poseycorp helps innovators become great communicators. (Sometimes by sending out helpful stuff in a newsletter.)
ISSUE 54
Make meaning
“Data doesn’t speak for itself; it needs a storyteller.”
- Nancy Duarte in Data Story
Right at the beginning of her great new book Data Story, Nancy Duarte writes about an experiment that
Chip Heath, co-author with his brother Dan of Made to Stick, did in his Stanford class. He asked each student to give a one minute speech about crime using statistics that Chip provided. Most students used two or three stats in their talks. Only 10% of the students told a story in their talks.
When the students were all done, Chip asked what statistics class members recalled. Only 5% could remember a specific statistic, but 63% of the students remembered the stories.
Human brains are encoded to remember
stories more than we remember data - there are dozens of studies that show the brain’s powerful and deep connection to story.
In our data-saturated world, everyone talks about “data literacy” and “data fluency.” Understanding how to find, make sense of, and draw insights from data is an essential skill in business today - for everyone, not just the data science team.
Nancy, though, takes things a step further. It isn’t enough to be data literate. You need to be able to tell stories with the data. Here’s the book’s money quote: “Transforming numbers into narrative will become part of every leader’s job.”
This book is a pragmatic guide to help you take what she calls the “big leap from making sense out of data to telling a meaningful story with it.”
We aren’t numbers people or word people anymore. We have to be
both!
On poseyblog
We're talking about stories and starting a new decade:
“Yours was the best media training I’ve ever had,” said a CEO client who’s had many.
If you’d like great results, schedule a conversation with me! It’s easy! Reach me at inquiries@poseycorp.com.
Your business must scale, and you must scale with it. Great communicators create the change they want to see in the world. poseycorp helps innovators build powerful messages and the skill to deliver them so they can break through the noise and be heard! Lisa Poulson, poseycorp’s principal, is expert at helping innovators scale by becoming great communicators.
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