Adding Story to Dull Numbers
If leaders have prodded you to add story to otherwise dry and stodgy data and topics, you’re not alone! Of all the performance review feedback communications coaching clients come to me with, this becomes number one. But how do we tell story around numbers? This becomes our theme for this week’s Medium post with a podcast version via my Sage Sayer’s podcast right here.
Find the Beat Reporter Within
When we’re tasked with updating leadership teams with the numbers and our work, view the subject matter as your reporting beat. You may:
- Keep notes of highlights, interesting gems, industry reports so you’ve plenty to draw upon. Stay audience centered as you gather. Ask: What does my audience really care about?
- Craft compelling headlines vs. boring slide titles. Consider any subhead like teaser text on the Guardian’s home page.
- Think of interesting pull quotes and sound bites.
- Cherry pick the top data — the real stand out data — lose the rest.
- Keep all language relatable vs. jargon-y. And know: Good news must also contain bad news. A story needs tension to compel. (Absence of the above risks any message resembling a thesis or a marketing brochure.)
Explore the Larger Trends
To help find a narrative theme within your numbers, you want to paint a broader picture and share how your numbers sit within. You may:
- Share how the numbers and performance sit within the industry.
- Look for the causes for any upticks or downturns whether those causes be political, consumer, or environmental
- Reflect on historical context within your company. When else have we been here (good moments or bad ones) and what pulled us through? Part of finding narrative within our numbers can tie to looking behind us and where we’ve sat five years prior, ten years, or whether these numbers become historical first.
Look for Lessons Within. Trust.
Part of storytelling ties to looking for what we’re learning along the way. This requires a few mental fitness techniques including:
- Viewing the numbers and trends like a curious anthropologist.
- Trusting you know what you need to know. Use your memory for draft one to determine the most compelling numbers. What stands out?
- Think of themes. Where we were last quarter vs. today and what next quarter might look like. [A potential framework can include a beginning, a middle, and an end with a ‘so what’ at the end, as I outline in this article on storytelling.]
Bring in the Humans.
Storytelling requires real people and a little empathy and openness, too. To help humanize your data, you can try:
- Thinking of the impact behind the numbers and to whom? If your products excelled this quarter, tell a story of a client who benefited — what changed in their life? Why, and how?
- Thinking of the struggles the leadership team may not know of behind the numbers. Any challenges you prevailed over become the vulnerable, intriguing part of your story.
- Sharing how you feel about the numbers — and why? If the numbers worry, inspire, or excite you, tell us — we’re all ears! What are your concerns and your hopes?
Stay Creative.
A request for more storytelling really becomes a plea to make the numbers interesting. Your leaders want to feel engaged and to discuss vs. endure a lecture. To help get there, clients I’ve coached have found success with:
- Employing fun imagery, like clear and then stormy skies, or euphoric teams when they’ve made unbelievable breakthroughs
- Finding metaphors to describe feelings and hopes around the numbers
- Experimenting with format. One quarterly review can become the quarter within five numbers, each telling a different piece of your story. Vary the numbers.
- Avoiding graphs or busy Excel sheets.
- Bringing in experts or insightful quotes. Find the company ‘historian’ who remembers the industry twists and turns. End on a reflective note through quotes, or circle back to a story you launched in the intro and and close the loop in your end notes.
I can see that without a journalistic training or without having taken a writing course, telling a story through data can feel daunting. And yet I believe that we’re all more than capable of storytelling. If you’ve told a story to your peers or to someone you love, you can tell one to your leaders. Also, I’ve found that requests for storytelling may not be literal. Often, leaders simply want to feel engaged with and not lectured to. So pick a theme, trust you know more than you think, and play with it.
Debbi Gardiner McCullough coaches and trains immigrant leaders to become more confident, concise, and mentally fit communicators. From Wisconsin, she owns and runs Hanging Rock Coaching and coaches worldwide with BetterUp.