go to the next section, which is about creating, right? So I think we have come up with all the plan, the main idea, and maybe the storyboard as well. Creating presentation slides, I think many people might like it or might dread for it, right? Depending on their feel about creativity. How much creativity at play here do you think we should do and does our slide need to look pretty?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Ah, great question! So when it comes to creativity, it depends. And I think, for sure, I’m a proponent of making use of what exists. So if your company or your team has templates or other things that you can use, do that, because it means there are many fewer decisions that you have to make when it comes to things like font and color and those sorts of things.

Does it need to look pretty? So I would say pretty for the sake of pretty, no. But do we need to spend time with the visual design of what we’re communicating? Yes, absolutely.

There’s actually a really interesting thing that happens when an audience or a consumer looks at something and they can tell that time and attention was spent on the design details that actually makes this sort of implicit contract where the user, the consumer has more patience and more attention maybe, if we can translate it to that for the product. And so, just translating that… I mean, and think about it. When you… when you have the experience of even just opening a good product, right? Where the boxing or the packaging is thoughtful, you have a different set of expectations. One for what’s coming with it. You have a different feel towards the product. We can make excellent use of that when it comes to the visual design of our graphs and slides as well.

So I would frame it as why would you not want to do that? And it doesn’t mean, you know, making things pretty. It means paying attention to detail. It means have there be alignment. So clean horizontal and vertical alignment between different elements. If you think of like text boxes versus a graph versus other elements you might have on the page, you know, does it look nice? Is there structure to it? Is there visual hierarchy where more important things are bigger or are contrasted in some way? So my audience knows to look there. Is it easy to interact with? Because when we can take the time to do that, then we’re now more likely both to get our audience to want to engage with it, but then to get them to read and remember it.

And one of the most powerful things that we can do there is really think about how we’re using words and graphs together. So studies have shown when we title the slide or the graph with the main takeaway or a key takeaway that we want our audience to know, that they are more likely to remember that key takeaway. So we want to think about using words, takeaway titles so that our audience knows what to look for when they see the graph.

Using color sparingly is something I’ve been an advocate of for a very long time. So the audience, you know, they read and know what to look for, and then they can see in the visual through sparing use of color or other means of contrast, what they’re meant to see. And these things that, you know, you could call it making it pretty, but I think it’s more about making the visual communication effective. And yes, we should be taking time to do that because that’s where what we need to get across to our audience is either going to succeed or fail. So it’s worth every minute we spend on it.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think the visual design aspect, I fully agree. Even though I may not be always happy doing that, but I think it’s really important because it gives people attention, you know. And then especially if it’s beautifully kind of like laid out, right, not necessarily the pretty aspect, I think it kind of like captures the audience better. And especially sometimes the main message gets across faster as well as what you maybe outline in your other book, right, Storytelling with Data. Because sometimes we just put everything together, it looks pretty, but actually the main thing is actually missing from there, right? And I think other things like typo, color, fonts, you mentioned about it, alignment, right? Sometimes people miss this, but actually it’s very important as well.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: This-is-where if you don’t feel particularly creative or you don’t feel like you’re good at this, look for examples to emulate. So if you see a well designed slide from someone else, think about what works well in it and how you can bring that into your own work.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, something that you can steal from Cole’s book as well. There are so many examples there.

[00:41:43] Storytelling With Data

Henry Suryawirawan: So let’s go to this Storytelling with Data aspect, right? So you mentioned sometimes we need to present data, factual data, numbers, whatever that is, right? And sometimes in tech, we also need to kind of like maybe present an incident or some charts where there are a lot of data that we need to put the message across.

So when I saw your book, actually, I was, uh, kind of like laughing, actually, why all my charts, my visualization looks so bad compared to what you show in the book, right? And it’s so simplified and all that. So maybe, I think this is very important to convey to the audience here. How can we present data much better in a visually appealing manner?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: I think a lot of it again, as with the entire presentation, when we get down to a specific graph, it’s being really clear on what do you need your audience to know. What are you trying to get across? Because when you can put that into words, then that will help you figure out what kind of graph is going to work. And I’m a big fan of iterating through different types of graphs. Any data can be graphed a lot of different ways. And so seeing what your data looks like as a bar chart or a line graph or a dot plot or slope graph. Cycling through these different types can help you get to know your data better and help you see what view of your data might work for getting your message across to someone else. So type of graph would be one thing.

I think identifying and eliminating clutter. So anything that’s visually present that doesn’t need to be or isn’t adding informative value. So when you strip away unnecessary grid lines and borders, it just leaves you with a cleaner starting point. So that then you can get away with adding things to it. When we think about adding words in the form of annotations or creating contrast with color or through other means, you can do that without it becoming visually overwhelming.

And then that is the next thing is to be clear where you want your audience to focus and do things to the visual design that help achieve that. So sparing use of color is a great way to do that, or you can think of making everything gray and then using one or two really strong colors. This is where you can tie branding in, if that makes sense. And then really thinking about story. What’s the takeaway? How do I put that into words? How do I take this one view of the data now and connect it to the things around it? So it’s really bringing the narrative piece into the data.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think that’s really, really important, right? Removing clutter. So I think, in the past, I used to create chart. You know, maybe there’s so many clutters that I don’t even see, but I only think that it’s important, you know, to present all the data. And I think the cognitive load, right? You mentioned in your book, the cognitive load when people saw that kind of like visualization is actually a lot, right? And sometimes they are lost. Like what should I pay attention to? Because there are so many things in the chart, in the graph itself.

[00:44:39] Pie Charts

Henry Suryawirawan: And I think the other aspect that I learned from your book, right, you maybe discourage people from using pie charts. But I still see so many pie charts out there. So what is your takeaway about pie charts?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: I think pie charts are, they are more frequently used than they should be typically. People, humans like circles for some reason. But we actually, our eyes don’t do a great job of attributing value to two dimensional space, which means pie charts are hard for us to read. There are cases where it will make total sense. So the use, perfect use case for a pie chart is when you want to show there is a total and you want to show something about the pieces of that total. But as everyone is familiar with, as soon as you get to have more than three or four segments, you lose the ability to make any sort of reasonable comparisons.

So I always say to people, if you find yourself reaching for a pie chart, just ask yourself why. And if you can answer that question, then you’ve probably put enough thought into it to use a pie chart.

But really, that’s not advice that is specific only to pie charts. We should be asking ourselves that every time we are showing data. Does this make sense the way I’m showing it? Do I need this data? We should always be asking ourselves these sorts of things so that we can, again, remind ourselves to be communicating for the people on the other end of that, versus just creating slides and graphs and things for ourselves.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. And plus there’s so many things that you can do in terms of presenting the data by using bar chart. You know, either horizontal and vertical, as what you kind of like showed in the book, right? So don’t always focus on the different types of graphs. So it’s not the fanciness of the chart or the graph, but actually like the visual aspect. Again, the visual aspect, the clutter, is more important than that, right?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: We’re actually working on a new book now, and I just finished a section that was titled, Bar Charts Are Almost Always a Reasonable Choice.

Henry Suryawirawan: Nice. Yeah. So I think it’s really powerful just to consider a bar chart, but in a different way, right?

[00:46:42] Data Visualization Tools

Henry Suryawirawan: So one aspect about creating these kind of a data visualization that I quite dislike is actually using the tools to create them. Because I understand like how all these visual design matter, but actually it may take a while for me to present in that way, right? So for people who are struggling, maybe is there any tools or tips that you can teach us, how we can create these type of charts much better and easier?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Yeah. Well, and again, this is one reason that starting low tech, even with your graphs and just sketching things on paper can be useful. Because you can often sketch things on paper where you might have this great idea, but then you see it and you’re like, oh, that doesn’t actually work. Whereas, you know, it would have taken a long time, maybe to build that crazy idea in your tool and then you become attached to it. So trying out things on paper first, when that makes sense.

I think it’s also about getting to know your tools well enough so that they’re not constraining you in unreasonable ways. I will just mention all of the graphs in all of my books, and really 90 plus percent of what we do is in Excel and PowerPoint, right? Because these tools are pervasive, anybody can pick them up and use them to make a graph, which is a great thing, also can be kind of scary. But so it’s really about using your tools. Getting to know your tools and using them well. There is no magic tool that makes all of this super easy and beautiful. And I think that’s because any tool is trying to meet the needs of so many different scenarios simultaneously that it’s never going to exactly meet any one of those needs perfectly.

And so get to know your tools, get to understand how you can iterate through different types of graphs relatively quickly. Because those can be quick and dirty, they don’t need to be beautiful. It’s once you’ve found the graph that now you’re going to use to communicate something important to someone else, that’s when you want to spend time on the design. And we have a ton of tutorials and tools, step by step kind of things, on the Storytelling with Data YouTube channel. So you can check that out, because it’d be like the worst kind of training ever, where it’s like, you know, then you click here, and then you click here, and then you click here. But it’s not bad when you can watch it in a self directed fashion.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I’m so relieved to hear that, right? So I’m sure everyone here used something like a spreadsheet, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Slides, whatever that is. I think we all can produce, you know, great graphs, just by using those tools, right?

[00:49:00] Teaching Kids About Data

Henry Suryawirawan: And I think many people are not taught about this since they are in, I don’t know, like in school, in, you know, university, right? Because we are always driven into the facts and how we actually come up with the gist out of it, right? And you wrote another book, which is Daphne Draws Data. So I think you kind of like want to teach children to present with data. Tell us more about it.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Yeah, well, I think in the, you know, in the past 15 years or so that we’ve been teaching adults, one of the things that we often hear people say is some version of, why didn’t I learn this sooner? And so I think that combined with having my own kids and just seeing how they learn and develop language. And they’re so curious. And their curiosity is such an amazing foundation for analytical thinking and building problem solving skills. And so I, for a long time, had been kicking around the idea of trying to bring the visual language of graphs to a younger audience.

And so my new children’s book, Daphne Draws Data, a storytelling with data adventure came out earlier this year. Features a dragon named Daphne who has this sort of strange skill for drawing data. Basically, making illustrative graphs. And she gets some fun poked at her by her brother who says this isn’t dragony enough, and so she leaves her cave and goes on a grand adventure in search of a place where she can be herself. So she travels to the jungle and under the ocean and outer space, each time meeting some creatures, hearing about a dilemma that they’re facing and helping them overcome their challenge by collecting and drawing data in these really pictorial forms. And then she eventually finds that she is making friends.

Uh, I won’t ruin the ending of the story, only to say that it’s a happy ending. And then the story ends, but the book continues into a glossary of graphs, because the story itself is really just a fun story. You know, she’s drawing graphs, but the word graphs isn’t used anywhere in it. And actually one of my most fun things is when I have the opportunity to go and read this to big groups of young students, because I will, I’ll build the graphs piece by piece on the big screen, and before we reveal Daphne’s response, the kids are sort of vying to try to read the graph and figure out like, oh, you know, where is the tree? Where the bananas have been stolen? Or are crabs really faster than shrimp? And they’re able to answer the questions with the graphs without any explanation of here’s a bar chart and here’s what a bar chart shows.

And so when you build it right, it’s just intuitive, which is so much fun. And so the story itself is just fun. But then in the glossary, it goes through the four types of graphs that Daphne uses. Bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, and scatter plots, and gives more information on what they’re useful for, how we read them, shares examples from her adventures. And in each case gives an activity that kids can undertake where they could collect and draw their own data to answer a question that’s useful for them.

So I think the other thing that I’ve noticed in the few graphs that my kids have come home with, they’re not very interesting. And I think we’re missing an opportunity to teach kids about the superpower of numbers for really being able to take their natural curiosity and help them answer their own questions by collecting data and drawing it. That if we can teach that ability young, I think that could be so powerful for really fostering the next generation of critical thinkers and problem solvers in whatever field they go on to pursue.

So yeah, it’s been a fun project and it’s super fun to see how excited kids get by Daphne and her data drawings.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, I think it’s sounds really fascinating, right? I’m actually interested, especially there’s a story aspect, right? You just actually narrate the story, right? So we can kind of like feel the build up, you know, like Daphne, the problem that he or she is having, right? And then up to the end, right? So I think for people who are interested, I think it’s not just for kids, I assume, right?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: No, I’ve had, well, I’ve had a lot of people say, I need to get this book for my colleagues. Or yeah, adults saying that, yeah, this will help me really get my kids to understand what I do for a job. But yeah, so for anyone who’s interested in more there, I mean, you can find, she can be ordered from wherever books are sold, but at daphnedrawsdata.com, there are activities for kids, support for parents, right? Cause I imagine a lot of people listening here are relatively data savvy, but not everyone thinks of themselves as being so. So have some support for parents and then also resources for educators. Because one of our big goals is to get Daphne into primary education schools.

And I think one of the reasons that I’m really excited about introducing graphing earlier in this manner is math often gets portrayed as being difficult, boring, and hard, and it turns kids off at such a young age. I’ve seen this with my own kids and their friends already, which is concerning for me. But I think part of it also is just this idea that there’s a right way and a wrong way. And when graphs enter the picture, that goes away. There’s not one single right way to do things. You can bring creativity into it. And actually what you can learn from people approaching the same or similar data problems in different ways is really fascinating. And so I love it from the standpoint of it just being more accessible and more open to different experiences and different approaches.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think, first, I highly recommend Storytelling with Data, and I assume this book will also be as good, right, especially if you want to teach your kids or maybe someone who is like a beginner in their data visualization journey. So I think highly check out, highly suggest to check out the book. I think that is something that I would advise as well.

[00:55:04] Giving a Powerful Intro

Henry Suryawirawan: Maybe let’s cover the last aspect, which is the delivery part, right? So you mentioned one thing that you think that doesn’t, it’s not well covered in so many other resources, is about giving powerful intro. So maybe give us one, maybe a few tips here. How can we bring, you know, a more powerful intro, especially in the beginning of our presentation?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Yeah, I think top for me would be really thinking about what perception or what reactions you want to incite in your audience. For example, if you think about, you know, you give your presentation or you give your introduction, your audience leaves the room and they’re talking about you. How are they going to describe you? What sort of adjectives are they going to use? Are they going to say, you know, oh, Henry was, you know, he was smart and capable and confident. Or, you know, what are the things that you, we want? How do you want them to perceive you?

And it’s fascinating to do this with large groups of people, which I’ve done, because you might think, or I thought at least, well, everyone’s going to have the same adjectives. Everyone’s going to want to be these things, which is fully not the case. Different people, and particularly as they’re thinking of introducing themselves in different scenarios, have a completely different view on this. And so this can be an interesting exercise to do across teams or in groups as well. And just kind of learn from each other through that process. Because I think it, it helps remind us that not everybody is, thinks the same or is motivated by the same things, which is a very useful thing. So be cognizant of, you know, what are maybe two or three reactions that you’re wanting to create in your audience.

And then think about your life, you know, the experiences you’ve had, what makes you unique, what jobs have you held, but go past the standard things that are on your resume to think about what are the things that make you you. And then connect those things to the perceptions you want to create. And with this, you can use post it notes as well. One of my favorite tools, we’ll talk about them again, where you connect these things together. And then that’ll help you see of the different experiences you’ve had or the unique things that make you you, right? The challenges you’ve faced or the successes you’ve had, how can you connect them and use them to highlight so you’re not saying to somebody, I’m smart and capable, you’re showing it through eventually the story that you tell.

And then really practicing talking aloud through, and this is where you can get comfortable with the storytelling aspect of it. And this is where I think you could say, you know, this feels awkward always. And so instead of imagining yourself in the scenario, imagine you’re telling this story to a friend or to, you know, a long lost cousin or somebody who, you know, you’re trying to bring up to speed on something, but where I think that allows you to really think of it as a story and how the pieces connect.

And so in the book, I walk through a way to do this and map it out and then actually write the story and talk through the story and then you can decide how to refine or cut things down or trim depending on the situation. But it just, it puts us such a different lens on one’s self, I think, because it forces us to try to see ourselves through someone else’s eyes. And it really comes back to a lot of what we’ve been talking about where effective communication is not only for you, it’s by really trying to meet the needs of your audience or your stakeholders. And I think as we think about how we portray ourselves, that there’s opportunity to make use of that as well.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! I think I learned about trying to think about the reaction or the perception that you want the audience to think about, you know, maybe the talk or even you, about you, right? So think maybe sometimes we just focus on the content, content, content, and the delivery and the key message. But we forgot like the reaction or the emotion that we want to bring the audience after the presentation. So thanks for mentioning that.

And I think I also learned in my previous episode as well, right? It’s not all about, you know, giving the facts or maybe promoting something, right? It’s also about self expressing yourself, right? So you mentioned about talking to a friend or maybe just think what’s something unique about you that you can convey to the audience? I think this is actually really key.

[00:59:13] How AI Can Help in Data & Storytelling

Henry Suryawirawan: Any conversation this day, it will be a miss if we don’t mention about AI. So what do you think about the role of AI in storytelling, storytelling with data?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Do you know, I did a reading at a bookstore the other evening. I read Daphne Draws Data, and even there, it was like an eight year old boy who, his hand goes up in the air, and he asked me about Daphne and AI. It really is everywhere.

I think when it comes to storytelling and AI, I think where AI, where I’m hopeful that things can be really powerful is in helping us analyze data so that we can really speed up that part of the process. Because I mean, I spent many years, you know, doing hardcore statistics and it takes so much time. And so to the extent that we can use machines to do that heavy lifting, I think one incredible benefit it is it then frees up more of our time.

And one, we still need to be very what careful consumers of data and learn how to interrogate, and ask questions to make sure that what we’re getting out of it makes sense and is robust. But assuming we get to that point, it should leave us a lot more time for the storytelling piece and for thinking about how we can make things connect with our audience.

Also finding just in my own use of AI, that it can be a really helpful brainstorming partner, because it comes at things with a different lens and a different point of view, which seems like a weird way to characterize a machine. But, you know, where my mind might go, if I need an example for something, or I’m working on a story and wanting to figure out how the pieces connect. My mind will go in one direction, but what I can say to, you know, ChatGPT or whatever I’m working with is, you know, give me 10 ideas for how this could be approached. And it does that with such speed and gets you out of your own head. And cause I think there will be useful scenarios where we can say things like I’m facing an audience that is like this, and we describe it and we say, well, there’s, you know, there’s this one woman who’s kind of hard from this standpoint, but there’s this other guy who’s and we can feed it things that may be able to be a helpful brainstorming partner on some of the stickier pieces when it comes to how we communicate.

I’m bullish that there are going to be a ton of benefits. I know there are also, you know, dark sides and risks that hopefully people smarter than me are spending their time thinking about and guarding against. But I’m excited for the beneficial things that we’ll be able to use AI to do.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I love the brainstorming aspect, right? Because sometimes, uh, especially when we’re creating presentation, right? So having more options, maybe choice of words, maybe like how we convey the message is actually can be a creative aspect, you know. And you choose kind of like the best way to present your talk, right?

[01:02:02] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So, Cole, definitely, uh, I think we all learn a lot, at least for me as well. And I highly recommend your books, you know, Storytelling with You and Storytelling with Data. And we also have Daphne Draws Data. So as we reach the end of our conversation, I only have one last question that I would like to ask you. I always ask this to all my guests. I call this three technical leadership wisdom, but I think for you, you can also spin it into three data leadership wisdom. I guess I leave it up to you to decide.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: So three things. So I would say one, and we’ve touched on some of this already, but one would be, don’t assume that everybody else is like you. Recognize that other people have different motivations, different things they care about, different biases. Because I think particularly when we need to influence or drive someone to understand something in a different way, really being able to step outside of ourselves and communicate for that other person and with their interest and needs in mind will just set us up to be able to communicate and influence more effectively.

Secondly, I would say, find your passion. Find something you are passionate about, and it doesn’t have to be in the workplace. Find it and just notice how you are when you talk about it. What are you doing with your body language, and your facial expressions, and your voice? And think about how you can wrap the best parts of that, into how you communicate in a professional setting as well. Because not every data that we touch, not everything that we need to communicate is always going to be fascinating. But if we can’t genuinely find the interest ourselves in it and convey that to others, we’re not going to be able to get anybody to pay attention to what we need them to pay attention to. So look for your passion, think about how you can fold that into how you’re communicating, and find the interesting facets of your work.

And then I think my third would be, when you want to influence change, and whether this is, you know, you want people to declutter their graphs or stop using pie charts, or you are trying to move people towards some sort of broader change, don’t tell. This is where you need to show and really lead by example. And I think if you can emulate the change that you want to see in yourself and through your own work, then people will see that and you’ll be able to influence better.

And I think you take those three things together and anyone can be an amazing communicator. And as we’ve talked about, being able to communicate effectively is really key for getting others to pay attention to us, pay attention to our work, pay attention to the data and all of the cool things that we’ve done with it.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! Really beautiful. So I think we all can learn from that. I think the message is clear, right? Be a better communicator. And I think it’s a really important.

So if people want to find you, you know, learn from all your resources, is there a place where you would recommend us to go to online?

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Yeah, the best place is going to be storytellingwithdata.com. There you’ll find information on our workshops, our books. We have an online community where people can practice and exchange feedback. We have a YouTube channel that I mentioned, you’ll find all of that there. And a ton of learning resources that I hope everyone will enjoy.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thank you for that. And I’ll put it in the show notes, right? So I think Cole, thank you so much for your time. I really learned a lot. So as I mentioned, right? So I think thanks for, you know, spending the time with me today.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic: Thanks, Henry, I enjoyed it.

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