Notes V Music - Data Story Telling
/Am I telling you sing at your next presentation?
No. I’m making an analogy.
I can’t play an instrument. I have no idea what this means:
However I will still happily tell you if a certain song is good or bad. This is thanks to the Data Story Teller - aka the musician. They translate and present the notes to me, in an understandable form. They can tell me a story, make me feel something, and even drive action (cleaning, working out, crying etc).
They can do all of this by just reading and presenting the notes in a certain way, to tell me a story.
Pick The Notes and Explore the World
To start, they do need a good base. Even the most talented musician will struggle to make you cry over their rendition of the chicken dance (well maybe if they didn’t stop playing it):
Say you have a strong base (good quality, popular notes). This isn’t enough.
Notes are written by people for certain reasons - some as an outlet as emotion, something to do, for money etc.
The notes of a song are simply a player in a world that lead to their creation. Understanding that world, at the very least basic probing, can help you better understand the notes and convey their story to other people. This is arguably the most important step, as most of the time you end up exploring the human factor behind the notes - and this is hard to understand and derive from simply reading the notes of a song.
Understanding the world behind the notes, will help you in your journey to create music and tell the story to other people. For example on paper “Highway to Hell” is a bad song to play at a funeral, but if you look into why the song was written, and who is having the funeral, it could end up being the best song to tell the story of the persons life.
If you didn’t take the time to do this, you would instantly dismiss it.
Drive Action
You now have the perfect notes and have an understanding of the world in which they will be used or derived from. This means you will also have a great idea on what will be the best instrument - for example you should know whether you and your guitar will suffice, or you need an entire band.
You will also have a good idea of what you need to do, to drive and encourage action from your audience. Do you need to play with a slow, sad emotion or upbeat and rhythmic?
You get most of these answers by simply exploring the word in the step above - you haven’t even needed to do too much analysis on the notes (apart from the basics, to make sure it isn’t grunge).
You can do use your notes to play music.
You can now use your data to tell a story.
Music to Data
The exploration of the world behind the data yields so much information, but it is usually missed! With it, you can tell a story without even opening your data-set.
I was tasked to try and improve the productivity of a production line. They had been recording times of job speeds for years. I analysed this, made recommendations, set minimum targets and performance managed where appropriate. We got slightly improved productivity, but higher staff turnover for that year.
Couple of years later I did a similar job. Only this time I went and did the job for a day, talking to the workers, supervisors and really understanding the world. Doing this, showed me that not all the production lines were equal. Some were hotter, darker, older.
I then went to my speed data, found the fastest line, and upgraded all the others so they were consistent (in terms of temperature, light and equipment). This improved productivity and decreased staff turnover.
Getting the company to pay for the upgrade, was easier than getting them to enforce a performance management scheme. This is because I played into the human emotion when I told them the story - no one likes working in dark, hot, old conditions.
Am I putting down quantitative data?
No I am not. The idea of “exploring” the world that the data is derived, is in reality gathering data but qualitative instead of quantitative (usually).
I’m not saying qualitative is more important, but it usually tells a better story that humans can relate to, compared to quantitative. If you watch a documentary about a tragedy, they don’t show you a table of the deaths and leave it at that. They usually interview and talk to a couple of individual people, as that tells the viewer a better story.
High up managers are usually from sales backgrounds, as they are good at telling stories based on qualitative (usually fictitious, inaccurate) data. However they can always be put in their place by an ice cold table of data proving them wrong.
You need to be able to back your story up.
So
Do not forget about exploring the world behind the data. This usually provides you quantitative data that is important.
Don’t get caught up in data analysis without exploring the human factor - you need this to tell a story and drive action.
Use your understanding of the world behind the data, the data and human factor, to put together a story that drives actions and yield results.
If you trying to put communicate a good story with quantitative data - start by putting them in a graph. Use my auto resize all charts macro to make sure your presentation is professional.
Also, if you are telling a story with data you have to be aware of the accuracy and limitations. Use my confidence interval calculator to analyse your data samples!