Storytelling: True tales from my life experiences

For the past few years, I have been performing as a public storyteller. My stage stories are true tales from my own life experiences, and the act of remembering, writing and sharing various memories has often been both cathartic and exhilarating. My performances have taken place at a variety of small venues around the San Francisco Bay Area, with audiences ranging from a few dozen to a hundred or so.

Last month, I ventured into San Francisco to one of the many “Story Slams” run by The Moth [1], a national organization that hosts more than 500 events per year and produces both a weekly radio show that appears on 480+ stations and a podcast with over 70,000,000 annual downloads. At the Moth StorySLAMs, those who are interested in performing put their names into a hat and are chosen at random. There are five storytellers selected during the first half of the show and five more after intermission, and each storyteller has five minutes to perform. Designated judges hand out scores to each storyteller immediately afterward, and at the end of the night the storyteller with the highest total score is declared the winner.

In hopes of being selected to perform, I had prepared a story [2], and as luck would have it, I was the fourth storyteller whose name was picked. My story was well-rehearsed, the audience of more than 200 was enthusiastic, and I walked off stage feeling great. Minutes later, the judges’ scores went up on the board and suddenly I found myself in first place!

In that moment, this no longer felt like a harmless hobby but rather an opportunity for glory! Winning that night’s competition would make me eligible for the Bay Area Moth GrandSLAM, held each year at the historic Castro Theatre [3] in front of a sold-out crowd of 1,400. I envisioned a flood of texts and emails from family and friends around the country telling me that they heard me telling a story on the radio. I imagined opportunities to deliver lucrative corporate keynote speeches based on my life’s adventures.

Alas, the ninth storyteller of the night told a wonderful tale about being commissioned to write a magazine article about the contents of celebrity garbage cans and beat me by just a couple of decimal points. Finishing in 2nd place, I left with a rueful smile on my face, and returned the next morning to my day job as a business analytics professor. 

Important Part of My Day Job

It turns out that storytelling is also an increasingly important part of what I do at work these days. Most of my courses are taught to MBA students, and for the past several years I have been hard at work preparing them to become “citizen data scientists” [4] and “analytics translators” [5]. Gartner defines a “citizen data scientist” as someone “who creates or generates models that use advanced diagnostic analytics or predictive and prescriptive capabilities, but whose primary job function is outside the field of statistics and analytics.” The “analytics translator” is usually described as less hands-on and more strategic, with deep domain knowledge, technical fluency, project management skills and an entrepreneurial spirit. Both roles, however, serve as vital connective tissue between the core business functions and specialized advanced analytics professionals – and effective storytelling is a critical part of their job descriptions.

Even before the International Institute for Analytics predicted that, “storytelling will be the hot new job in analytics” [6], my previous professional experience had taught me the value of effectively presenting analytical work to nontechnical business people. My colleagues and I long ago made managerial presentations of data- and model-intensive analyses a mandatory component of every MBA course we offer. But with no clear idea of how to teach data storytelling, year after year I found myself listening to my students’ presentations with great frustration, splashing copious amounts of red ink on their slides, and exhorting them to revise and resubmit their presentation slides. Though this process was both painful and inefficient for all of us, my students would regularly thank me for the detailed feedback … and the not infrequent doses of “tough love.” Many would also later share stories about how developing these skills had helped them professionally, something that I found very gratifying. 

Sense of Relief

Nevertheless, I felt a great sense of relief when I found Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s “Storytelling with Data” [7]. In her 2015 book, Knaflic carefully and thoughtfully organizes, describes and solidifies many of the ideas that I had been struggling to systematically convey to my students. Though the book’s primary focus is on effective graphics (its subtitle is “A data visualization guide for business professionals”), it also includes valuable discussion of context, audience, empathy and story structure. Along with the recently released “Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice!” workbook companion, this book has proven to be an invaluable resource.

Brent Dykes’ newly released book “Effective Data Storytelling,” goes even further, positioning storytelling at the center of the analytics value creation story. In particular, he carefully describes a great deal of scientific research on how we humans process facts (including the classical System 1/System 2 concepts from the work of Kahneman and Tversky [8], as well as results from more recent studies) and contrasting it with how we respond to stories. He robustly supports his money quote from psychologist Jonathan Haidt (“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor”) with references to recent neuroscience research that has revealed a great deal about how people respond to different stimuli. The key findings: We instinctively respond to facts with a variety of defenses and biases, whereas stories activate more of our brains, help us connect with one another, improve our understanding, and make us more amenable to change.

I recently caught up with Dykes by phone to talk about his book and his regular column on Forbes.com [9]. Given that he comes from a marketing background, I was surprised to discover that his views on data storytelling were grounded in a supply chain metaphor: On the journey from data to information to insight to impact, too often the failure takes place in the “last mile” as a result of poor communication. Data storytelling, he argues, is often the key to preventing these types of lost opportunities. I heartily agree.

Speaking of lost opportunities, as of this writing I have not yet qualified for the Moth GrandSLAM, presented any of my stories on national radio or been invited to tell my tales at any corporate gatherings. On the plus side, I have been invited to develop a class on the topic of “Storytelling with Data” that I will be delivering to executives in Singapore this summer. Maybe there is some fame and fortune ahead of me as a storyteller after all. 

References and Notes

1. https://themoth.org/
2. A slightly longer version of this particular story can be heard at https://www.theshoutstorytelling.com/uploads/1/1/5/8/11588558/vijaymay2016.mp3
3. https://www.castrotheatre.com/
4. https://blogs.gartner.com/carlie-idoine/2018/05/13/citizen-data-scientists-and-why-they-matter/
5. https://hbr.org/2018/02/you-dont-have-to-be-a-data-scientist-to-fill-this-must-have-analytics-role
6. https://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/12/prweb12384934.htm
7. http://www.storytellingwithdata.com/books
8. https://pubsonline.informs.org/do/10.1287/LYTX.2013.05.09/full/
9. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/#602ffb094c5b