Find the narrative in the numbers

Data points are just numbers until they are analyzed for patterns and trends and made consumable to stakeholders to drive action. Today’s CFOs and finance executives must go beyond analyzing data and shift to storytelling – finding the narrative in the numbers.

From

Partner and Leadership Coach at Ginger Communications.

On the surface, finance and storytelling might seem to be polar opposites: one is about numbers, the other about language. However, if finance teams can uncover the narrative in the numbers, they have at their disposal a powerful tool that provides context to facts and figures. It allows the C-suite, Board and other stakeholders to connect with a message on an emotional level and understand the financial impact on the business.

Here are a few quick tips to start you on your data storytelling journey:

• Look at the data the way a detective examines a crime scene. Then present your evidence and build your case in the form of a narrative. Don’t forget there’s a human story behind every data point, so start to see data as a huge set of tiny stories.

• What’s the strategic narrative of your company? Think about where your customers/clients are right now. Where do you want to take them and how are you going to get them there? What has to happen?

What obstacles need to be overcome? How can you bring them with you? Start by identifying the change you want to create and reverse engineer your story from there.

• Start and end with a story rather than a graph or bar chart. Data visualizations can be effective, but you still need to wrap them in a narrative – and make it personal if you can. Don’t forget that people buy people, not numbers.

• Rather than rattling off figures, think of more inventive and relatable ways to contextualize them – for example, rather than saying, “We sold 1.5 million units,” you could say, “The number of units sold would fill an Olympic-sized stadium.”

• Experiment with one of the basic tenets of effective storytelling – show, don’t tell. For example, a global newspaper recently wrote an article about the wealth position of the richest person on earth ($185 billion USD). To make this number imaginable for the reader, they explained that this money could buy you 400,000 modern town houses in the US. Not everyone is a familiar with financial numbers and these storytelling tricks are effective.