Storytelling (not Showing Off) With Data

Actionable Insights

If you only have a few minutes, here’s what’s going to make your business smarter with a book on data.

• Everyone should have skimmed this book: “Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals” by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic.
• Analysts need to study this book, work through it, and take a week to redo their graphics.
• Neither our world nor data is 2-dimensional. Yet we make it so by using dashboards and tables, plain old, mostly 2-dimensional representations. Don’t do that. (1) Realize our world and our decisions are multi-variate. (2) Use data to tell a story, to make a point about a large dimensional space, not to impress.

Escaping Flatland Sculptures by Edward Tufte

Chartjunk! That word is a good description of most of the trillions of statistical graphics published in reports, companies, and on the Internet each year. It is probably not the best marketing slogan for Tableau, Looker, and all the other business intelligence pioneers, but it is true nonetheless.

Our world is inevitably multivariate, and that’s exciting! Yet we tend to try to squeeze it into little…