Narrative by Numbers

As jobs become increasingly similar, there are two skills that everyone needs
if they’re going to thrive. ese are the ability to interrogate and make sense
of data, and the ability to use insights extracted from data to persuade others
to act. Analytics + storytelling = influence.
Humans are hardwired to respond to stories and story structure. Stories
are how we make sense of and navigate the world. We respond best to
stories that are based on evidence. But storytellers need to use data as the
foundation of stories, not as the actual stories themselves. To be truly
impactful, rational facts need to be presented with a veneer of emotion.
e Big Data revolution means more data is available than ever. e
trouble is, most people aren’t very numerate or good at statistics. Many find
it hard to look at data and extract insights. Meanwhile, those for whom
numbers hold no fear don’t always make the best storytellers. ey
mistakenly believe they need to prove their point by showing their
workings.
ere are some simple and effective rules of data-driven storytelling that
help everyone tell more compelling, evidence-based stories, whoever they
need to convince. Narrative by Numbers shows you how.

Sam Knowles is a corporate storyteller with 30 years’ experience helping

businesses communicate beer. Originally a classicist, he holds a doctorate
in psyology, the source of his understanding of human motivation and his
passion for data-driven stories. His purpose is to make businesses sound
human.
We need this book! Evidence and numbers help us to make sense of the world, to
transcend how things appear, and find out how they really are. But this is not a
tenical journey – it’s a human one, of meanings and relationships, and Sam
Knowles shows why we need to grasp that first. With an armful of words, a poet
cras meaning or passion or action. But what do we do with an armful of statistics?
Sam Knowles has the answers.
Tracey Brown, Director, Sense About Science

Numbers aren’t the enemy of narrative – quite the opposite. Relevant data should
be the foundation stones of stories with impact. is approa is clearly relevant for
the resear and insights business, but also today for every kind of organisation:
public, private, and third sector. Sam Knowles makes the case for storytelling by
numbers powerfully and persuasively, while at the same time offering a clear how-
to guide. To be recommended.
Lord Cooper of Windrush, Founder, Populus

We live in a world of uncertainty. What and who can we trust – and how will we
know? Sam Knowles helps to unravel today’s biggest question. His thesis – that
data is a trusted friend whi provides life’s “True North” and the certainty we
yearn for – is compelling.
Miael Greenlees, “Godfather of London advertising”, Founder, Chairman & CEO of Gold
Greenlees Tro

John Naisbi, author of Megatrends, said: “We are drowning in information but
starved for knowledge.” Today, we are drowning in data and starving for wisdom.
In this book, Sam Knowles teaes us skills that are practical and easily applied to
make sense of data that every marketer needs.
Bharat Avalani, Former Unilever marketer; storyteller and memory collector

People who are good with words are seldom good with numbers and vice versa – or
so conventional wisdom has it. Sam Knowles appears to be very good at both. His
book is a persuasive case for why combining narrative and numbers is essential in
an age of big data and short messages. I will be recommending it to my students.
Professor Trevor Morris, Rimond University

Sam’s book is the perfect embodiment of the principles he uncovers and outlines.
He looks at and makes sense of the data, and weaves it into a story that is both
convincing and inspiring. He ably demonstrates his central premise: analytics plus
storytelling equals influence. And with this book: QED. Essential reading for
anyone in the insight industry, or anyone who has wrien or sat through an
interminable presentation of loosely related data points and cried out for some
story to make sense of it all.
Jem Fawcus, Founder & Group CEO, Firefish

Over the last several years many books have been wrien to help organizations
make sense of marketing data. Unfortunately for those marketers and
communicators on the front lines, many of those books were wrien with the
analyst in mind. at angle, while valuable for the analysts, dismisses the people
who need to use data the most. e good news for that audience is that Sam
Knowles has been in their shoes many times before and brings that perspective to
Narrative by Numbers. Sam presents an excellent overview and guide for how
marketers can utilize data to tell beer stories within their organizations. e
framework that Sam presents will allow you to understand marketing performance,
grow your budget and expand your influence within the organization. It is a must
read.
Chu Hemann, Author

e thesis of this book is spot on. Storytelling has been a defining part of humanity
since we came down from the trees, sat in front of the fire, and painted caves. With
the abundance of data that surrounds us all today, our stories have the potential to
be that mu more relevant and powerful.
Miael Karg, Group CEO, Ebiquity

e wealth of information that swirls around corporations today also threatens to

overwhelm them. But if the right data is captured and it’s analyzed in the right
way, the insights extracted truly can drive corporate strategy. Sam’s approa to
storytelling with statistics as the starting point is both practical and actionable. is
is a polished primer from a seasoned practitioner.
Chris Deri, President, Teneo Digital

is book is the 101 for anyone who wants their insights to shine. Sam guides the
reader on an engaging journey, from data to impactful delivery, by explaining the
methods to cra a data driven story.
Tim Ward, Head of Analytics, Square Enix West

Analytics is so important in guiding decision-making and turning insights into

action. But drowning your audience with facts and numbers is a real turn-off.
Turning these numbers into stories is the way to engage people – consumers as well
as customers and employees – making them real and tangible and injecting them
with relevant emotionality. Sam knows how to aieve this with impact, and this
book shows you how.
 Vera Markl-Moser, Global Sustainable Business Development Director, Unilever

e separate worlds of art and science merge in the masterful hands of Sam
Knowles as he expertly guides us into understanding how to find the art in the
science. is hugely important book is essential reading for communicators,
scientists, academics, and anyone who needs to understand how to find stories in
the numbers.
Tim Johns, Business Coa and former Head of Communications for Sainsbury’s, BT, and
Unilever

e Big Data revolution has confused the world’s communicators for too long.
What really maers is the relatively small and self-contained neigh-bourhood of
relevant data. Sam’s book shows organisations what to look for, what to avoid, and
how to exploit the power of data to tell engaging and impactful stories.
Neville Hobson, Social Media Strategist at the Internet Society

For as long as we can remember, data merants and storytellers have been quite
content to plough their separate fields – the storytellers wanted no tru with
numbers while the data merants remained blissfully ignorant of the power of the
narrative. With Narrative by Numbers, Sam Knowles has shaered this cosy co-
existence and produced a timely synergy of hard data and storyline. Like an
ingenious alemist, he’s succeeded in fusing together two elements that once
occupied very separate worlds. In the process he’s created a new and explosive
compound, the reverberations of whi we’re going to hear for many years to come.
Dr Peter Colle, Psyologist and Body Language Expert, University of Oxford, UK
Narrative by Numbers

How to Tell Powerful and Purposeful Stories with Data

SAM KNOWLES
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 ird Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 Sam Knowles

e right of Sam Knowles to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, meanical, or other means, now known or hereaer
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-8153-5315-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-8153-5314-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-13722-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Joanna Sans

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Acknowledgements and inspirations
Preface: analytics + storytelling = influence

1 e two skills everyone needs today

2 Keep it simple

3 Find and use only relevant data

4 e four Es of effective storytelling

5 Beware the Curse of Knowledge

6 Talk human

7 Five gods of data-driven storytelling

8 Why facts maer more than ever

Epilogue
Where to find out more
Index
Anowledgements and Inspirations
Narrative by Numbers may have one author, but it has many interested
cousins, some of them several times removed.
e idea for a book came up during my first coaing session – as a
coaing guinea pig – with the splendid Tim Johns. Tim has been a client,
will always be a mentor, and morphed into a coa when he decided to train
as one. I had six brilliant sessions for the price of none as he learned his
coaing trade. He became progressively less directive over our year
working together, just aer I’d set up my corporate and brand storytelling
business, Insight Agents. But at the end of our first session, he said: “If you
want to become Mr Data-Driven Storyteller, if you want to give a TED talk,
it’s simple. You have to write the book. Get to it.” So here it is. We’ll see
about the TED …
My wife, life, and business partner Saskia, with whom I’ve already spent
more than half my life (we got together on the first day of the second term
of our first year at university). I’ve been saying I’m going to write a book –
on comedy, on my father, on insight – since almost the first day we met.
Saskia’s sense of reality, tinged with a very helpful dose of scepticism, has
always kept me honest. So here it is at last, my darling.
Dr Beth Miller, my writing coa. OK, I don’t pay her (all the time) to
help with my writing, but she’s been a true inspiration. First for geing her
novels (and non-fiction, including the excellent Arers and Shakespeare
handbooks) published and selling. Second, for the unforgeable course “Get
Going On Your Book Before Christmas” in autumn 2014. ird, for telling
me that the only way to write a book is to write a book – no excuses. And
fourth, for suggesting that I set up a Writing Group with other writers, to
share and critique work and frustrations between us.
Derek Allen, Annie Maey, and Lulah Ellender, the other members of
my Writing Group. We meet every now and again, usually over the
legendary jerk ien (for me at least) at the Lewes Arms, and together we
make a great mutual support network. Your stories of the Jews in Denmark
during World War II, self-discovery in the Australian outba against a
badrop of parental madness, and finding yourself and your mother via
your grandmother’s lists are all inspirational. And it’s all down to you three
– especially Lulah – that I’ve wrien Narrative by Numbers first and as the
prequel to How to Be Insightful, whi I’ve been working on since 2014 and
will follow soon. Promise.
Stuart Lotherington, Senior Partner at SBR Consulting. One of the most
inspiring and impactful trainers I’ve ever come across. Aer aending a
consultative sales training course with SBR in 2012 that fundamentally
anged my outlook on how to do business, I occasionally aend their free
taster sessions in Covent Garden’s Connaught Rooms. In early January 2016,
Stuart ran a workshop on goal seing, and his ten-point, goal-seing
framework is what finally gave me the stimulus to write this thing.
And lastly to my son and shareholder in the family business, Max, whose
love of puns, and playing with language, and storytelling since he could
speak, are just three of a thousand things about him that make me laugh and
love and smile every day. His edit of an early dra of Chapter 1 was brutal,
but spot on.
To you all, thanks for the inspiration. e mistakes – as ever – are the
sub-editor’s.
Preface: Analytics + Storytelling = Influence
e two core skills required to thrive in the knowledge economy are
analytics and storytelling. I wrote this book to explain how important and
yet straightforward it is to combine these two skills. And to show how
impactful and influential you can be if you can successfully weave
narratives that are data-driven by design.
It is my intention that Narrative by Numbers should be instructive,
entertaining, and at the same time intensely practical. While the rules and
guidance contained in these pages could never hope to be definitive and
would never pretend to be so, my aspiration is that those arged with being
data-driven storytellers are likely to exceed their peers’ and bosses’
expectations if they follow the advice set out here.
Ea topic apter includes an example of a data-driven story from the
public eye over the past decade or so, stories that have moved individuals to
action and in some cases mobilised millions. And ea topic apter also
concludes with a practical exercise designed to reinforce the lessons learned
and rules extracted, ea one tried and tested in the training sessions I run.
For there’s lile point of theory without practice, just as, for me, there’s lile
point of stories without data, woven into a narrative.
To support this book and its mission to help the world’s data-driven
storytellers become more impactful yet, we’ve created a website called
www.narrativebynumbers.com. Swing by, pull up a virtual air, and
become part of the community. It’ll be great to have you along and hear the
tales you have to tell.
I trust you find this book and its site helpful.
1
e Two Skills Everyone Needs Today
[Nobel laureate] Lord Rutherford used to tell his staff at the Cavendish Laboratory
that if they couldn’t explain their physics to a barmaid, it was bad physics.

David Ogilvy (1963), Confessions of an Advertising Man

First Principles
ere are two skills that everyone needs in today’s knowledge economy to
thrive and do their jobs most effectively. ese are the ability to interrogate,
understand, and extract meaning from data and statistics, and the ability to
use the insights derived from the data to move people to action. Analytics +
storytelling = influence. e purpose of this book is to show you how to
excel at both and make the combination worth very mu more than the
sum of the parts. We’re here to understand how to develop narrative by
numbers.
We are all, in the words of U.S. business writer Dan Pink in his book To
Sell Is Human, in the “moving business”. And the best way to persuade,
inspire, and convince others to do something is to bring together analytics
and storytelling: to make data and statistics the foundation stones of the
stories you tell. e impact of combining analytics with storytelling holds
good for most everyone working in the public or private sector; in
commerce, finance, or government; in academia, medicine, or education.
e data generated by and available to everyone in all stripes of organ-
isation has grown exponentially in recent years, and the social media
revolution means that today many more voices maer in the public domain.
In one capacity or another, both formally and informally, more and more
individuals have responsibility for speaking for or as an organisation. ese
trends show lile sign of slowing down, whi means the ostensibly fire-
and-ice ability to tell impactful stories rooted in data and statistics will be
everybody’s business within no more than ten years.
In caricature, the data analyst is an introverted, self-reliant number-
cruner who has beer relationships with maines than he – and it’s
always he in the stereotype – does with other people. He’s got a brain the
size of the planet and colleagues consider him to be a social liability to be
kept away from clients at all costs, but the insights he can generate with
data can help unlo the allenge at hand. ere are also oen pointed (and
usually groundless) snidey sideswipes at the analyst for his aention to
personal hygiene, be it showering, shaving, or skincare.
 And in caricature, the raconteur is an extraverted, entertaining,
empathetic figure who comes alive in a roomful of people and who can use
the power of storytelling to convince anyone to do anything. Even Inuit to
buy ice, Geordies to buy coal, and Athenians – as the cliés have it – to buy
owls. Colleagues and friends talk warmly about storytellers, and while in
business their appearance may be protected or rationed – well, you wouldn’t
want too mu of a good thing, would you? – when the meeting is set, it’s
one not to be missed.
e truth about both capabilities and the aretypal individuals who best
exemplify them is rather more nuanced and prosaic.
e Trouble with Education
Twenty or thirty years ago, it was fashionable in education systems around
the world to classify students as either artists or scientists. I know because –
in Britain at least – I was there. It was the done thing to annel people as
early as 14 or 15 to pursue one path or the other. is would dictate oices
of subjects for the last two years of sool, whi would in turn dictate
oices of degree courses and, inevitably, career trajectory. If you didn’t do
emistry, physics, and maths for your final sool exams, it was very hard
to see you progressing far in the emical engineering world.
Unfortunately, it became a badge of honour among many of those artists
– who found mathematics to be a allenge and so gave it up as soon as they
were not mu more than numerate – to happily admit they were “no good”
at the subject. Perversely, it even became a lile bit cool to say so, too. is
problem was first formally identified in 1959 by C.P. Snow in his Rede
lecture at Cambridge titled “e Two Cultures”. Snow was both a novelist
and a physical emist – a Renaissance man and data-driven storyteller, if
ever there was one – and his lecture proposed that the forced separation of
the humanities and the sciences would prevent the world from solving its
most pressing allenges. His diagnosis of the allenge is so well expressed,
it’s worth repeating this line of argument:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the
standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have,
with considerable gusto, been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of
scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how
many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was
cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific
equivalent of: “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” I now believe that if I had
asked an even simpler question – such as, “What do you mean by mass, or
acceleration?”, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, “Can you read?” – not
more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the
same language. So, the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of
the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their
Neolithic ancestors would have had.
Inspired by Snow’s lecture, early 1960s satirists Miael Flanders and
Donald Swann painted a caricatured picture of how those sooled in the
humanities need to talk to scientists if they want to make themselves
understood. In the introduction to their song The First and Second Law of
Thermodynamics, Flanders addresses an imaginary scientist with the line:
“Ah, H2SO4 Professor. Don’t synthesize anything I wouldn’t synthesize. Oh,
and the reciprocal of pi to your good wife.”
Today, fortunately, the impact of early oices is being mitigated to an
extent by broader advanced level subject arrays – particularly thanks to
innovations su as the International Baccalauréat. It’s encouraging seeing
the Arts trying to jimmy themselves among Science, Tenology,
Engineering, and Maths, and to see that STEM subjects are morphing into
STEAM.
e fact that jobs are, indeed, becoming more similar also helps. Because,
increasingly, we are all in the moving business, to thrive in this new world
order we all need to master the skills of analytics and storytelling.
e Trouble with Psyology
Psyology also needs to shoulder some of the blame for the misperception
that analytics and storytelling are not easy bedfellows – or at least the wilful
misinterpretation of some influential psyological resear. It is still widely
believed, for instance, that these two core skills are mediated by different
hemispheres or sides of the brain.
Humans are simple creatures, albeit simple creatures in possession of the
most powerful supercomputer yet devised or discovered: the human brain. I
say we are simple creatures because we tend to look for simple, elegant, and
reductive solutions to the allenges that face us. We also use a wide array
of shortcuts – tenically known as cognitive heuristics – to try to solve
these allenges. While heuristics enable us to make decisions when
confronted with mountains of data, they oen lead us to make very
predictable mistakes in data processing and decision-making under pressure
or uncertainty. is has been aracterised as System 1 thinking by the
psyologist Daniel Kahneman in his popular 2011 book Thinking, Fast and
Slow, in contrast to more deliberative, considered, and slower System 2
thinking. at book summarises decades of Kahneman’s resear, including
the award-winning experiments he ran with his long-time collaborator,
Amos Tversky.
A good example of this process in action is the universal human desire to
favour single-factor solutions – solutions that say that “the Gulf War was
about oil”, that “Leicester City won the premiership because of Claudio
Ranieri’s leadership”, or that “Trump won the 2016 election because of fake
news”. When we’re generalists looking into a specialist field, as most of us
are most of the time considering most issues, we find it very difficult to
consider the interaction of multiple factors working together. Factors like:
Ranieri’s management style, plus Vardy, Mahrez, and Kanté all peaking in
the same team at the same time, plus the Premiership’s Big Six clubs all
underperforming for different reasons in the 2015/16 season, plus Jose
Mourinho imploding and being saed by Chelsea, plus the impact of the
Sky billions on smaller clubs’ playing budgets, plus media momentum, plus
bookmakers’ commentary, plus, plus, plus …
When it comes to popular neuroscience – a dangerous oxymoron if ever
there was one – the le brain/right brain, analytical/intuitive, sciences/arts,
rational/emotional diotomy has proved to be one of the most stubborn
and pervasive and inaccurate separations of function yet perpetrated by
psyology on its lay readers. It’s a complete caricature, and a convenient
single-factor explanation of the ultimate supercomputer that is the human
brain. It is, in the handle of one of my favourite Twier feeds, total
@neurobollos. And it’s been popularised at every turn by the reductionist,
popular media.
Yes, it’s true that certain functions more connected with analytical
processing have been identified as generating more le than right brain
activity. But to ascribe this function to a single hemisphere and to categorise
individuals as le- or right-brained on this basis is to display gross
ignorance of the finer-grained nature of the brain.
Computer/brain analogies are always imperfect. is is because the
billions of neurons and junctions between them – the synapses – not to
mention the hundreds of different neurotransmiers at work simultaneously,
independently and on ea other, are generations more complex than any
computer made by humans to date. Or for the foreseeable future.
Talking about the impact of brain damage on brain function, the
psyologist Riard Gregory1 drew a famous analogy: “If I remove a
transistor from a radio and the result is that the only sound that I can get out
of a radio is a howl, I am not entitled to conclude that the function of the
transistor in the intact radio is as a howl suppressor.”
Just as a transistor is not a howl suppressor, so the le hemisphere is not
responsible for analytics nor the right brain storytelling. Complex brain
function like analytics requires the simultaneous and sequential firing and
interaction of hundreds or more of interconnected functional units
controlling discrete subroutines. ese exist across both hemispheres. It
would be convenient if the generalist, lay public could understand the le
brain as the analytical part of the brain and the right as the storytelling part,
but only convenient because it would tell a simple, reductionist story. And
as Steven Pinker frustratingly concludes in his 1997 book, How the Mind
Works, as creatures we la the cognitive aritecture to understand the
promise of the title of his book. Frustratingly, but – it appears – quite
correctly.
e other glaring error of the le brain/right brain, analytics/storytelling
division of both function and types of people is that it assumes that the other
hemisphere (and functionality) is inactive. So, analysts can’t communicate,
and communicators can’t analyse. While it’s true that some people are
naturally beer at analysis than others, and others are naturally beer
storytellers, as jobs in the knowledge economy converge and as we all
gravitate towards the “moving business”, we are all required to excel across
both domains. And the motive of this drive is a lile word with a big impact
on all our lives. Data.
e Rise and Rise of Data
Data has grown so fast and to su an extent that it’s rarely talked about
these days as just plain old data. Today it’s usually big data. And though
English resists the temptation to follow its Germanic cousins and capital-ise
words or phrases other than names, countries, or brands, big data is also
very oen Big Data. Perhaps it’s grown so mu, it’s already acquired titular
or nation status.
It’s hard to keep a handle on how mu data individuals, businesses, and
nations produce, and many find the sheer volume of data available today to
be overpowering – threatening, even. In Big Data: A Revolution That Will
Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, Viktor Mayer-Sönberger and
Kenneth Cukier calculated that, by the end of 2013, there were an estimated
1,200 exabytes (EB) of data stored on earth. 1EB is 10^18bytes. Or 1bn GB,
enough to fill 40bn, 32GB iPads, whi would stret from the Earth to the
moon. And we produced the same volume of data again in 2014. If, in a
single year, we produced as mu data as had ever been produced in the 574
years since Gutenberg’s first printing press, it’s clear that the overwhelming
majority of all data produced has been produced in the past few years. e
graph is only going to become ever-more asymptotic.
Data is geing bigger everywhere, in every aspect of our lives. Cars
produce and record details about every trip you take, from fuel economy to
average tyre pressure as speed and temperatures ange. Every phone call
you make generates permanent records – about your location, the person
you called, for how long, what your talked about. Personal fitness devices
from Apple Wates to Fitbits record every heartbeat, as well as exercise and
sleep paerns, and then give you a nudge when you haven’t been for a run
for a few days or been mindful for a few hours. And conversations on social
media reveal what people think – perhaps particularly vocal people in the
early days of social, but today mu closer to representative samples – about
products, brands, personalities, and politicians.
e pace with whi data is growing shows no signs of slowing down – if
anything, it’s accelerating – and there are two interrelated factors to support
this assertion (a bit of data-driven storytelling, if you will). One is that
Moore’s Law of exponential growth continues apace. Gordon Moore, who
cofounded two pioneering silicon ip businesses in the 1960s – Fairild
Semiconductor and Intel – observed in a seminal paper in 1965 that the
number of transistors on dense, integrated circuits doubles every year or so.
By 1975, Moore revised this down to every two years. What we’ve seen on
average since 1965 is in fact a doubling about every 18 months.
Twice as many transistors in the same space every 18 months means
eaper and faster computer ips, both memory and processing ips.
ey’re eaper because they take up less physical space and use less of the
precious material silicon. ey’re faster because electrons representing the
ones and zeroes of digital data processing have progressively shorter
distances to travel. As a result, computers continue to get faster and eaper
and storage capacity increases. Because it doubles every 18 months, this
represents exponential growth according to a geometric rather than an
arithmetic progression.
I’m mu less interested in the data privacy or security or Big Brother
aspects of the Big Data revolution. at’s not to say these aren’t important
issues for the world to consider and agree on; they are. It’s just that there are
plenty of people and resources more knowledgeable about those areas than
me. I’m interested in the potential that the explosion of data offers for beer,
fact-based, evidence-driven storytelling. is is because spoing insights
and paerns and trends in data is one of the keys to beer storytelling –
storytelling that’s rooted in human truths we couldn’t record or observe or
report on before, but that are now lile more than a few clis away for
even entry-level users.
e second factor supporting the assertion that the Big Data revolution
shows no sign of slowing down concerns the tools developed to harness,
manage, and make sense of data. Just as there’s more data available about
almost everything that’s going on in the world, so the tools for analysing
and visualising Bigger Data sets are geing beer and simpler and more
straightforward to use. Tools like IBM Watson. Tools like Tableau. Tools like
Brandwat.
e real allenge of Big Data for storytellers is finding and isolating that
lile corner of it – Lile Big Data, or maybe lile big data – that’s relevant
to the story you want to tell. And then analysing it and extracting meaning
from it. But the real power of using relevant, lile big data sets as the
foundation for beer storytelling is that it’s true. is is a theme that I and
my co-presenters Neville Hobson and omas Stoele return to in every
episode of our Small Data Forum podcast (see www.smalldataforum.com or
iTunes).
As I’ll explore in the last apter of this book, my contention is that we
don’t live in a post-truth era, whatever the Goves and Trumps and Bannons
of this world would have you believe. We live in a more open and data-ri
world in whi anyone can cross-e what anyone else says. And for
brands and corporations, politicians and personalities looking to grow and
sustain loyal audiences – audiences who can become, through social media,
their very advocates – truth and authenticity have never been more
important.
e Power and Impact of Storytelling
As cognitive creatures, humans are hardwired to respond to stories and
story structure. Stories are how we make sense of and navigate the world.
We pay aention to stories, we are persuaded by stories, and we react to
them. To do something different, or to carry on doing the same thing our
families have been doing for generations. In Mar 2017, the English
sociologist and broadcaster Tom Shakespeare quoted novelist Philip Pullman
to Radio 4’s The Power and Peril of Stories: “Aer nourishment, shelter and
companionship, stories are the things we need most in the world.”
Story structure was first identified – or at least first codified – by Ancient
Greek philosopher Aristotle in his elegantly brief, fourth-century BC work,
The Poetics. Considering the art forms of the day – principally epic poetry,
tragedy, and comedy – he showed that people respond best to stories with a
three-act structure; a beginning, a middle, and an end; a thesis (proposition),
an antithesis (an opposing view or plot), and a synthesis (a bringing
together). Academics and practitioners since have developed this beguilingly
simple structure, labelling the first act the set-up, the second act the
confrontation, and the third act the resolution. Indeed, Hollywood
scriptwriters and screenwriters have also contributed mu theory and
practice to our understanding of story structure.
American solar Joseph Campbell identified a 12-stage narrative paern
whi he called the hero’s journey and is the narrative structure many epic
stories of trial and redemption follow. Common elements include the call to
adventure, meeting and being trained by a mentor, tests and trials in a world
different from the world inhabited by the hero, rewards for overcoming
adversity, and a return to the world where the story started. Just consider
Star Wars and Harry Potter, The Odyssey and The Aeneid, Little Red Riding
Hood and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Not to mention episodes, series, and
entire boxed-set narrative arcs of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Modern
Family.
e reason these stories resonate so well with us is because they are based
on universal principles of storytelling. e three-, 12-, and other numbered-
step models – identified and expounded by academics and practitioners
from Aristotle to Robert McKee – are designed to draw out universal rules
from stories that resonate. Stories about people like us who have to
experience something extraordinary in order to move on with their lives. We
are able to make our own decisions in our mu more mundane, slower-
paced lives by reference to those stories that ime best with us. We may not
be a king or a queen, we may not be dealing with murderous plots of evil
dictators, but the power of great story, well told, is our ability to learn from
it because it feels authentic and like something we could go through. Our
lives are all reflected through the prism of Game of Thrones.
e literature goes on to suggest that we respond best to stories that are
based on reality whi itself depends on experience and evidence: stories
that are rooted in genuine, data-driven insights that explain an aspect of the
human condition and are wrapped in a veneer of emotion. As it is my
intention to demonstrate in this book – through both theory and practice –
modern-day organisational storytellers need to use data, facts, and evidence
as the foundation of their stories. Not instead of stories or as the stories
themselves.
e economist Steve Levi and the journalist Stephen Dubner have
proved themselves to be the masters of data-driven storytelling through
their Freakonomics franise – the books, the (partially sanctioned) film, and
the podcast. At time of writing, Freakonomics Radio had just published its
300th weekly episode. Think Like a Freak is the closest thing they’ve come
to writing an instructional manual, and it distils their learnings into a very
readable how-to guide. ey conclude this book with the line: “Stories sti
with us; they move us; they persuade us to consider the constancy and
frailties of the human experience.”
We’re All Storytellers Now
Before the Big Data and social media revolutions, communication was a
closed shop and a restricted discipline. In corporations and governments, in
the private and the public sector, communication was done by
communications professionals – an ironic soubriquet, given that both
communications departments and communications agencies are populated
by amateur generalists. Most oen, these people were arts graduates, except
in unusual cases that required specialist tenical or biomedical knowledge,
su as science or law or medicine.
Communication was a mediated monologue, with communications
departments and/or agencies issuing statements, and media outlets using
that information to report on what the organization did and said. ey
didn’t blindly report, copy-and-paste style, what the PR teams put out. Not
all the time, at any rate. For investigative journalism has a ri history, from
Watergate to News International’s phone haing; from Woodward and
Bernstein to Ni Davies. But very few individuals – particularly in listed
businesses or positions of public authority and power – were mandated or
even allowed to speak.
How different the world is today. Not only do most people who work in
any category of organisation have personal social media profiles on whi
they share details of their lives outside the office (Twier, Face-book,
YouTube, Instagram), but many also use these annels and others besides
(personal or company blogs, LinkedIn, Reddit) to comment and share their
opinions on issues of direct relevance to the businesses they represent. ey
are involved in a process of impressionistic or pointillist corporate image
building, adding their opinion to that of colleagues and competitors.
Today, many more voices maer. Anyone with a smartphone and a Wi-Fi
connection has as mu right and as mu ance of being heard as anyone
else. ey have a ance to get their voice out there, the same ance as
anyone else on social media sites – bar celebrities and high-profile
commentators to whom a different set of rules apply. Only ten years ago,
that would not have been possible. Influential bloggers start trends, celebrity
efs cause products or ingredients to sell out, and doctors – particularly in
the U.S. – can lead unsafe drugs to be recalled from the market by
regulatory authorities.
In this world – and it’s a world that’s not going away or slowing down
any time soon – everyone in an organisation has the potential to be a
storyteller. For themselves in the context of their employment, of course –
su as when experts in a business aend conferences. But also on behalf of
the organisation they work for. Again, for the purposes of this book, I’m less
interested in the ethical or governance issues raised by the democratisation
of corporate and brand storytelling. at’s a maer for legal teams and
counsel inside organisations, and there are plenty of good resources about
how to get your employees to be a social media asset and not a liability,
starting with “don’t tweet drunk”. What I’m keen to explore is how, given
the reality of a world in whi many more voices maer, we can all make
beer use of data and statistics to tell beer, more convincing, more
impactful stories.
Telling Stories with Data and Statistics
However specialised workers in the knowledge economy become – as
researers, managers, or tenicians; as scientists, data analysts, or
consultants – there truly are today two core skills everyone needs: analytics
and storytelling. e higher up an organisation we go, the further we’re
likely to get from the raw data itself. But to tell stories authentically and
with impact, we need to understand not just what the data show but also
why and how. is is the sense in whi everyone’s jobs are becoming
increasingly similar.
So, this book is designed to help many different people in many different
types of organisation in their quest to become beer, data-driven
storytellers.
ey might work in a communications agency – advertising, PR, or
digital – and need to create a new idea for their client’s product, brand, or
service; for a company, an NGO, or a arity. is is the world I know best,
but narrative by numbers isn’t just about communications agencies. It’s
about communications for and by everyone.
ey might have discovered something through empirical, academic, or
market resear and want to share what they’ve found out with others, to
get them to see the world from their point of view, and to share the real-
world impact of their discovery.
ey might need to motivate others to do something differently from how
they do it today. To start doing something (take up exercise, say). To stop
doing something (smoking). To do more (eating fruit and veg) or less
(drinking alcohol) of something. Or to do something for the first time and
adopt a new habit (wear a smart wat and integrate it into their lifestyle).
ey might work in an organisation on a mission and want to recruit
others to their cause.
ey might be tendering or piting for a new contract and need to make
a compelling case for why their bid is best for the prospective client or
customer.
 Or they might work in an organisation and need to persuade colleagues to
adopt a new strategy. To buy from a new supplier. Or to adopt a new policy.
In ea one of these instances, taking an analytical and data-driven
approa to storytelling will make the story beer, stronger, and more
impactful. It will help a wide variety of different people, in different types of
organisation and at different levels of seniority, with the task of convincing
people to support them. It will assist them in the “moving business”.
ere are plenty of excellent books and online resources and tools to
enable you to oose how best to visualise the stories you tell with data.
Former Googler Cole Nussbaumer-Knaflic’s Storytelling with Data: A Data
Visualization Guide for Business is one of the best, most accessible, and most
practical guides to show you how to communicate data to tell a story. She
shows very clearly how different types of arts or particular elements of a
graphic can distract the eye or get in the way of telling an impactful, data-
driven story. She uses some of the principles of storytelling at the heart of
her process, and I learned a lot from reading her book. What it’s all about is
given away by the subtitle aer the colon. You’ll find it great too, and should
buy it. But this book does something different.
ere are also plenty of resources extolling the virtues of taking a
storytelling approa to business communications – particularly the
ubiquitous and frequently pernicious PowerPoint presentation – and
Anthony Tasgal’s Storytelling Book is one of the most instructive here. If you
can get past his love of the pun – something I share with him, so it didn’t
hold me up – there are 24 great tips that will help you “find the golden
thread in your presentations”. I learned a lot from reading his book, as I’m
sure you will too. I’ve also enjoyed hearing him speak at Market Resear
Society events, though I think in person he slightly overdoes the argument
that storytelling needs to move away from numbers and ba to story, but
different points of view are healthy. Add his book to your Amazon order.
But again, this book does something different.
Tenology, data, and the fact that many more people fulfil the role of
storyteller than ten or even five years ago doesn’t necessarily mean
everyone does it well. e ability to look at, interrogate, and understand
data sets, and then to extract only those elements of the data that you need
to tell a convincing and compelling story – that takes real skill. Colleagues
and bosses and clients don’t necessarily need to know how you got there or
to see your workings out. In fact, this is usually a distraction or irritant at
best, but can be confusing and undermining to the point you’re trying to
make at worst. It can, indeed, be counter-productive.
is book sets out a series of five simple rules that will empower and
enable any storyteller in any organisation tell beer, data-driven stories no
maer whom they need to convince. By sharing the pitfalls and the pratfalls
I’ve suffered over nearly 30 years advising companies on how to tell beer
stories, my aim is to help the current and future generations of data-driven
storytellers do their job brilliantly. And remember, we’re all storytellers now.
We’ll see how you can keep your storytelling simple. How to find and use
only relevant data, detecting genuine signals from the siren call of noise and
avoiding false positives and spurious correlations. We’ll learn to beware the
Curse of Knowledge and drive genuine engagement in data-driven
storytelling through a combination of energy, empathy, and emotion. Data-
driven storytelling is very definitely NOT all about facts, facts, facts. It’s
mu more about knowing your audience – understanding whom you’re
trying to convince to do what – and then talking human. Even though
companies are abstract concepts without the power of spee, it’s terrifying
how un-human corporate-speak can be, even though it has to be uered or
wrien by a person.
ere. If you were in a hurry, those last two paragraphs have covered
what we’re going to go through in detail over the coming apters. We’ll
look at ea of these rules, in theory and in practice. What’s more, ea
apter will present a practical exercise to bring different elements of data-
driven storytelling to life. Ea apter also features an example of a truly
great data-driven story that has lived in the public domain, and we’ll
analyse what it was about these stories’ use of data that made them work so
well.
As legendary screenwriting coa Robert McKee is fond of saying, “a
business leader should think like an author about their brand.” As we’ll see
in the pages to follow, this is particularly true when an organisation is using
data and statistics to inform their narrative and shape their storytelling.
I trust you’re up for the ride.
Summing Up
David Ogilvy’s assertion that physics was bad if Lord Rutherford couldn’t
explain it to a barmaid is outdated, and in the twenty-teens we’d say
“member of bar staff”, though hopefully not “waitron”. But the principle is
spot on. Everything is explicable.
Analytics and storytelling are the two core skills for most people working
in the knowledge economy.
Educational systems and theory around the world have pigeon-holed
people as “artists” or “scientists”. is has been unhelpful.
Psyology should also shoulder some of the blame in keeping analytics
and storytelling apart, particularly the caricature of the le brain/right brain
diotomy.
People like simple, single-factor explanations of phenomena, but the
world is oen more nuanced than that.
e exponential growth in data means we have never had more
opportunity to use information as the basis for observations and ultimately
insights that reveal deep human truths as the foundation of our storytelling.
e growth in the availability of data has been mirrored by the number of
tools – oen free – to crun enormous volumes of data into mu more
manageable summaries from whi narratives can be developed.
As creatures, humans are hardwired to respond to stories and story
structure. It’s how we make sense of the world. is was first observed by
Aristotle in his Poetics, 2,400 years ago, but the principles of the three-act
structure are eternal and eternally appealing, including as the underpinning
of Hollywood screenplays, short stories, novels, and multi-series TV epics.
e rise in data has been paralleled by the explosion in social media,
whi has provided many more individuals in all kinds of organisations
with the potential to speak as and on behalf of their employers. Today, many
more voices maer.
Telling stories with data and statistics is relevant right across the
knowledge economy – public and private sector, profit-making and not-for-
profit.
 While there are plenty of books that talk about data visualisation or
storytelling, there’s nothing that brings these two disciplines together – until
now, and until this book.
Give It a Go: e Five “Whys?”
When someone presents you with a set of data or a data-ri presentation,
become a four-year-old again. Ask “Why?” whenever they draw a
conclusion from data. And then ask “Why?” again. Spice it up and vary it by
asking “For what purpose?” And if you work for the Royal Shakespeare
Company, you could even sprinkle in the odd “Wherefore?” Do this five
times on a single argument a colleague is trying to make using a key data
point, a killer stat, or a critical finding from their resear or data set.
It may be best let them know that you’re doing this because you want to
get to the boom of whether the data really does maer – really does tell a
transformational story. Because if they don’t know what you’re up to, they
might – just might – get annoyed with you.
Build this tenique into your repertoire of enquiry and interrogation
whenever data is presented. It’ll sort the spurious correlations from the
organisation-anging data sets.
Data-Driven Stories

How 20 years have flown (easyJet)

What’s the organisation?

easyJet
What’s the brand?
easyJet corporate and consumer brand
What’s the campaign?
How 20 years have flown
What’s the story?
In just 20 years, easyJet has gone from the bargain-buet, no-frills airline
allenger brand - from the stable of easyis, easyat, and easyeOther
companies from Stelios Haji-Ioannou - to the largest single carrier out of
Gatwi. e company wanted to celebrate this history with its customers
and show how they’ve grown alongside the airline, as well as use the
anniversary to introduce a series of very direct offers.
How did data drive the story?
easyJet aggregated data from its customers’ journeys at both a macro level
(to demonstrate its impact on short-haul travel) and at a personal level (to
celebrate and remember journeys individual passengers had taken together).
What was the outcome of the campaign?
Fourteen-fold increased response to usual email campaigns, with 7.5% of
customers booking flights within 30 days of receiving tailored, personalised
emails.

e fact that an organisation has been in existence for a round number of

years is generally of lile interest to anyone outside of the organisation
itself. It can even be hard to drum up interest inside the organisation
without raising yawns or suspicions among the troops that the generals are
trying to divert their aention from something important by banging on
about an anniversary. “Are they looking to celebrate 50 years and then make
half of my team redundant while we’re hanging out the corporate bunting?”
When Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou founded easyJet in 1995, budget airlines
were benefiing from EU deregulation and piling ‘em high and selling ‘em
eap – seats, that is. Budget airlines became a byword for value,
commoditising what had been an overregulated closed shop and opening up
opportunities for new entrants to the new market.
Over the following 20 years, easyJet grew to become one of the dominant
carriers in continental Europe, a true short-haul success story. As it grew, its
passengers grew with it. eir lives developed, their friends’ and family’s
ildren’s lives developed. ey used easyJet to go to more and different
destinations, driven by availability of routes, fashion, and consumer
demand.
More and more easyJet flyers who went on holiday with the company
also ose to fly orange and white on short-haul business. With the
exception of a couple of destinations – and I speak with bier experience of
assuming Milan Malpensa was near Milan – easyJet secured good routes to
popular destinations and started to clean up.
Management and ownership both anged and grew up, and under the
leadership of Carolyn McCall from 2010 to 2017, easyJet became the largest
single carrier out of Gatwi. It has also become synonymous with effective,
cost-efficient, short-haul travel between the U.K. and continental Europe.
And even a lile beyond.
So, when easyJet turned 20, it decided it was going to use all of the data it
had gathered and kept safe about its passengers over the previous two
decades and build a comprehensive, integrated, multi-annel
communications campaign to celebrate “How 20 years had flown”. What is
particularly inspiring about this example is the way that easyJet used its
data to build data-driven stories that are driven by the emotion of travel –
family holidays, reunions, landmark birthdays and anniversaries – and at
the same time build stronger relationships between the company and its
customers through their shared history. Individuals had got engaged in
Dubrovnik, and easyJet had flown them there and ba. What’s more, as the
data is about who flew where, it feels very mu more like narrative from
the opening scene, qualitative and quantitative though it is. Fundamentally,
it’s about everyone’s individual hero’s journeys.
Aggregated at a company level, the data was used to fuel and inform
communications to celebrate the company’s twentieth anniversary – in a
brilliantly shot TV advert of an ever-anging family through 20 years; in
press ads; on the easyJet website; and in digital banner advertising.
Where the campaign used data-driven storytelling to score a spectacular
home run was in the way that relationships between easyJet and individual
customers were celebrated in tailored emails celebrating the journeys they
had taken together. e emails included su personal data as: destinations
visited and the dates they were visited; the cumulative number of miles
flown together; total number of trips made; where the traveller ose to sit
most oen (aisle, window, middle seats); first and last trips together; and so
on.
ese emails – all 12.5m of them to active members of the easyJet
database – were opened 100% more than average easyJet email newsleers
and saw 25% higher cli-through rates than normal. Hundreds of thousands
of customers liked the campaign so mu that they took to social media to
share easyJet’s clever, thoughtful, emotional, and bespoke meanic with
their followers.
Across all markets where the campaign ran, 7.5% of customers went on to
book new flights with easyJet in the next 30 days. Compared with other
promotional emails sent during the same period, the personalised, emotional
story of the past 20 years together proved to be more than 14 times as
effective. e campaign won Marketing’s data creativity award in the 2016
New inking Awards.
As personalisation becomes both more possible and more prevalent, there
is keen debate in the marketing communications community about whether
it is welcomed by consumers or whether it feels a lile creepy and
stalkerish. For Millennials – that mu-maligned, mu overused
demographic; let’s just say “for under-35s” for the purposes of this debate –
there’s lile problem with highly personalised content. ey welcome it. It
makes them feel special and cared for by the organisations who use data in
this way. By contrast, there’s some evidence that for older consumers,
personalisation freaks them out and makes them feel like Big Brother is
wating them.
 For this easyJet campaign, there was very lile evidence of any overt
rejection of the personalisation from any demographic. Far from it. Bookings
were up in response to the personalised email across the age groups, and
customers of all generations took to social media to celebrate the aention
the airline had showed them personally.

Key takeaway: Retaining and managing personal customer data

enables an organisation to aggregate that information at a global level
and also make it intensely personal – and emotional – at an individual
level, providing the fuel for engaging, impactful, data-driven
storytelling.
Note
1 Edna Andrews (2014) Neuroscience and Multilingualism, 3.2, p. 73. Cambridge
University Press. hp://bit.ly/2oPH7V3
2
Keep it Simple
Don’t make it too hard for people to discern your narrative. Communicate a clear
and consistent story, and offer data points over time that demonstrate progress
towards your vision.

Steve Girsky, Chairman of General Motors, Harvard Business Review (August 2014)
More is Very Rarely More
Rhetoric is defined as “the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing”,
eoing Dan Pink’s contention that we’re all in the “moving business”. In
Classical Greek and Roman times, as well as in Georgian and Victorian
England, rhetoric was taught to prospective politicians and leaders. e focus
of instruction for these elites oen focused on form over content, and the use
of compositional teniques including figures of spee, from anaphora to
zeugma. Rhetoric was helpful in making the words of the privileged few
sound elegant to their peers and impressive to those they governed on the
rare occasions they came into contact with the masses. But as a skillset, it
didn’t have mu to do with how to use data and statistics to make a beer
case.
e mediation of public and business life through the press, radio, and TV
– and more recently through interactive social and digital media annels –
has anged the game for organisational storytellers. ey need to be
prepared to both sound good and deliver the killer evidence that persuades
their audience to follow them, or vote for them, or buy their new product.
Increasingly, they need to be able to do this live and in real time, responding
to new developments or initiatives as they happen. To sound convincing, they
have to be in complete control of their material. ough it’s not just what
you say but how you say it. As I’ll explore in Chapter 4, to drive engagement,
they need to deliver arguments rooted in data and statistics with energy,
emotion, and empathy.
When organisational storytellers learn of the potential impact of the data-
driven approa, many find it tempting to try to blind their audience with
science. Whether you’re a scientist, a Government spokesperson, or the head
of R&D at a cosmetics manufacturer, it’s hard to resist troing out a roll call
of evidence that supports your argument.

is is a trap you should work hard to avoid

Too mu data, particularly too mu unfiltered data delivered out of
context, is more likely to be counter-productive. Many people find data and
statistics to be confusing. is is in part because they were “badly taught”
maths at sool and find lists of statistics intimidating. And it’s in part
because they believe Mark Twain’s maxim about “lies, damned lies, and
statistics”. Politicians have been found too-oen being “economical with the
actualité”, a condition that rogue Tory MP Alan Clarke admied to in a
parliamentary question on the sales of arms to Iraq. Know what? He lied.
What’s more, as both 2016’s EU referendum in the U.K. and the U.S.
presidential election demonstrated, the mere production and repetition of
facts is not enough to convince voters to follow a desired course of action.
While data delivered with honesty, authenticity, and credibility can help to
swing contentious arguments, non-facts, anti-facts, and fake news (that’s lies
again) can be a massive turn-off. Trouble is, it can be a turn-on when
delivered with passion and gusto. With energy, emotion, and empathy for the
intended audience.
When one side of an argument relies too heavily on data and statistics, it’s
easy for their opponents to start piing their argument apart, one statistic at
a time. Or, as Miael Gove scoffed to su memorable effect on the Brexit
campaign trail, “people in this country have had enough of experts”. His
staunest defenders might argue he was talking about particular experts
“with acronyms who have got it consistently wrong”, but this is not how
Gove was heard or reported or interpreted. It’s worth wating on Channel
41 again, if you think I’m being unfair. He didn’t go quite as far as Republican
politician Newt Gingri who once infamously said “feelings are just as valid
as facts”, but he wasn’t far off. e accusation from Gove and its impact at
the ballot box led New Scientist to suggest, just a week aer the EU
referendum: “Trying to ange someone’s mind by giving them the facts
usually just makes them dig in. For reason to triumph, scientists need to learn
to engage with emotion” – an argument we’ll return to in Chapter 4.
e fundamental problem is that facts are not, inherently, memorable. If
you’re reporting polling or aitudinal data – about who intends to vote for
whi politician, or whi new flavour of yoghurt is liked beer by toddlers
versus teens – you’re likely as not reporting a long list of percentages. And as
brothers Chip and Dan Heath said memorably in their book Made to Stick:
Why Some Ideas Survive & Others Die: “Aer a presentation, 63% of aendees
remember stories. Only 5% remember statistics.” Had the EU referendum
come out the other way, one of the statistics that would have been both
memorable and negatively impactful was the overzealous, unsupportable
“We send the EU £350m a week – let’s fund our NHS instead”. A factoid that
Brexit eerleader Nigel Farage was already disowning on breakfast TV on 24
June 2016, when the ballot papers were still warm.
e Kind of Stats that Work Hardest
Ironically, indeed, the Vote Leave campaign’s £350m a week statistic bears
many of the hallmarks of the type of number – the type of core campaign
statistic – that works hardest in data-driven storytelling. Whatever its
veracity, whether anyone in the Vote Leave camp ever really pressure-tested
it as a number that they would really be in a position to redirect from
funding the EU to funding the NHS, the £350m figure does carry with it
many of the criteria of a statistic with legs.

It’s simple

e figure is clear, it ends in a zero, it doesn’t include any decimal points or

fractions. It’s an undemanding presence that doesn’t require mu effort to
remember it. is makes it easily repeatable and so easily transmissible. It has
– in Susan Blamore’s terms – memetic potential.

It’s big

Most people don’t have a concept of what it would be like to have a figure
this large at their personal disposal. Several times bigger than even the
biggest Euromillions Loery win in history – itself an almost unimaginable
amount of money – it’s clearly the kind of sum that a government could do a
lot with. Government is big and spending on citizens costs money at scale, so
£350m – and that amount ea week – could clearly aieve something.
What’s more, for those liable to be opposed to spending on the EU, it
becomes an instant rallying cry against the body because it’s perceived to be
su a waste.

It doesn’t show its workings out

e number £350m has clearly been rounded – up or down, it doesn’t maer
whi – but it’s not so suspiciously round as to be unbelievable or too
obviously made-up. £400m would be more suspicious, and £500m/half a
billion would feel too mu like a figure plued from the aether. But £350m
feels mu more like a number that has been worked on, but doesn’t demand
too mu of the audience or require them to come on the mathematical
journey. It doesn’t show its workings out, but by its nature it feels like it has
been worked out.
Some storytellers feel the need to give incredibly accurate numbers –
sometimes to two or more decimal places – in order to show that they
haven’t just made the numbers up. is is particularly irritating and
unnecessary in the reporting of percentages – “99.82% of Iraqis voted for
Saddam”. e trouble with being (too) accurate is that this starts to involve
the audience into the process of calculation, and any set of figures that draws
those listening into the process of calculation starts to feel like a maths
lesson. Work hard to avoid this. Stories that give too many numbers and
show too mu working out don’t feel like stories. As Cole Nussbaumer-
Knaflic says2 in the narrative structure apter of her “data visualization
guide for business professionals”: “A collection of numbers and words on a
given topic without structure to organize them and give them meaning is
useless.”
It’s worth saying that, although you should avoid volunteering your
workings out as part of the core thrust of your storytelling, you should be
able to produce them – immediately – if you’re allenged to do so by a
journalist or an opponent or a client. If the data or statistics pique your
audience’s interest sufficiently for them to ask a follow-up question or
questions, fantastic. So, always keep that ba of a fag paet, napkin, or
spreadsheet handy just in case – joy of joys – your data-driven storytelling is
so impactful that it stimulates further questions. Make that your goal in
selecting the best statistics to start with, but don’t be surprised if further
questions are the exception, not the rule.
In storytelling, it’s mu beer to stimulate intrigue and questions, rather
than indulge in a lengthy bout of exposition and bastory without being
invited to do so. As with good films and novels, so too with corporate and
brand storytelling.
It’s a compound variable

Wherever possible, numbers and statistics that summarise stories should pull
together many different elements of calculation into a single value, again
without showing the working out. It’s fine to reference the fact that several
different elements or line items were included in the calculation, but there’s
no need to walk the audience through what those calculations actually were.
Voters in the EU Referendum were aware that member state funding is a
complex equation. Remainers would point to a system of rebates whi
meant that net contributions were very mu less than the headline
membership figure: that the EU invested a huge amount in projects across the
U.K. whi made the actual cost of membership very mu less than the
dues. Brexiteers could have taken the same approa and shown a balance
sheet of spend versus return, and perhaps moed the projects that saw a
return because they were pointless or wouldn’t have been necessary if the
money had been targeted at the problem without having to be filtered via the
EU. But instead, they ose to simplify all of the inputs and outputs into a
single figure of almost unimaginable proportions, and a figure that represents
weekly, not annual, contribution.

It’s understandable

Indeed, the focus on £350m a week does a mu more powerful job than
aggregating the figure up to an annual total. £350m * 52 = £18bn (rounded
down, naturally). Imagine the arguments in the Vote Leave camp. “We sent
£18bn a year to the EU – that’s an unimaginably large number – we should
shout that from the rooops, spaer that on our bale buses. Whaddayasay,
Boris?” But the sheer size of the £18bn number makes it unusable or at least
mu less effective as a number on whi to base a data-driven campaign.
Not to mention – as we’ll see below – that, at best, this figure represents
gross, not net, contributions.
When numbers get too big, they lose meaning. While a million of anything
is hard to understand, a billion of anything is mu harder to grasp. e fact
that total U.K. government expenditure3 was almost £750bn in 2014–15 is
hard to grasp. What that figure ends up meaning is lile more than “it costs
£750bn to run the U.K. ea year”. It’s a number so far outside most people’s
grasp or comprehension that it just becomes a circular definition.

It’s repeated ad nauseam and becomes an earworm

Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair made the Labour Party electable for the first
time in nearly two decades in 1997 through a number of highly effective
strategies. ey dragged the party to the right (or the centre, depending on
your starting point). is involved them repositioning the party as “new
Labour”, mitigating Middle Englanders’ concerns that a Labour government
would mean industrial action paralysing public services and the PM huddling
with the TUC over beer and sandwies at Number 10. ey also successfully
reassured the British public that new Labour could be trusted running the
economy. One of the most effective arrows in their quiver was incredibly
simple, direct, and of course data-driven.

Figure 2.1 e 1997 new Labour election pledge card, Scoish Labour version

What Peter and Tony also did incredibly effectively ahead of the 1997
election campaign was agree on the six core areas where new Labour would
make a difference. ese were captured in a simple, straightforward pledge
card. e pledge cards were wallet-sized and issued to all party members and
campaign activists. ey represented the summary of new Labour’s costed
pledges for what it planned to do when it got into office. Ea one of the
pledges had numbers and statistics and targets aaed to them – something
that came ba to haunt the party when in office.
All activists – whether on the doorstep or appearing on BBC TV’s
Question Time – were expected and required to focus on the six areas. All
were required to learn, know, and follow-up ea pledge with the data and
statistics that supported them, particularly as prospective voters or TV
interviews showed some interest or allenge for any specific pledge. What
the pledge card did was serve as a summary and a bridge and a jumping-off
point for debate on the issues where new Labour felt safe and confident its
policies would make a significant difference.
What new Labour created in the pledge card was a classic executive
summary of a data-driven storytelling campaign, and the party foot soldiers
deployed this weapon as intended and directed. It meant that the campaign
stayed very mu on-message. As an analogue piece of card in the wallet, it
was less sinister and apparently controlling than pagers sharing soundbites
and slogans, an early use of political te that was used as a sti to beat new
Labour once it took power. What the card ensured was that new Labour
talked with one voice, dominated the debate on its terms, and won the first of
two landslides, the first of three elections. e stuff of the Corbynistas’
wildest dreams.
e 1997 pledge card made new Labour’s pledges become a close-knit set
of earworms. A general election is rarely about a single issue – whatever
eresa May’s declared motivation in calling the 2017 snap election – and
this contrasts with referenda. While referenda in general – and the EU
Referendum in particular – are about more than single issues, they do require
voters to vote on a single question. Where the Brexiteers were so successful
with their relentless focus on the “£350m a week” killer statistic is that they
repeated it, ad nauseam, until it, too, became an earworm. e defining
earworm and statistic of the campaign. When Remainers looked to rubbish or
discredit it, they referenced it. It became shorthand for cost and value of EU
membership. It was created and owned and ampioned by the winning side,
even if they disowned and dropped it less than four hours aer the result was
confirmed. But that didn’t maer. By then, it had done its job.
It avoids the inconvenient truth of context

Sometimes, context is invaluable in data-driven storytelling. Seing data and

statistics in their proper context can show how one course of action can have
impact outside the immediate frame of reference. It’s more honest, holistic,
and even-handed and shows that the storyteller has considered the issue in
the round, rather than just from their own point of view. We’ll come ba to
empathy in Chapter 4.
At other times, avoiding context – hiding the full picture from the
audience – can make the data and statistics osen by the storyteller perform
mu more powerfully. is is exactly what the Vote Leave campaign did
with the £350m figure, cunningly derived from the Government’s own data
and based on gross and not net spend aer rebates. ey used a round (but
not too suspiciously round), big (but not too big) figure to make their case.
What they didn’t do or use or consider was the money the U.K. got ba from
the EU in the form of investment or rebates, agricultural, industrial, or
regenerative. Nor did they oose to present what net expenditure meant in
terms of overall Government expenditure.
e totality of U.K. Government expenditure aer rebates and subsidies
provided by the EU offer up the context that Vote Leave was so keen to omit.
e official data show that the net cost of the U.K.’s membership of the EU
for 2015 was the still impressively big figure of £3.7bn. But set in context,
£3.7bn represents half of one percent. In statistical terms, 0.5% is a rounding
error. A figure so vanishingly small as to be of no statistical or practical
significance.
Let’s look at it another way. In psyological and medical trials, an
experiment is not deemed to have been caused by anything other than ance
if it doesn’t have a probability (or p) value of less than 5%. Convention has it
that this is oen wrien as p < 0.05. What this means is that, if we’d
conducted the same experiment 100 times, we would have got a different
outcome in fewer than five of the experiments. Flip that on its head and we
see that, for every 20 times we did run the manipulation, it would come out
differently in less than one experiment. And for psyologists, this means
they’re prey confident they’ve found something interesting; the
manipulation aieved something of interest that is very unlikely to have
happened by ance. In some medical experiments, the probability threshold
is set twice as high, at p < 0.10.
If psyology is prepared to accept probability values ten times as large as
the Brexiteers are prepared to invest in the EU – and medicine 20 times as
large – this tells us that Vote Leave was street smart (if deceitful) not to put
the true value of expenditure in its proper context.
Here’s another analogy. Let’s scale it down to salaries or mortgage
payments. If you’re used to taking home £2,500 per month and one month
your pay paet shows you’re being paid £2,487.50. Would you quibble?
Would you notice? Or imagine your direct debit for mortgage payments is
£1,250 per month and one month your mortgagor takes £1,256.25. Again,
would you notice? Would it be worth raising?
Figure 2.2 EU membership cost
Cost of EU membership after rebates in the context of all U.K. Government spending:
£3.7bn out of £735bn (2014–15)
Source: U.K. Government’s Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses for 2015
URL: www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-expenditure-statistical-analyses-2015

at’s the scale of the cost of EU membership to the U.K. as a percentage

of annual expenditure. If those numbers had been presented, the result might
have been rather different – if the population at large had seen EU
expenditure in its proper context. As it was, the Remain camp decided to
embark on Project Fear and use literally incredible scare stories about what
could happen to industrial output and jobs and tax receipts, and their over-
reliance on too mu fact presented in too mu detail ran their campaign
into the buffers. anks, Gideon and Dave. A poor, data-stuffed campaign
was run by pushing statistic aer statistic on a confused public with lile
emotional wrapping other than fear and dread.

e zombie status of “£350m a week”

Since its first, extensive outing during the EU Referendum campaign, £350m a
week has taken on the status of a zombie statistic, one that refuses to die no
maer how many credible, authoritative commentators try to kill it off.
Independent analysts – including Government statisticians – have pawed
over the statistic and its data sources and sought to discredit it. ree major
points of contention have been its total la of context, the fact that it ignores
rebates and subsidies, and whether the carefully worded slogan on Boris’
bale bus implied a post-Brexit selement would ever use the money “saved”
to go directly to the NHS.
And just when it was thought that the victorious Brexit camp had wrung
all that they could from it, Foreign Secretary Johnson gave it new life by
repeating the number and again suggesting it be earmarked for the NHS. In a
4,000-word extended manifesto designed to undermine a major spee from
PM eresa May to European Leaders, he said in the Daily Telegraph4 on 15
September 2017:
And yes – once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly
£350 million per week. It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a
lot of that money went on the NHS, provided we use that cash injection to modernise
and make the most of new technology.

is led Sir David Norgrove, Head of the U.K. Statistics Authority, to rebuke
Johnson for confusing gross and net contributions and in so doing wilfully
misleading the British public for a second time. A proper telling off and rap
over the knules. ough I doubt it’s the last time BoJo will wheel out his
favourite pet zombie.
Figure 2.3 Leer from Sir David Norgrove to Boris Johnson

Choosing the Killer Statistic

ere are other criteria you can use to make sure you oose the perfect killer
statistic. Data that can show trends – particularly trends that can project
reliably into the future – are helpful. Done right and in a way that does, in
the end, accurately predict the future, predictive analytics can be incredibly
powerful.
e trouble here is that those in the prediction business generally have a
very poor tra record in accurately and reliably predicting the future,
whether they’re sto market analysts, bookmakers, weather forecasters, or
astrologers. ey might get on a luy roll and predict winners or weather
right four or five times in a row. But the roll won’t carry on forever. e
statistical law of regression to the mean will interfere and bring outcomes
ba to the average of what might be expected, and future-gazers’ models
will be found laing because they haven’t considered enough input variables
in building their model. ey’ll rely too heavily on cognitive heuristics or
shortcuts that enable them to cope with huge volumes of data quily but not
necessarily effectively, making their incorrect predictions predictably
incorrect. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow explains how and why
in detail, and for the truly commied, it’s worth going ba to Kahneman
and Tversky’s original papers.
And so, in summary, for its simplicity, its bigness (but not too-bigness), the
omission of workings-out, the fact that it brought several data points together
and was understandable, its earworm qualities, and the judicious decision not
to set it in context … for all these reasons, Vote Leave’s “£350m to the NHS”
truly was an inspired example of data-driven storytelling, however flawed or
dishonest or downright wrong it was and I and the rest of the 48% may know
it to have been. Remoaners, eh? Su sore losers.
Be Simplest of all in Your Language
So far in this apter, we have considered the different criteria you should use
when oosing the right data and the best statistics to tell your story. At the
heart of what we’ve covered so far is the need to be simple, clear, and
understandable. While complex mathematical and statistical teniques and
processes need to be applied to numbers to build a rigorous, evidence-based
story, these need to be stripped ba and hidden away when it comes actually
to telling the story. Just as important as the numbers osen to make your
point are the words you use to tell the story.
When physicist Riard Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Physics, he was asked if he could explain in just three minutes why he’d won
the prize. In a rare misstep, Feynman is reputed to have answered: “If I could
explain it in three minutes, it wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize.” With all
due respect, Dr Feynman, you’re wrong. Anything can be explained top line
– in an elevator pit – in three minutes. It should be possible to explain it in
a sentence and ideally in a phrase. e = mc2, anyone?
It’s always possible to make difficult concepts easier to understand by
using simpler and more straightforward language. Note: this is not about
dumbing down. It’s about talking human, a theme we will return to in
Chapter 6. e words osen by businesses and other organ-isations are very
oen far too complex and difficult to understand. Sometimes that’s to do
with jargon (and we’ll come ba to that, too). But more oen it comes down
to an overly complex writing style. As soon as they’re given the scope to
write on behalf of or in the voice of an organisation, normally fluent
communicators default to an obscure, fuzzy, pretentious form of words that’s
never come out of any human’s mouth.
One of the most straightforward ways in whi organisational storytellers
can use data to make their storytelling more compelling is in writing in a
simple and straightforward way. Fortunately, there are a several different
diagnostic tools that you can use to e whether your language is telling
your story simply, clearly, and effectively. And suitably enough for a book
about telling stories with data and statistics, all of these produce – erm – data
and statistics about the words you use.
e Gunning Fog Formula analyses text and generates a score that’s a
sool grade. is equates to the number of years of formal education a
reader would need to have passed through to be able to understand the text
with ease at first reading. e SMOG Index does something similar, though
it also benefits from associations with London’s peasouper smogs (“smoke” +
“fog”), worst in the so-called Big Smoke of 1952. For five days in December,
pollution plus weather made it hard to see your hand in front of your face.
e analogy with smoggy, unclear writing is almost too appealing. What’s
more, SMOG is an acronym for Simple Measure of Gobbledygook. It, too,
creates a sool grade score. Other tests include the Automated Readability
Index, the Fry Readability Formula, and the Coleman–Liau Index. ere’s
a world of text analysis to whi most people are entirely oblivious. (Note:
this paragraph scores 10.3 on the Gunning Fog, but 12.4 on the SMOG Index,
as calculated using http://readable.io).
Perhaps the simplest, most widely used, and most useful of all the tools
available is the Fles–Kincaid ‘reading ease’ score. e FK score is based
simply on the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per
word. e shorter your sentences, and the fewer long words you use, the
higher your score.
Figure 2.4 Fles–Kincaid scores for authors from @shanesnow

FK scores typically range from 0 to 100, although there’s a sentence in

Moby Dick that scores −146.77 and one in Proust that scores −515.10.
Journalist and head of Contently, Shane Snow,5 produced a great study6 of
the FK scores generated by different authors and sources, whi is well worth
the detour. Above is a typical art, with text analysed from ildren’s classic
Goodnight Moon (FK of less than 3) and the Affordable Care Act (aka
Trump’s favourite Obamacare) (FK 13).
As we’re particularly interested in this book in how organisational
storytelling is mediated through print, broadcast, and online media outlets,
the following table gives typical Fles-Kincaid scores for a variety of
different annels.
e FK score is accompanied by a grade level. is represents the U.S.
sool grade a reader needs to have aained to be able to understand the text
in question with ease. e test, scores, and grade levels are based on well-
validated psyological tests. Essentially, the longer the words and the longer
the sentences, the harder they are to understand; to “parse”, as linguists say.
Longer processing time of interminable sentences mean the start of these
sentences fall out of working memory. is makes us fail to understand, lose
interest, and become less engaged.

Table 2.1 Typical Fles Kincaid scores for different publications

Source FK ‘reading ease’ score

BuzzFeed (list post) 96

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 85
Cosmopolitan magazine 78
Guardian homepage 64
The Economist 43
Apple iTunes Terms & Conditions 33
Standard insurance policy 10

Tenical topics based on scientific or medical breakthroughs are oen full

of tenical terms. ese are oen polysyllabic words derived from Latin or
Greek. ey go on for ages. String a few of those together and soon you’ve
got an incomprehensible sentence. Keeping language simple and easy to
understand drives engagement and interest. It has the same effect as an
enthusiastic person talking about one of their passions in an entertaining but
straightforward way.
Do this simply, clearly, authentically. Be you. If you’re Eric, be very Eric.
Not Jeremy or Bobby-Ann.
In our ever-more digital world, when people want to find out about your
organisation, company, or brand, they look online. Whether they’re about to
buy from you or they just want to comment on your customer service, most
people find that what you say in your own (or owned) media annels says a
lot about you. About whether you deserve their loyalty or the sharp edge of
their tongue.
e language you oose is a critical first step in shaping perceptions of
your organisation, as it is for your competitors. Sure, it’s important what
influencers say in editorials, blogs, and social media, but geing people to
understand what you do and why you do it really starts with the story you
tell about yourself.
Summing Up
In this apter, we’ve focused on the basics of how to tell stories with data
and statistics. e advice from General Motors’ Steve Girsky not to make it
too hard for people to discern your narrative demands clarity and
consistency.
Choosing the right data and statistics can make the difference between
winning and losing – an election campaign, a sales bale with a competitor,
the hearts and minds of your audience.
e always-on nature of modern media means organisational storytellers
need to oose and use the right data and statistics sparingly – and be
prepared to give a fuller explanation “if asked”.
Don’t blind you audience with science – always be selective in your oice
of data and statistics.
More is very rarely more.
People respond to stories more than they do to numbers. Data and
statistics should be the underpinning or the foundation of your stories, not
the stories themselves.
Be simple. Avoid decimals and fractions. But don’t make your numbers too
suspiciously round.
Use big numbers – not too big so that you become literally
incomprehensible.
Don’t show your workings-out, but be prepared to share how you got to
your answer – including the intricacies of your methodology and calculations
– if pressed by the knowledgeable or interested.
Compound data together to create variables that summarise the meaning
of your story. But be careful you don’t lose important details along the way.
Tell your audience what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. And then tell
them what you’ve told them. Over and over and over again. at’s the way
to create a truly memorable earworm.
Use context where it helps to advance your case. But be aware of what
you’re hiding if you fail to set the data you oose to use in its proper
context.
 Be simplest of all in the language you use – short sentences and simple,
short words.
Being clear is not the same as dumbing down.
Give It a Go

Keep it simple, smarty-pants

e simpler the text, the easier it is to understand. e easier copy is to

understand, the fewer times people need to read it before they understand it
– ideally just the once. And the quier they understand it, the quier they
can respond to it. Buy your product. Support your cause. Decide that you are
the party or candidate they want to vote for.
Go to your organisation’s About Us page. If you don’t have an About Us
page (unlikely), how about your most recent personal statement or biography.
Highlight and copy the text into a new Pages or Word file and save it. en
go to one of the online readability tools available. Readability Formulas is
free (www.readabilityformulas.com), and I subscribe to www.readable.io for
a modest annual fee. Paste the copy into the text window and find out how
simple or complex your copy is.
I favour Fles–Kincaid, whi – like many of the other tools available – is
based on words per sentence and syllables per word. If your text has scored
higher than you’d hoped in reading age and lower than you’d expected for
readability, save a fresh copy of the text and start working on it. Make the
sentences shorter. Replace long, Latinate, abstract words with short, pithy,
Anglo-Saxon equivalents. Cut out all the fat. And then run the textual
analysis again. You’ll be surprised how quily you can make even complex
text mu more readable, mu more understandable, and mu more likely
to trigger action for your audience. Build language complexity analysis into
your regular, storytelling routine.
Simples.
Data-Driven Stories

is Girl Can

What’s the organisation?

Sport England, a representative body providing services and funding for
sport in England
What’s the brand?
Women’s participation in sport
What’s the campaign?
is Girl Can
What’s the story?
How data about the drags and drivers of women’s participation in sport
anged aitudes and behaviours.
How did data drive the story?
e planning of the campaign was shaped by resear among 14-60-year-old
women that showed one of the principle reasons why they didn’t get
involved was because they were afraid of what others thought of them
taking part.
What was the outcome of the campaign?
An additional 1.6m U.K. women regularly taking part in sport, a sustainable
and sustained increase from 2014 to 2017.

Changing aitudes and beliefs with a data-driven storytelling campaign is

one thing. Changing the behaviour of millions of people is nothing short of a
miracle. But it’s exactly what Sport England’s is Girl Can campaign
aieved in less than two years.
e benefits of sport and regular exercise are well-established. To
individual health and wellbeing. To mental as well as physical health. And to
society at large, particularly a society beginning to be weighed down by an
epidemic of obesity and inactivity, with kno-on costs already taking up
scarce health service resources. Society would be beer off – physically,
spiritually, and financially – if more people regularly took part in sport.
e message about the long-term benefits of sport and exercise are failing
to get through, despite up to 13 years of regular weekly exercise at sool.
Something is clearly going wrong at sool age, because more than a third of
the least physically active sool girls agree with the statement that they feel
like their body is on show in PE lessons and this makes them like PE less.
Once sool’s out and games cease to be compulsory, active participation
in sport in England falls off dramatically. e la of participation in sport
aer sool age is particularly common among English women. Resear
commissioned by Sport England showed that 2m fewer women aged 14–60
play regular sport compared with men of the same age.
Sport England also found that more than 75% of the women not regularly
playing sport say they would like to, but the resear discovered that the
fundamental factor holding them ba is fear of being judged by others: the
fear of what others will think about their physical appearance and ability
when they see them exercising. A quarter said that they “hate the way I look”
when taking part in sport. And – wrongly – most women believe they are
alone in their fears, whereas the resear pointed to this being a universal
truth.
Sport England and its ad agency FCB Inferno put resear, data, and
statistics at the heart of their communications development and planning
process. ey knew they needed to produce an emotional, emotive campaign
to help women understand they were not alone in their fears and anxieties
and to empower them to understand the very real value – to themselves,
their families, and their communities – if they did become involved in sport
and exercise.
Figure 2.5 is Girl Can

Part of the reason for the campaign’s impact and success has been its use
of real women, not airbrushed celebrities, in its films – real women who have
overcome the anxieties that are holding ba many millions of their peers
across the country. By using emotive imagery and film, the campaign was
able to address very real, very specific concerns that have been holding
women ba from active participation in sport, including the unjustified
misconception that geing sweaty and red in the face is just not feminine.
is misconception was held by almost half of the women surveyed by Sport
England. It was overtly addressed by the two of the campaign taglines,
“Sweating like a pig. Feeling like a fox” and “Damn right I look hot”. And
perhaps most memorably of all, at a time when women’s football in the U.K.
is finally coming of age, “I ki balls. Deal with it”.
At every step of the creative and executional process, the campaign used
data and statistics as the rational underpinning to unlo the insights that
made the campaign so powerful and effective. As a result of the campaign,
1.6m more women took part in sport regularly than before it aired. What’s
more, the rate of ange – the rate at whi women are taking up sport
compared with men – is now to women’s advantage.
e second is Girl Can campaign broke in early 2017, focusing on older
women participating in sport. Early results already suggest that it is likely to
be just as impactful.
Key takeaway: Data and statistics can be used as the foundations of
incredibly powerful public education campaigns that actively and
sustainably ange behaviour.
Notes
1 www.youtube.com/wat?v=GGgiGtJk7MA
2 Storytelling with Data (Wiley), pp. 177–8.
3 www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-expenditure-statistical-analyses-2015
4 hp://bit.ly/2y8KgUa
5 hps://shanesnow.contently.com
6 hp://bit.ly/1L9M5P5
3
Find and Use Only Relevant Data
When we know why we do what we do, everything else falls into place.

Simon Sinek (2011), Start with Why

Wading rough the Smog
e bigness of Big Data can be intimidating. Many storytellers don’t know
where to start in their quest to tra down the relevant corner of Big Data –
what I call lile big data – whi will prove most fruitful in building an
evidence-based narrative. ey can’t see the forest for the trees.
I well remember the difficulties one of my data analytics teams had to
overcome some years ago in building the right sear strings to harvest news
and social media conversations about Tide washing powder and laundry
liquid. Now Tide is the number one laundry brand in the U.S., but it’s also
the name of a popular sports team (the Crimson Tide, an American football
team from Alabama), as well as the name of a popular film of the same name
as the sports team, starring Gene Haman and Denzel Washington. Oh, and
it’s also the word that describes the phenomenon of the sea coming in and
out, affected by the gravitational pull of the moon. Every coastal town or city
in every English-speaking country in the world (and quite a lot more besides)
publishes tide tables to help sailors and fishermen with their daily work.
Increasingly, these are published and updated online.
Searing for Alpha Romeo, Audi, or Adobe – for Pepsi, Pampers, or
Pantene – poses relatively few problems and brings ba relatively few false
positives (we’ll come ba to them later in this apter). It’s one of the
reasons brand names are so distinctive and so powerful around the world.
ey stand out like beacons from the mass of text-ri data around them – in
newspapers, on websites, in social media streams. But when a product’s
brand name is a common word used in other contexts – as in the case of
“Tide” vs “tide” – you need to be constantly narrowing down your sear. To
be sure you’re not bringing ba a load of meaningless content that has
nothing to do with your brand, you (or more likely your analysts) need to
learn and become fluent in a new language: Boolean.
Boolean is the language of logic, and it allows you to sear for certain
terms but in the right context; within xx aracters or words of the target
word; always exclude if it’s within yy words of a disqualifying term, and so
on. Boolean is the language of AND and NOT and OR. Relatively
straightforward for Tide laundry products. Not quite so easy when the
number one competitor of Tide in the U.S. is (or was at the time) a brand
called All. Nice, inclusive brand name. Designed to tell its users that its
product has no boundaries, for its users or the clothes it can clean. And also,
the thirty-sixth most common word in the English language. My mind
boggles at the Boolean flips the analytics team had to do to find relevant
mentions of “All” (NOT “all” AND “laundry” OR “washing” AND “clothes”
etc.).
Some – mistakenly, I believe – consider the task of identifying and
isolating the right data to be a tenology problem. Yes, tenology is
important. You need a tool or a platform capable of extracting meaningful,
relevant content from the smog that threatens to obscure the data you’re
looking for. ese are the kinds of allenges that face the security services
daily in looking to identify terrorists based on keywords or constantly
anging code words. You might also need a tool that can spot trends and
paerns, separating regularities from irregularities, and find meaning from
the morass. But fundamentally, identifying the relevant corner of lile big
data isn’t a te problem.
Start With “Why?”
While tenology maers, purpose maers a whole lot more. When looking
to generate and distil the right data and statistics to tell your data-driven
story, you need also to have identified and clearly articulated your purpose.
Mr Purpose is Simon Sinek.
During the first decade of the 2000s, Sinek was a busy, successful
consultant, building and growing a practice with national and international
clients from a U.S. base. As the years went by, the business got bigger and the
revenues grew. But Sinek became increasingly dissatisfied with and stressed
out by his business. From the outside, everything was rosy; from the inside,
he was torn apart. Not from the stress of the business struggling, but rather,
from the stress of not knowing why he was in business in the first place.
Sinek observed that truly great businesses that have leaders and employees
who want to come to work have a clearly articulated sense of purpose of why
they are in business. By “Why?”, Sinek doesn’t mean to make money or be
successful or be the best in class. Salaries and revenue and status are helpful,
oen very aractive by-products or benefits that follow to those who work in
businesses that are successful. But the impacts of these benefits are short-
lived in the hierary of workers’ needs. Salary hikes and promotions have
been found to have a positive impact on productivity for all of … 11 days.
In his book Drive, fellow American business writer Dan Pink identifies the
three principle drivers of twenty-first century workplace motivation as
autonomy (the freedom to make oices about how you do what you do),
mastery (doing what you’re good at doing), and purpose (doing something
for a reason).
By “Why?”, Sinek also means the types of problems and allenges the
business helps to solve. He means the contribution they make to lives of the
clients they serve. From Apple’s original purpose – “We’re here to remove the
barrier of having to learn to use a computer” – to IKEA’s “To create a beer
everyday life for the many”. From the BBC’s “To enri people’s lives with
programmes and services that inform, educate, and entertain” to Coke’s “To
refresh the world … to inspire moments of happiness”. From Nintendo’s “To
put smiles on the faces of everyone we tou” to Patagonia’s “Build the best
product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement
solutions to the environmental crisis”.
Purpose is mu more than a corporate mission or vision statement. It’s
what an organisation stands for: its principles and ethos. It’s an expression of
the long-term journey a business is on, adding meaning to what it does. It
also makes it very mu more straightforward to build emotional
connections into product propositions, and between employers and
employees. When Dove found its purpose in allenging the stereotypes of
the beauty industry (see the case study at the end of Chapter 6), global brand
director Silvia Lagnado would regularly walk past scores of Unilever’s
brightest and best marketers on her way to her office. ey had queued up
because they all wanted to come and work on a brand with su a clearly
defined purpose, and direct action seemed to be the way to do it.
Ba to Simon Sinek. Once he’d worked out the role and importance of
purpose in business, Sinek realised that his purpose was to let the world
know about the transformative effect that finding and expressing your own
purpose can have on your business. So, he wound up his consultancy
business and pited up at TEDxPuget Sound in September 2009 and gave his
talk “How great leaders inspire action”. It was here that he introduced to the
global stage his now famous concentric circles, with “WHY” in the inner
circle or bullseye, “HOW” in the middle circle, and “WHAT” in the outer
circle.
In this talk – now the second most-wated TED Talk of all time at 35m
views and counting – Sinek showed how most companies start to talk about
themselves by talking about what they do (what, what, what, what, what). A
few focus on how – their proprietary methodology that sets them apart. And
only a very few start with why. Half a dozen times in 18 scant minutes, Sinek
insists – with increasing urgency – “People don’t buy what you do, they buy
why you do it”. With that talk, he established a new business and new
business model and a new approa to organisational storytelling.
And so, while identifying and isolating the right data and statistics are of
course tenological problems, mu more importantly they’re philosophical
allenges. And it starts with “Why?”
Ask the Right estions
I see this allenge as more of a detective story than a fishing expedition. A
task where you’re working from the boom up – from the first clues – rather
than from the top down. Working from the top down – trying to cast a net
over everything and only hold onto those bits of information that are
relevant – is like trying to boil the ocean. You might make a very lile
progress in a very few areas, but you’re very unlikely to find what you’re
looking for. If you do stumble across it, you may well not recognise that
you’ve found it. And if you do recognise that you’ve found it, you’re very
unlikely to have the confidence that it is – aer all – what you were looking
for. As Big Data becomes Bigger and Bigger Data, the top-down approa
will become progressively less effective.
e same is true of craing resear briefs and questionnaires, the answers
from whi you want to use to extract insights about those you’re
interviewing. Before even starting to sket out resear questions to help
you beer understand aitudes, motivations, and behaviours, you need to
first get a thorough grounding in the topic area you’re looking to understand
further through the resear. is doesn’t mean cooking the resear
questions so they give you the answers you’re looking for. at is only ever a
game of short-term returns. Rather, it means gathering and using all the
intelligence there is about the topic area to help create the best and most
relevant possible hypotheses to test. And you can only do that by a proper
immersion in the subject area. By being curious and asking questions and
having receivers always on.
ere are several powerful examples of data-driven stories that have been
created in just this way through resear detailed in the case studies in this
book. Consider Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty and the resear-driven
revelation that only 2% of the world’s women would describe themselves as
beautiful (see pp. 122–125). Consider Sport England’s is Girl Can, based in
part on the finding that 85% of women feel intimidated and held ba from
taking part in sport or exercise for fear of what others might think about how
they look or how they perform, about how they may be judged (see pp. 39–
42). And consider Tesco’s Producers As Heroes, and the insight derived from
in-store competition entries that customers perceive the tasty, fresh produce
from Britain’s farms sold at Tesco as high quality; what makes a quality
product is at least as mu the responsibility of the producer who grew,
raised, or made it as the retailer who brings it to you (see pp. 62–65).
On the face of it, market resear and social media analytics are very
different disciplines. Different audiences, different motivations, different
modalities of communication. But increasingly, many progressive thinkers
now think of social media analytics as among the purest and most
spontaneous forms of market resear available. Social media content is
produced by an increasingly representative sample of the general population,
and personal and demographic information is oen aaed to posts and
tweets and shares. And it’s viewed as spontaneous and unfiltered, because to
be moved to talk about an issue or a product on one or more of your osen
social media platforms, it must have made you particularly happy or sad or
angry. Indeed, although delivered through competition entries, the Tesco
story below (see pp. 62–65) is a good example of data and statistics generated
by an initiative that wasn’t set up to deliver this kind of intelligence.
Avoid False Positives
For storytellers looking to use data and statistics as the foundation of their
narratives, there are a couple of specific, significant allenges you need to be
aware of in relation to what you think the data may be telling you. ese
relate to the wide availability of large amounts of data generated both by and
about organisations, as well as the myriad other sets of data that are made
available by both public and private sector organisations. Put simply, there’s
just so mu data available, it can be difficult to know where to start, what to
pay aention to, and what to ignore.
ere are all kinds of data you and your organisation might collect that
could be useful as the foundation of beer, evidence-based storytelling. In
almost every case, this data is more useful for storytelling if it’s trended over
time, to allow you to see how things are anging. Changes can arise for
various reasons, including campaigns from you and your competitors or
peers, new market entrants, or anges in regulation or legislation. In no
particular order, the data sources an organisation has at its disposal can
include:

News data and analysis – What are people saying about you and
your competitors and peers in the (increasingly online) news media?
What kind of language do journalists use when they’re talking about
your category? Are they routinely more positive when they talk about
you or your competitors? Are your people or your competitors’
spokespeople more likely to be sought out for a point of view? What
is the sentiment of the articles wrien? Is it positive, neutral, or
negative? What methodology is used to ascribe sentiment? Is it done
by computer algorithm, using – say – automated natural language
processing (whi oen isn’t mu beer than ance)? Or is it
manually coded by real human analysts? Is all of the content scored
for sentiment, or just a sample? Is that sample representative? Where
in the country or the world is there more or less interest in your
organisation? Who are the most influential journalists writing in the
area you’re involved in?
Social media data and analytics – Similar to news media data
(though usually mu shorter form in terms of original content).
What are people saying about you and your competitors and peers on
social media platforms and in blogs? What pictures are they posting?
What type of language do they use when they’re talking about you?
What’s the sentiment? Who are the most influential individuals in
social media as measured by how many other people they rea
(number of followers etc.), how many people they stimulate to share
their content (their resonance), and how mu they talk about you
rather than competitors or peers (their relevance)? Last time I
eed, there were several hundred different social media analytics
platforms, so it’s hard to know where to start in terms of
recommendations. Because they’re generally agreed to be one of the
best, because they’re sons and daughters of Sussex born out of my
second alma mater the University of Sussex, and because they’re
generous with helpful content, I’d recommend starting with
Brandwat1 to harvest and analyse both news and social media
content, though of course this comes at a cost.
Sales data – What have you sold in whi locations over the relevant
period? How do your sales compare between online and offline?
What’s a typical customer journey?
Market resear and polling data – What do people think about
your category, your company, and its products? How do their
aitudes compare with what they think about your competitors? Or
about peers, or businesses you respect or aim to emulate?
Employee data – How do your people feel about working for you?
Do they live to work or work to live? Do they understand and can
they repeat your corporate purpose and philosophy? Do they even
know you have a purpose? Are they genuinely engaged? Are they
coming on the same journey as you’re intending to lead? How long
do they stay with you? Are you experiencing excessive, industry-
standard, or below-average urn?
Reputation data – What do people – from specific interest groups to
the general public – think about your organisation? Do you have a
 good reputation? How could it be improved? How are you doing
compared with your competitors, peers, or benmark companies?
What are the drivers of your reputation, good or bad? Are some more
readily anged than others? What do people think of the quality of
leadership and vision in your organisation?
Market data – What’s the dynamic of the marketplace in whi you
operate? Are you a monopoly supplier, are there several competitors,
and where do you rank? Are there new entrants or allengers
entering your market? What are the opportunities for you to expand
into new or adjacent markets? Is digital tenology disrupting your
market and are some new entrants threatening to “do an AirBnB or
an Uber?”
Analyst reports – What do financial analysts think and say about
your performance? Are you seen as progressive or sti-in-the-mud?
How do you compare with competitors and peers?

In addition to your own data, other data sets are also increasingly being
made available. ese data sets are usually free to download and can be
incredibly useful for organisations looking to build a story based on
sociodemographic trends. ey include:

Health data – National and transnational league tables of morbidity

and mortality – siness and deaths. e late, great Hans Rosling –
perhaps the greatest data-driven storyteller on the subject of global
public health, and the subject of a profile in Chapter 7 – was
instrumental in securing and providing access to a wealth of health
data. e Gapminder2 site he set up, run since his untimely death by
his ildren, is a good starting point. e World Health Organization
(WHO) and national health departments, including the U.K.
Department of Health, also provide good sources of data. As do the
bigger, publicly funded health resear projects in both the EU and
the U.S., su as the Framingham Heart Study. e U.S. National
Institutes of Health web resources are helpful here.
Wealth and income data – How mu people earn, how mu they
spend, and how mu they owe can all help you build powerful
narratives. So can data about tax revenue – individual and corporate
– and the size and scale of different businesses. Data sets in the U.K.
to look out for include those made available by the National Audit
Office, HM Revenue & Customs, the Office of Budget Responsibility,
and the Office of National Statistics. Corporate annual reports –
covering everything from financial performance to sustainability –
oen also provide a mine of relevant information.
Government spend data – e organisations listed immediately
above also provide time series data of U.K. Government expenditure
(and income) for different departments. Planned and phased
investment in rail infrastructure, for instance, could provide the
ammunition a civil engineering firm needs to make a case – and tell
the story – for relevant investment. One of the best TED talks on
narrative by numbers (Hans Rosling aside) was given in April 2015 by
self-confessed “data storyteller” Ben Wellington.3 Wellington fell into
his role almost accidentally, spurred into action by Mayor
Bloomberg’s decision to create an open data portal4 that made all of
the city’s data sets publicly available. At the time the TED talk was
recorded, the data portal already had 1,200 data sets, but the
repository is now several times larger.
Weather and holiday data – Many organisations – particularly
retailers and branded goods companies – rely on weather data to plan
and predict demand. From DIY outlets to ice cream manufacturers,
weather data can be incredibly helpful in building data-driven stories.
Academic data – All U.K. academic institutions and many resear
labs make mu of their data available for public access, partly for
scrutiny and partly to stimulate collaboration.
Drug trial data – Aer controversies about pharma companies and
university resear labs only publishing the results of trials that
report favourable outcomes for their drugs, there has been a move on
both sides of the resear divide to make trial data publicly available.
Other data – e U.K. Office of National Statistics is a great
repository of data that details trends and developments in what the
U.K. population is like. Crime, vehicle ownership, pet ownership,
religion, sexuality. Whatever you want to know about the people of
Great Britain, it’s probably there. Including the fact that Brighton is
 the hotbed of the Jedi “religion”, at least according to the most recent
U.K. census, taken in 2011.

So, not only are there vast quantities of data available inside most organ-
isations, there is also a mass of publicly available data. Taken together, these
data sets can make it difficult to know where to start and whi data sets to
use as the foundation of your narrative. Because of the seemingly endless
availability of different types of data, it’s also incredibly easy – and even
more tempting – to throw everything into the mix and go on what
statisticians calling a fishing expedition.
Fishing expeditions are dangerous, because if you start with no idea of
what you want to get out of your data analysis and you’re just leing the
data do the storytelling, two things are likely to happen. First, you’ll get an
answer of some sort. And second, the answer is likely to be aractive – “Why
didn’t I think of that? How couldn’t I see that?” But third, it’s also most likely
to be wrong.
When looking for relationships between data sets – between specific
variables, say social media sentiment and sales – the standard tools available
to the inquisitive, stats-literate storyteller are correlation and, building on
that tenique, regression analysis. Don’t get me wrong. is isn’t a stats
textbook. ere are many excellent stats textbooks available, including
almost anything wrien by one of my former stats teaers at the University
of Sussex, Andy Field.5 But bear with me on this line of thought for just three
short paragraphs more. Or skip past them if they make you break out in a
cold sweat.
Correlation looks at sets of numbers and asks these sets of numbers if
there’s a relationship of any sort between them. In the case of social media
sentiment and sales, for instance, do sales go up when people say more nice
things about us, do sales go down when people say more nasty things about
us, or is there no direct, obvious relationship. Relationships can be linear
(direct) and positive (one goes up while the other goes up) or negative (one
goes up while the other goes down). Relationships can also be cubic or
quadratic – there are twists in the tale. In our example, it might be that sales
go up when people say nice things about us, but when the sentiment gets too
sily sweet, people cease believing that the comments are authentic and
suspect them to be astroturfing (fake posts engineered behind the scenes by
the company), and sales go down (a cubic relationship).
Life isn’t usually that simple, however. One thing doesn’t usually cause
another in the absence of any other factors. As we considered in the
introduction, as cognitive creatures, we are aracted to single-factor
solutions. We find multiple factors, interacting with ea other, difficult to
grasp. Or at least we find it difficult to hold all these factors in mind
simultaneously: “is if that and that but not the other”. So, while some
might want to put Leicester City’s 2015/16 Premiership success down to
Claudio Ranieri’s management – and the club’s owners certainly thought he
was the single cause of failure, when they saed him just eight months later
– there were likely many other, interacting factors behind that extraordinary
5,000–1 success.
So, because life is more complicated than single-factor solutions,
statisticians have developed more complex statistical tests that we can use to
look at relationships between multiple different factors. We can see what the
relationship is like between multiple predictor variables (variables that
predict an outcome) and an outcome variable (the impact of the inputs).
ere are different teniques – including regression analysis and analysis of
variance (ANOVA), cluster analysis, and factor analysis – but they all, at their
heart, use correlations between variables to work out their answers.
(FAO statistophobes – it’s safe to come back now). For the organisational
storyteller, correlating different variables together can be a dangerous thing.
Going ba to our example of social media and sales, this is likely to be too
simple a model, as we’ll explore shortly. But before we get there, it may well
be that su a simple model fails to consider the impact of a hidden third
cause.
Imagine you’re the brand manager of a new ice cream sandwi brand.
You notice an increase in the number of social media mentions – and in the
number of positive mentions – for your product. is follows investment in a
dynamic campaign with a hot new social media agency, and it’s really
bearing fruit. Over the same period, you tra an increase in your sales and
also in the number of new vendors looking to sto your product.
You conclude that positive social media comment has driven sales and
distribution, report this to the marketing director, and ask for more budget
for the social media agency. And then feel incredibly deflated when she
points out that the period in question was spring into summer, and you’ve
failed to account for the hidden third cause: the weather. Her greater
experience immediately tells her that people tweet more about ice cream
brands – more positively – because they are more present in the lives of
consumers when it gets hoer. Rather than causing the increase in sales, the
increase in positive social media mentions were most likely the result of more
people buying and eating the product because May, June, and July are
warmer than February, Mar, and April.
Before you dismiss this analysis as fanciful and naive, a word of warning.
I’ve seen exactly these kinds of conclusions drawn time and again because
organisations tried to draw too-simple, one-factor models of the world and
ignored perhaps the most obvious cause, a hidden third factor, whi has an
obvious impact on both the other variables in the correlation. It was tempting
for our brand manager to look at social media sentiment and sales, because
he wanted to justify his investment decision and get more budget for his
favoured agency. He would have been beer off looking at a thermometer
and a calendar. How analogue!
Fishing expeditions can also be dangerous because they represent an
incomplete model of the world that doesn’t take in all the relevant variables.
Even if you build a regression analysis with what you believe – and history
has shown – to be the five most important predictors of sales, you may well
be leaving out the most important factor. Like the advertising spend of an
aggressive new competitor in the market whi, while you don’t control it,
turns out to be the decisive factor in your shrinking market share. Not your
middle managers’ average waistline, the price of stamps, or the impact of
new Government legislation.
Finally, fishing expeditions are a classic example of what I first heard Andy
Field describe as GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. ere is so mu data
available to all sorts of organisations today – companies, brands, arities,
NGOs, Government departments, academics, journalists, bloggers, politicians,
religious leaders … frankly, to everyone. e tools to undertake even
rudimentary data analysis are also ubiquitous. I’m not talking expensive
applications like Tableau, great as they are. I’m talking applications on every
Mac and PC I’ve ever seen, Numbers and Excel. So, the data and the tools are
at everyone’s disposal. But there isn’t necessarily the critical faculty or the
training to judge whether the correlation you’re running is likely to produce
meaningful – let alone true – results.
Spurious Correlations
Tyler Vigen is a student at Harvard Law Sool. He became so obsessed with
the spurious correlations he saw appearing across news and social media –
and a lile distracted from his law studies – that he started downloading a
wealth of different, publicly available data sets. He then ran endless
correlations to make the point – in a very funny, quasi-academic way – that
just because you can correlate two sets of data with one another it doesn’t
mean that you should. More importantly, it doesn’t necessarily reveal
anything meaningful. He’s brought together hundreds of data sets and
produced literally tens of thousands of arts that show very strong
relationships – tenically very strong correlation coefficients or r values –
between the most unlikely of variables.
Some of the most memorable are collected in a book, Spurious
Correlations, that you should buy. My favourites include:

U.S. spending on science, space, and tenology and suicides by

hanging, strangling, and suffocation (r = 0.99)
Age of Miss America and murders by steam, hot vapours, and hot
objects (r = 0.87)
Math doctorates awarded and uranium stored at U.S. nuclear power
stations (r = 0.95)

And this one, below: the number of people who drowned by falling into a
pool and films Nicolas Cage appeared in (r = 0.67). A comparatively weak
correlation, but WHAT a story! Oh …
On his open-access website – and I allenge you not to get lost for hours
at tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations – Vigen says of himself:
I love to wonder about how variables work together. The charts on this site aren’t
meant to imply causation nor are they meant to create a distrust for research or even
correlative data. Rather, I hope this project fosters interest in statistics and numerical
research.
What the book says loud and clear – and it’s a statistical lesson even the least
numerate appear to have heard – is that …

Correlation is not the same as causation

… a lesson that even the more numerate are sometimes too qui to forget
when they’ve been on a fishing expedition and found something apparently
interesting.
e satirical online publication The Onion regularly plays with data-driven
storytelling, has a fondness for the spurious correlation, and a

Figure 3.1 Spurious correlation (second art)

particular penant for drawing precisely the opposite conclusion from the
“resear findings” they present to build bogus news stories. One recent gem
reported:6 “Study finds exposure to violent ildren causes increased
aggression in video game aracters”. ite so.
In the end, it all comes down to what you want to find out, what story
you’re looking to tell, and whi data and statistics you can best use to help
tell that story. When looking to select the right data to be the underpinning
of your story, you need to start with a meaningful hypothesis you wish to
test with the data. And not – as is too oen the case, particularly on fishing
expeditions – start with the data and see what it says. Worse yet, start with a
conclusion in mind and see if you can’t bend the data to support the case
you’re trying to make.
is is not the approa that (proper) scientists take with data when they
use data to test hypotheses. Tempting as it may be – particularly if it’s
building on a body of existing work – scientists don’t look to prove their
hypotheses, they look to test them. ey look to see if, by experimental
manipulation – say giving drug x – they can rule out everything apart from
the dosage of the drug as being the cause of the outcome they record – say
beer memory for faces. e intelligent use of statistics to rule everything
out – and conclude that it’s likely to be the impact of your experimental
manipulation that’s had the effect – is known as null-hypothesis significance
testing. e null hypothesis is the devil’s advocate position, assuming what
you were testing didn’t happen. Organisational storytellers would be well
advised to take this approa, too, when looking to build an evidence-based
story. Or otherwise you’ll make the philosopher Karl Popper, the father of the
scientific method, spin in his grave.
Detecting the Signal from the Noise
Nate Silver is one of the gods of predictive analytics. He and his 538 team
have a near-legendary reputation for predicting the outcomes of elections
and sporting fixtures. Together, they make deep and deeply intelligent use of
data and statistics to show what’s likely to happen next. eir skills need
Silver star contracts with first the New York Times as the home for the 538
blog, focused on political forecasting, and then at ESPN.
In the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, Silver correctly predicted
the right result in almost every congressional district for the two Obama
presidential victories. And while the polling and predictive analytics business
was thrown two curve balls by both the EU Referendum and the 2016 U.S.
presidential race, it’s fair to say that on both those elections Silver and his
team were among the least wrong.
Silver leapt from specialist to generalist interest with the publication of his
2013 book, The Signal and the Noise. e title neatly captures what
organisational leaders are looking to distil and to discard when oosing the
right data and using the right statistics to analyse that data to tell beer,
data-driven stories. All the different categories of organisational and publicly
available data listed above (pp. 49–52) offer the opportunity, if treated right,
to detect meaningful signals. Signals that form the foundations and the
underpinning of more impactful, evidence-based storytelling. But approaed
with insufficient caution, they are more likely to generate meaningless noise.
Many organisational leaders have been poorly served during the Big Data
revolution. Data has been disunited, when an integrated view would tell a
more complete story. Casual observations are slapped onto apparent trends
too early and with insufficient caution. Hypotheses aren’t tested; the data is
manipulated to prove a point. Small “p” politics wins out over statistical
rigour. And the lure of the all-singing, all-dancing data visualisation
dashboard has spawned an industry but afflicted organisations with too
many prey ways of making no sense of nothing.
Taken together, disunited data sets, casual observations, hypothesis
hijaing, and Dashboard Syndrome are unhelpful at best, counter-
productive at worst. e prescription of beer data-driven storytelling starts
with knowing where to look, what to look for, and who to have on the team.
Pierre Emmanuel Maire is the advertising planner responsible for the
compelling “Dirt Is Good” insight that helped Unilever take global leadership
from Procter & Gamble in the laundry category. Ever since the invention and
mass production of washing powder – including the development of the soap
opera as an advertising vehicle for P&G’s products in the 1920s – advertisers
had done lile more than make mums feel guilty. e “whiter than white”
advertising shti had been the category norm for decades, implying only
just beneath the surface that a mum was a bad mum if her kids’ clothes
weren’t always spotless. As if dads had any role in doing the washing …
“Dirt Is Good” turns this idea on its head – as well as empowering parents
to allow their kids to express themselves, enabling kids to be kids and get
outside and play. Yes, Unilever’s laundry products like Persil and Skip will get
the kids’ clothes clean – of course it will, that’s why the product exists. But
rather than constrain ildren’s growing and learning opportunities found
rolling and romping around in the mud, eating a pe of dirt, “Dirt Is Good”
as a message enables parents (not just mums!) to forget about the clothes-
cleaning part, because that’s already taken care of.
Maire distilled the insight from resear he led at ad agency Ammirati
Puris Lintas. In an interview with me conducted in September 2015, he
described finding the right nuggets of data like prospecting for oil.
“Unearthing genuine insights is like finding oil. First, you zone in the right
area. Next, you mine in the right place. en, you extract something
relatively crude. And finally, you refine it until you have something
powerful.”
Summing Up
e Bigness of Big Data can be intimidating.
Use your resources to identify the corner of lile big data that holds the
answers to the questions you want to ask.
Tools and teniques – from Boolean logic to big data analytics – are
important. But it’s not, first and foremost, a tenology problem. It’s a more
problem of purpose – of identifying and articulating your purpose or your
“Why?”, as Simon Sinek shows so elegantly in his 2009 TED Talk.
To ask the right questions that will deliver the right data and statistics, you
need to work boom up, not top down.
is is true for social media analytics, for market resear, for any means
you may oose to identify and isolate the right data and statistics.
Done right, social media analytics can represent the most natural and
unfiltered form of market resear available.
ere’s a huge amount of data available to all organisations – data inside
the organisation, and also massive, publicly available data sets. You should
embrace the wealth of available data, but always be on the lookout for the
false positive.
Statistical fishing expeditions involve seing off into the great unknown of
available data and seeing what you can find. Not to be recommended.
Outcomes very rarely have single causes, particularly in complex markets
or environments. e problem with building statistical models of the world –
particularly when looking for cause and effect – is that you leave out or
ignore relevant data sources.
Correlation very definitely does not equal causation. While spurious
correlations are oen hilarious, they’re very rarely helpful. Except when you
want to talk about how unhelpful they are.
When looking to test (not prove) hypotheses, use the scientific method and
deploy null-hypothesis significance testing. With this approa, you’re
looking to rule out every possible cause of the outcome you’ve observed
before accepting it was something you did to try to ange things.
 Detecting the signal from the noise is a holy grail, but many leaders have
been let down by disunited data sets, casual observations, and the debilitating
affliction known as Dashboard Syndrome.
To get a head start in data-driven storytelling, take leaf out of the oil
discovery business. Zone in the right area, mine in the right place, extract
something relatively crude, and then refine it until you have something
powerful.
Give it a Go: What Makes the News?
Take two newspapers, one more upmarket (in the U.K., perhaps the Daily
Telegraph; in the U.S., maybe the New York Times), one more downmarket
(in the U.K., perhaps the Daily Mail; in the U.S., maybe USA Today). You
could use the online versions – whi carry more stories – but there’s
something incredibly satisfying about doing this exercise with a newspaper
(while they still last) and scissors.
Scan every story for data-driven stories. e City and financial pages are
always full of annual or quarterly results, news of mergers and acquisitions,
and financial performance metrics. at’s a relatively easy place to start. But
keep on reading, starting wherever you want, and you’ll be amazed to find
quite how important data and statistics are to news. Government figures, the
results of new resear, the impact of Big Data, the potential of Blo-ain
or its new allenger Hashgraph, the number of passes completed by the star
of your favourite football team … anything you oose to mention.
Cut out all articles that are data-driven, and make a tally of the proportion
of stories that depend on data to make their points. Advanced players of this
game should focus on a data-driven story in an area with whi they’re
incredibly familiar, and here a web sear will likely prove more fruitful.
Find a story about your organisation or its category but not generated by it;
oose one generated by or about a competitor or peer. And then really work
at the data and statistics, and assess how true or accurate you believe the
story to be.
Data-Driven Stories

Producers As Heroes

What’s the organisation?

Tesco, the U.K.’s largest supermarket. In October 2016, it had 28% market
share, accounting for around one in eight of every pound spent on the high
street.
What’s the brand?
Corporate brand - Tesco food, across all categories
What’s the campaign?
Producers As Heroes
What’s the story?
To ange perceptions about the quality of Tesco’s produce, the company
made a strategic shi to ampion the stories of the producers - from
farmers to bakers, from whisky distillers to vegetable growers.
How did data drive the story?
e campaign was born from a linguistic frequency analysis of a Tesco
customer competition and the tie-breaker line “[PRODUCT X] is my
favourite, quality Tesco product because . . .”. Contestants had 30 words or
fewer to say why.
What was the outcome of the campaign?
Fundamental and sustained shi in perceptions of Tesco as a provider of
quality products.

On returning from summer holidays in 2010, the most intriguing email trail I
found in my inbox connected me to Tesco’s then ad agency, Red Bri Road.
Now this is long before retailing’s tallest poppy hit the buffers, ewed
through CEOs, made some of the biggest losses in British corporate history,
and got mired in accounting scandals. e recession had started to ange the
dynamics of food shopping – Aldi and Lidl were making waves, Waitrose
had launed an Essentials range, and everyone was parking tanks on their
competitors’ lawns.
Tesco, I learned from the emails, was starting to talk about quality. ey’d
developed some farm gate to store stories and begun advertising about the
quality of food not just in its Finest* range. But it wasn’t cuing through in
earned media; in news, broadcast, and social. Expecting journalists, bloggers,
and punters to suddenly start talking and writing about the quality of Tesco’s
products just wasn’t a realistic aspiration, at least not with the strategy they
were pursuing.
With colleagues, I took what proved to be the first of many trains for the
next two years to Cheshunt, met the food marketing supremos and category
heads, and headed ba to the office with a bag full of briefing materials.
Least promising of all was a fat spreadsheet full of competition entries from
Tesco customers (always customers; never consumers or clients). e
competition theme? “What’s your favourite quality Tesco product?”
Tiebreaker? “[PRODUCT X] is my favourite, quality Tesco product because
…”. Tens of thousands had taken the time to enter, but the marketers didn’t
know what to do with all their comments and nominations.
at night – and it did take all night – I subjected the spreadsheet to
intensive linguistic analysis, cruning frequencies of words and looking at
how customers talked about their favourite quality Tesco products. And the
new day began, I had a sense that this unpromising spreadsheet might hold
the key to unloing the brief of geing journalists and social media
commentators – yes, even in 2010 – to talk about the quality of Tesco’s food,
allenging misconceptions and building an already shaky reputation. e
linguistic analysis revealed four important traits underpinning customers’
opinions about what set their favourite Tesco’s food apart: Britishness,
freshness, produced on farms, and taste. But the traits felt more like
indicators than insight; like filtered data than a central idea on whi to base
a campaign about quality.
Stu, I took a timeout. Timeout is one of the most important and
underestimated tools in idea creation and insight generation. Deliberately
taking time away from the problem you’re trying to solve allows the
subconscious mind to do that brilliant thing it does all the time without you
even noticing: recombination. Vilfredo Pareto may be best known for his
80/20 rule. But his second most famous maxim is: “An idea is nothing more
or less than a combination of old elements”. How right he is.
e subconscious glues together already-acquired information (read here
data and statistics) and puts them together in new and interesting ways.
Many, it will reject. But some it will promote and when they pop through
into consciousness that, for me, is the very essence of the eureka moment.
(I’ll talk mu more about this in my next book, How to Be Insightful).
So, stu, I went to meet a collaborator at the Rude Britannia exhibition at
Tate Britain. is celebration of Anglo-Saxon smut, from saucy seaside
postcards to the Carry On franise, was a romp through what tiled
Britain’s rude funny bone from the World War II onwards. And it was while
taking this timeout, wandering between the giant blow-ups of pages of Viz
Comic, that I realised I’d worked it out. I had my eureka moment. ree
metres tall, giant blow-ups of two Viz aracters – Farmer Palmer
(catphrase “Get off moi land!”) and 8 Ace (alcoholic superhero) – towered
over me. And suddenly, the idle it-at with my collaborator stopped.
Combining the traits from the linguistic analysis with these two aracters, I
had my insight.
To tell the Tesco quality story – about tasty, fresh, British food that Tesco
customers loved so mu – we needed to tell the story through the eyes of
the farmers who supplied produce for the supermarket. Not Farmer Palmer,
but Tesco farmers. Yes, the products were sold at Tesco, but the true heroes
were the farmers and growers and producers who made su good quality
produce. Tesco was the enabler, the facilitator, and not just to quality food
products on the shelves today, but also to growing thousands of other
businesses across the country whose quality food products they distribute
and sell.
And so was born Producers As Heroes, an award-winning campaign that
lasted 18 months and helped to reposition Tesco and allenge three
misperceptions it had struggled to throw off.

1. at Tesco’s products – outside its Finest* range – were generally

prey poor quality.
2. at Tesco’s relationship with its producers was one-way traffic and
in no way a partnership. e shorthand outside the business was
that Tesco used to “screw its suppliers to the floor”.
 3. at Tesco’s unique size and rea were a force for good for Tesco
and Tesco only.

e campaign was not, of course, robust enough to withstand the

allenges that came to disrupt Tesco so profoundly aer Terry Leahy le
and Philip Clarke took over, before Dave Lewis steadied the ship as CEO. A
communications campaign could never withstand the collapse of Tesco’s U.S.
expansion plans via Fresh ‘n’ Easy, the onslaught of the discounters, and
internal accounting scandals. But for a good 18 months – while the data-
driven storymining and storytelling team went through all of Tesco’s
different categories and found and told great data-driven stories – the food
marketing business helped to ange what many people said and then
thought about Tesco.

Key takeaway: Sometimes, the data and statistics you need to tell
powerful stories are siing right underneath your nose. Turning data
into insights and insights into compelling stories requires both
analytical skills and storytelling nous.
Notes
1 A good example of their generosity in content marketing – and an excellent resource
for analysing Twier content – is their 2016 blog The Top 10 Free Twitter Analytics
Tools, linked here hp://bit.ly/2q23EPf

2 See www.gapminder.org, so-named because of the paternalistic warning on the

London Underground. More about Hans Rosling and his work in Chapter 7.
3 “Making data mean more through storytelling” by Ben Wellington (2015, April 20)
TEDxBroadway. hp://bit.ly/1XzrMAd
4 hps://opendata.cityofnewyork.us
5 www.discoveringstatistics.com
6 www.theonion.com/article/study-finds-exposure-violent-ildren-causes-incre-55456
4
e Four Es Of Effective Storytelling
Stories are powerful ways of connecting emotionally with your audience.

Dale Carnegie (1915), The Art of Public Speaking

Driving Engagement
e holy grail of marketing – particularly digital marketing, and most
particularly social media marketing – is engagement. e two-way,
conversational nature of social media enables companies and brands to see
in real time how people are responding to what they’re saying and doing.
Not only does social media provide an immediate feedba loop, it also
comes with built-in measurement and metrics that can – used right – help
organisations understand in more detail the extent to whi they have
genuinely engaged current and potential customers.
If individuals share content produced by companies or brands on their
personal timelines or feeds without comment, the creator of that content can
assume that the person doing the sharing believes it’s worth sharing. ey
can’t be certain that they like or approve of the content – they might be
sharing it without comment to a loyal following who all know, without
accompanying editorial commentary, that a share means “look at what these
idiots are saying now”. is trope is common when sharing content from
contentious politicians and journalists (think Donald Trump and Katie
Hopkins, though both of them oen have abuse added at the top of a share
or retweet).
But in general, when an individual shares content put out by an organ-
isation, it’s fairly safe to assume that the person sharing approves of the
content they’re passing on. e act of sharing anything involves aaing a
lile piece of the person sharing to the content shared. In the least active
way possible, they’re endorsing what they’re sharing by saying to their
followers, “I think you should look at this, too”.
If the person doing the sharing actively likes or favourites content from
an organisation, the organisation can assume with greater confidence that
they approve of the content. And if people share content and add a
comment, the words, phrases, and sentiment used alongside the share give
companies and brands a good idea of what they actually thought about the
content they’re sharing. Of course, people oen share or retweet and add a
hostile comment (think Trump and Hopkins again), but the fresh content on
top of the original content makes it completely transparent what the sharer
intends by sharing.
e act of sharing is actually comparatively rare. It is estimated that even
the most active Twier users, for instance, only see a maximum of 4% of all
tweets that pass over their timeline from those accounts they follow. It is
rare for users to like or retweet more than 1% of those tweets they do see,
except in the special case of fans of celebrities, who oen like and retweet
almost everything a Justin Bieber or a Katie Perry ever posts.
When a Twier user does retweet or like tweets, these have the potential
to be seen by that user’s followers, though based on the 4% figure above, if a
given user has 1,000 followers, no more than 40 of them would be expected
to see the like or retweet. Social media engagement can quily become a
game of diminishing returns.
Because social and digital media annels are still relatively young, and
because companies, brands, and other organisations using them are mostly
fairly naive about what engagement is and what drives it, a good number of
third-party businesses have been set up to measure and report on
engagement. e products and services these companies offer can map how
far particular pieces of content travel, the extent to whi they’re shared,
how many people they have reaed, and so how engaging the content is
deemed to be. Just take what they say with a pin of salt, particularly the
unjustifiably ubiquitous Klout score.
ere are three allenges with the engagement scores and ratings these
companies provide:

1. ey are usually only absolute and not relative, and there’s no
sense about what is a good engagement score and what is not so
good.
2. ese measurement systems are measures of potential
communications output, not outcomes. ey don’t report on what’s
been aieved by the tweet or blog post, just how far it’s travelled
and, potentially, how many people could have seen it.
3. Many of the most-used social media platforms – including
Facebook, Instagram, Snapat, and Google+ – operate as “walled
gardens”, and no-one has access to even output data apart from the
platforms owners themselves.
Several times in 2016 and 2017, Facebook has been forced to admit that it has
overestimated how many people were exposed to ads and videos on its
platform, and for how long. It has also been compelled to revise down
potential audience rea because it has declared figures for – say – teens in
the U.K. and U.S. that are higher than the total populations provided in
census data.
e Power of English
When looking to prepare powerful, data-driven stories that are likely to
drive engagement in a target audience, it is important to ensure that the
content organisations prepare and distribute is fit for purpose. English is
su a ri language with gloriously diverse ways of saying the same thing.
In one form or another, English has been around for more than a
millennium. In that time, many other languages – of conquerors and the
conquered, of allies and foes – have le their trace. at’s why we have
rusks and biscuits, craers and cookies eek-by-jowl in the same
supermarket aisle.
You see, English – unlike rather too many of its native speakers on its
home island these days – is an incredibly welcoming entity, willing to admit
as many ambers as it does verandas, as happy with Sadenfreude as the
Kindergarten. Mercifully there is no Academie Anglaise, and our linguistic
open borders policy allows us to build narratives – tell tales – fabricate
fables from the riest palate available to storytellers anywhere.
One benefit of this tolerance for tautology is that the able English speaker
can deploy more forms of spee than those less linguistically well-
endowed. And one of the simplest and most pleasing to the ear is
alliteration: starting successive words with the same leer or sound, creating
a rhythmic cadence to phrasing to make it more memorable. It’s not a bad
starting point.
What’s more, resear from the pre-digital age – particularly from the
laboratories of Paul Ekman at the University of California at San Francisco,
where he created a universal Atlas of Emotions – mean that we know that
people pay more aention to information that tis the following three
boxes.

1. It’s emotional – it covers emotional subject areas and it triggers the

emotions.
2. Connected to this, it needs to be energetic. Language – and, luily
for me and us, particularly the English language – is able to convey
 energy and excite, even on the printed page, even on the
shimmering screen of a computer, a tablet, or a phone.
3. It’s empathetic – it considers the world from the point of view of
those it’s trying to influence. It talks to the target audience in the
language they understand and respond to.
Emotion
Data-driven stories that include an emotional element are actually
remembered beer than those stories that are purely factual. is is true of
both positive and negative stories, both of whi are more memorable than
neutral, fact-based stories. is is because words and concepts that trigger
an emotional response are of evolutionary value. ose things you could eat,
mate with, or be killed by, deserve and command our aention, and should
not be forgoen. What’s been dubbed the brain’s emotional barometer, an
oval body called the amygdala (amygdala is the Greek for “almond”) lights
up when we see, hear, talk about, or observe something pleasant or
unpleasant.
e amygdala (actually, there are two of them; just drill in on either side
from the eyes and ears and the amygdalae are at the meeting point) is an
ancient structure. It’s the keystone of the limbic system – also known as the
emotional brain – and is something we share with many other animal
groups, including reptiles, birds, and, of course, other mammals. Emotional
content is encoded more deeply, more rily through the involvement of the
amygdala, and as a result is remembered beer. Organisations would do
well to remember this lesson from Psyology 101.
During the EU Referendum campaign, Vote Leave campaigner Miael
Gove claimed, “people in this country have had enough of experts”. His
contention was in response to the Remain campaign’s constant use of dry
facts and data about what might or might not happen to the economy in the
event that Britain le the EU.
In the aermath of Vote Leave’s success, there has been a lot of debate
about whether we have entered a “post-truth society”. e Guardian1
reported on 19 September 2016: “e rush to believe that facts and evidence
aren’t what people want is already streaming through policy and
professional circles and influencing a rethink of how to communicate with
the public.” is debate was redoubled aer the 2016 U.S. presidential
election, during whi truth and facts apparently played a less important
role than fake news. “Post-truth” was even the Oxford English Dictionary’s
“word” of the year in 2016.2
e evidence suggests that it is not that facts are irrelevant, that we have
not, indeed, entered a “post-truth society”. In fact, we live in an age when
facts have never maered more, as we’ll explore in Chapter 8. But what is
also undeniable is that facts – data and statistics – need to be delivered with
emotional relevance and resonance. Simply trying to ange someone’s
mind by (a) telling them they’re wrong and (b) showing them the facts that
prove they’re wrong is counter-productive. In fact, using su a laboured,
expository storytelling style is more likely to make them become further
entrened in contrary views. And as well as an emotional veneer, data-
driven corporate and brand storytellers need a dose of intrigue to stimulate
further interest.
e “post-truth society” is a particular nightmare vision for the scientific
community, whose whole raison d’être is to underpinned by knowledge,
facts, data, and statistics. In a rallying cry editorial wrien just aer the
referendum, New Scientist magazine wrote:3 “For reason to triumph,
scientists need to learn to engage with emotion.”
Energy
English is a vibrant, living, ever-anging beast. All languages are, but
English is particularly adaptable, capable of expressing energy through the
types of words and phrases you oose to tell your data-driven story. It’s
also supremely flexible. Has rules just waiting to broken. Smashed; crashed.
Dashed against the ros. Completeness comes from full sentences. But also
from shards. Jagged outcrops.
What’s more, different types of words convey different states: verbs for
action (think sports reporting), nouns for facts (an engineering manual), and
adjectives for emotion (rousing poetry). And we’ve already set out above
why emotion is so important in data-driven storytelling.
Too factual (the usual failing)? Cut down the noun count, particularly
Latinate, abstract nouns.
Not enough action? More puny, Germanic verbs please. Contrast the
deathly dull “preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification” with
the raw energy of “sweat, timeout, eureka, prove”. And how would you like
a perfect first date to end? Would you rather osculate, kiss, or even snog?
Same ideas, very different levels of engagement through emotion.
Content lacking in emotional appeal? Increase the number and intensity
of adjectives. Two is too few, four is a list, but three has the potential to
become a mind worm. ree adjectives like emotional, energetic, and
empathetic, say.
Empathy
e Cotail Party Rule states: “If you want to be boring, talk about yourself.
But if you want to be interesting, talk about what maers to those who are
listening.” Just consider those who draw an audience at a party, like bees
round a honeypot. Are they talking about themselves? Almost never. ey’re
talking about a subject and in a manner that draws others in.
To aieve this with impact means thinking from others’ points of view
before we start talking – before we start telling our data-driven stories. It
means understanding how others will receive the information that’s
transmied, not just thinking about the elegance of transmission. And being
able to do this is only possible to the mind readers among us – the truly
empathetic. Well come ba to the Cotail Party Rule in Chapter 6.
We met the New York–based data storyteller, Ben Wellington, in Chapter
2. In addition to the helpful provision of public data sets by Mayor
Bloomberg’s open data laws providing raw, Big Data sets for Wellington to
work with, his skills as a data storyteller have benefied hugely from his
tra record in improvisational theatre and comedy, or improv. As he
explains in his TEDxBroadway talk, improv is all about telling stories beer
and connecting with people’s experiences through empathy.
e skilled improv performer doesn’t look to tell his or her own story; he
or she looks to riff off what co-performers are doing and saying, and the best
way to anticipate even a nonsense scene is to use empathy to understand the
other aracters. As Dan Pink shows in To Sell Is Human, great improv
performers see every scene as an opportunity for empathetic, two-way
dialogue. ey see every line from another performer as an invitation. And
this makes them approa their responses with an open aitude of “Yes, and
…” rather than the closed and restricting “No, but…” Additionally, improv
requires performers to focus on single ideas, keep scenes simple, and explore
subject areas that performers know best. But above anything else, successful
improv comes from empathy, whi is also a core skill of the organisational
storyteller.
 In the case of organisations telling data-driven stories, looking to engage
in dialogue with customers and consumers, empathy is a skill to be sought
out, learned, and prized. ose organisations that fail to put themselves in
the shoes of their audience, who can’t see – and tell – stories from their
perspective, well, they’re suffering from what we might call corporate
Asperger’s syndrome. Some are mildly on the spectrum and just a lile
mind-blind. ey can learn shortcuts to overcome this condition. But others
– oen business-to-business, te-first enterprises – can only see the world
from their perspective and need fundamental rewiring if they’re ever to be
thought of as engaging.
Engagement
e fundamental point of any storytelling, of any language you oose to
use, is to interest and aract those you want to influence. In the always-on
world of corporate and brand dialogue, this applies as mu to companies as
it always has to people. And organisations can learn to talk that elusive
dialect of English – Human – if they follow the golden rules of storytelling.
If they wear their hearts on their sleeve and display their emotion.
If they keep up the pace and exhibit real energy.
If they put themselves in their audience’s shoes and reveal their empathy.
Do all of these things, and you’re very mu more likely to secure that
elusive fourth E: engagement.
Summing Up
e power of story has been known from the time of Aristotle onwards, and
was first recommended to business leaders for more than a century in Dale
Carnegie’s seminal The Art of Public Speaking.
Every organisation craves engagement from those it seeks to influence.
When people share content from an organisation, it’s a prey good sign
they want to draw others’ aention to that content.
When they comment favourably on content they share, it’s safe to assume
they approve of what they’re sharing and the organisation. ey’re already
one of your advocates.
Sharing and liking are remarkably rare.
People pay more aention to content if it’s emotional (not – just –
rational), if it’s energetic (not passive), and if it’s empathetic (not self-
absorbed).
Emotional stories are more rily and deeply encoded in memory than
facts alone. ey trigger the brain’s emotional barometer, the amygdala.
Facts maer, but facts need to be placed in the context of human
emotions.
English is particularly versatile in the way it can convey energy to
meaning. Nouns deliver facts, verbs action, and adjectives emotion.
Organisations need to tell stories with the audience in mind. ey need
their empathy radar swited on and working.
Engagement is a consequence of emotion, energy, and empathy.
Give it a go: Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives
Go ba to your organisation’s About Us page. Or, if you don’t work for an
organisation, go to the About Us page of an organisation you admire.
Capture the text into a Pages or Word file. Strip out all of the words apart
from nouns, verbs, and adjectives. en tally these up. Whi comes out on
top?
Mostly nouns, and the organisation values facts and information most
highly.
Mostly verbs, and the organisation is a go-geer. (ough if they’re
mostly in the passive voice “the shop was opened” rather than “we opened
the shop” it’s not that go-geing).
And mostly adjectives, this is an organisation that wears its heart on its
sleeve. It understands how to communicate emotion.
Does the relative count of nouns, verbs, and adjectives for the organ-
isation in question meet your expectations of what it’s actually like? If not –
and particularly if it’s your organisation – rewrite the About Us page to
mat either the reality or the desired perception, and share it with those
who can bring about ange.
Alternatively, get a group of people from your organisation together.
Working in teams of four or five, generate three lists of 20–30 nouns,
adjectives, and verbs that are truly distinctive to your organisation – why it
exists, what it does, and how it does it.
en, take it in turns to make sentences that describe the organisation
using at least one of ea. It’ll be like wading through treacle and feel
unnatural at first. But aer a few minutes of playing with your distinctive
lexicon, it’ll feel good and empowering. And you’ll be surprised at how good
it sounds – and consistently so.
Data-Driven Stories

Dear Person

What’s the organisation?

Spotify
What’s the brand?
Music streaming service
What’s the campaign?
Dear Person
What’s the story?
Develop locally tailored advertising in markets around the world based on
the music Spotify knows its users have been streaming in particular
countries, cities, or markets.
How did data drive the story?
e campaign could not have existed without the data, statistics, and
analytics.
What was the outcome of the campaign?
Increase in empathy and understanding between users and Spotify. And a
milestone aievement of passing 40m subscribers at the end of 2016.

Spotify is the Stoholm-headquartered music streaming system that has

revolutionised people’s relationship with music around the world. Although
music streaming systems existed before Spotify (most notably Napster) and
although big players who are never first to market but oen swoop in and
clean up have since launed their own music streaming services (most
notably Apple with its Apple Music platform), Spotify is the dominant
player in the market, across multiple markets.
ere are a number of reasons why Spotify has proven to be so successful.
e company has been able to sign up the vast majority of record labels and
artists whose music is in demand. ey have made it simple and
straightforward to no longer own physical copies of music but rather to pay
to have access to digital copies, streaming seamlessly between devices. ey
provide different levels of membership, from free (with ads every 30
minutes), small monthly payment (on a handful of devices and streaming on
only one at a time), and slightly larger monthly payment (multiple – family
– users, streaming simultaneously). At every step of the way, Spotify has
used its tenology and data management to drive success.
In order to pay micro-royalties every time an artist’s music is streamed,
Spotify knows who has streamed the music, where (geographically), on
what type of device, at what time, and whether they’ve done so just once or
repeatedly. Not only does this enable them to know how mu they need to
pay to licence and copyright holders of music, but it also enables them to
make suggestions and recommendations, from new artists to user-created
playlists, as well as offering special offers for concert tiets and meet-and-
greets to commied fans who stream particular artists the most.
As a truly data-driven business, Spotify ose to use what it knows about
its users’ streaming behaviour as the fuel for a global advertising campaign
towards the end of 2016. Without seeing the creative executions, in principle
this campaign sounds dull and dry – just a data-driven communications
campaign that reflects ba to users what they’ve been doing.
In reality, the delivery of Spotify’s “Dear Person” campaign follows the
principles of the 4Es of storytelling. To drive user engagement – and also,
without doubt, to trigger subscribers to rea for phones and tablets and
stream some more – the wiy executions play on emotion, use real energy,
and display deep empathy.
Campaign posters, whi ran from November 2016, first in the U.K.,
France, Germany, and the U.S., and then in ten more countries, included the
headlines:
“Dear person who played Sorry 42 times on Valentine’s Day. What did you do?”
“Dear 3,749 people who streamed It’s e End of the World As We Know It the
day of the Brexit vote. Hang in there.”
Figure 4.1 Spotify Brexit advert

“Dear person who made a playlist called: ‘One Night Stand With Jeb Bush Like
He’s a Bond Girl in a European Casino.’ We have so many questions.”

Emotion – Different executions in the campaign referenced individual,

city-wide, and country-wide moments of emotion, distress,
unhappiness, and joy, whi they addressed by listening to just the
right music.
Energy – Visually, the campaign craled with energy. From its use of
a very un-corporate electric pink and clashing red to iconic images.
But also verbally, too, in its encouragement to its users to “Hang in
there”. Not to mention the campaign’s strapline: “anks 2016. It’s
been weird.”
Empathy – e whole campaign is about Spotify showing that it
understands what its customers are doing and thinking. By knowing
whi music they’re playing at particular moments – on Valentine’s
Day, on the day of the Brexit vote, and so on – and drawing
associations between what was streamed when, the company is
showing deep empathy for its customers. Aer all, the campaign is
called “Dear Person”, and it doesn’t get mu more empathetic than
that.
Tech Times
4 reported that the idea for the data-driven advertising campaign
originated from Spotify’s end-of-year, “e Year in Music campaign” in
2015, whi showed that user data contained some interesting titbits and
insights. According to ief marketing officer Seth Farbman: “at led to the
idea of reflecting culture via listener behavior, showing that big data is not
depriving marketing of creativity as some have implied. For us, data inspires
and gives an insight into the emotion that people are expressing.” Tech
Times dubbed the campaign “the fun side of customer data analytics”, and
it’s certainly that. But it’s also a compelling example of data-driven
storytelling at its very best.

Key takeaway: e data you collect from your customers can be

repurposed to tell data-driven stories that drive engagement through
emotion, energy, and empathy.
Notes
1 hp://bit.ly/2d1rZey
2 www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37995600
3 hp://bit.ly/2shQgnO
4 hp://bit.ly/2z1lUZO
5
Beware the Curse of Knowledge
Rather than browbeating the consumer with persuasive messaging which
immediately triggers a defence mechanism, storytelling activates neurones that
create empathy between the storyteller and the subject.

Lisa Samuels, Health Employees Superannuation Trust of Australia1

A Dangerous ing
e two core skills that are in highest demand in the data-driven knowledge
economy are analytics and storytelling. One: the ability to identify, isolate,
and make meaning out of the neighbourhood of lile big data that is most
relevant to the narrative your organisation seeks to use to differentiate itself.
Two: the ability to use the right data, manipulated through clever statistics
and set in its proper context, to tell that story in a compelling, coherent, and
convincing way. With emotion, energy, and empathy, of course to drive
engagement.
Traditionally, it was believed these skills were found in different types of
people. Scientists and artists. Introverts and extroverts. Le-brain analysts
and right-brain communicators. People who had specialised – and been
forced or annelled into specialising by secondary and tertiary education –
in one area or another. But the problem with dividing responsibility for
these skills into different job functions and roles – to R&D on one side and
marketing communications on the other – is that it can be difficult to get
these two types of player to play on the same team. Fire and ice can make a
spectacular combination, but without a good mediator who can see the
middle way between the two, that combination has the potential to end up
as just a disappointing puddle of water.
Keeping analytics apart from storytelling and only bringing them together
when it’s time to tell the story sets organisations up for failure. As
generations of Victorian and Edwardian anthropologists and linguists
discovered, exploring hidden and pre-industrial societies, if cultures are
physically separated, they develop in different ways. ey have different
forms of society, different cultural conventions, different hierarical
structures, a different pace of working, and, most fundamentally, different
modes of communication. ey end up speaking a different language. Yes, if
they’re geographically close it’s likely they’ll be able to make themselves
understood, but words will take on their own meaning and an awful lot will
be lost in translation. Both sides can get frustrated and will withdraw if they
can’t make themselves understood.
 e most common complaint that analytics folks have about storytellers is
that they dumb the data down. Storytellers don’t understand the tenical
details of what analysts have discovered. ey want a one-factor solution
when the situation’s mu more nuanced than that. e stories they look to
tell only tell part of the story in a way that trivialises and oversimplifies the
very real substance of what they have discovered or developed. Because
storytellers la the tenical nous to appreciate the complexity of the
analysts’ work, the stories they look to build make a moery of their
innovation. Oen, analysts see lile point in cooperating with the
storytellers if all they’re going to do is tell the tiny bit of the story that they
actually do understand.
On the other side, storytellers oen get incredibly frustrated by analysts’
inability to explain their findings and their breakthroughs in a simple, clear,
and coherent fashion. ere are always so many “ifs” and “buts” and “only
in certain circumstances”. Boffins are supposed to come up with great
solutions, aren’t they? Not something that we can only claim works with a
following wind, every other ursday, and if there isn’t an “r” in the month.
Storytellers absolutely want to build stories with as few interacting
factors as possible, because the more factors and contingencies there are to
explain, the harder it will be to communicate the benefits of the innovation.
It will be harder to engage even specialist, tenical media to listen to, write
about, and carry the story to those they seek to inform and influence. In the
social media world, it will be harder to grab the aention of leading bloggers
and those with most rea and influence in the specialist area of the
organisation. For organisational storytellers, it can sometimes feel as if
analysts are actually working for the opposition.
What this clash of cultures oen does is make both sides withdraw and
refuse to cooperate and collaborate. It results in more siloed businesses. And
most importantly – from this book’s perspective – it results in weaker, data-
poor stories, rather than impactful, data-driven storytelling.
A Tale of Teabag Tenology
e first time I saw the walls come down between the analysts and the
storytellers was when, in the mid-1990s, I had the privilege to sit on the
inside tra of one of the most important developments in British culture of
the late twentieth century. I talk, of course, of when teabags moved into the
third dimension. When PG Tips stole a mar on the rest of its competitors
by moving from flat and square to three-dimensional and pyramid-shaped.
e era of tetrahedral tea was upon us.
As even non-British readers know, tea is an incredibly important part of
British culture and British life. Tea is drunk by many Brits all day, every day.
e mantle of the nation’s biggest tea drinker is hotly disputed between
former Labour minister and firebrand Tony Benn – who drank a pint of tea
an hour, enough in his lifetime to float the QE22 – and the mother of the
third and finest Dr Who, Tom Baker – whom Baker claimed in his first
autobiography3 drank up to 72 cups a day.
Not all of us trouble our bladders quite so insistently, but tea is woven
into the fabric of British life. It’s used to wake us up. As a punctuation point
at times of emotional or physical crisis, at both a personal and a national
level. Making a cup of tea is an act of kindness and sympathy – “tea and
sympathy”, aer all – and drinking a cuppa makes the world right again,
allowing us to put things into perspective. Soap opera features tea being
poured almost constantly, although those in soap operas probably need a bit
more tea than the average Brit because there’s so mu going on – and so
mu tragedy – in the life of your typical EastEnder or Ambridge resident.
When your husband’s eated on you? Time for a cup of tea.
When England are 2–1 down to Iceland in the Euros (you heard me,
right)? e national grid goes into meltdown as keles are flied on with
the half-time whistle.
When another senseless ISIS or Al-Qaida aa brings carnage to the
streets of Berlin or Stoholm, but particularly London? e most British
expression of how this won’t be allowed to disrupt our lives and we’ll get on
with life as normal, thanks very mu, is best manifested through making
and sharing a cup of tea.
So, when Unilever decided it needed to make the first major innovation in
teabag tenology since the introduction of teabags in 1953, they needed to
tread carefully. Tampering with tea is like suggesting criet is played in
coloured pyjamas and with a white ball. And Unilever U.K. was particularly
cautious at the time because, only a couple of years before, it had relauned
Persil washing powder as Persil Power, and consumer tests showed it eating
through and wreing clothes. e whole innovation had to be scrapped,
and it le the CEO nervous and cautious. Unilever had had its Blue Pepsi or
New Coke moment. It couldn’t afford a misstep with PG Tips.
When I became part of the Project Magic team, I was working for the PR
agency that would be launing the new product innovation. Naturally, we
were keen to know what the science was behind the innovation. And we
were soon introduced to one of the first – and certainly one of the best –
data-driven storytellers I’ve ever come across. He was someone who both set
the bar and made me realise early in my career that fire and ice can work
together and produce, yes, magic; that telling stories that are underpinned
by complex science but don’t lead with the equations or workings out really
can cut through.
Dr Andrew (Fred) Marquis was a researer in thermofluids in the
Department of Meanical Engineering at Imperial College, London. He and
his colleagues had been briefed by a PG Tips team, including tea tasters and
marketers, supply ain and brand managers, to create something truly
revolutionary in teabag tenology. Something that would improve the
brewing experience given by a teabag and make an even beer-tasting
cuppa.
You see, when you pour boiling water onto a conventional, square, flat
teabag, the pressure of the water on the teabag initially squeezes those
delicious tannins and flavonoids from the leaves and into the water. But
because the teabag is flat, almost as soon as the flow of water stops – when
the mug or the teapot is full – teabags tend to clomp up, to use the tenical
term. e tealeaves sti together and they have no room to move around in
the two-dimensional teabag. is reduces the potential for fresh polyphenols
to be released from every tealeaf in the teabag, and the brew is suboptimal.
To get more taste, people tend to leave the teabag in the cup. But that tends
to create a more bier taste, whi some find unpleasant. Or else they grab
hold of it and dunk it up and down, and then they usually burn their fingers.
e allenge was set.
Rather than dismiss this as marketing fluff or a allenge too trivial,
Marquis and his team took up the task with gusto. ey dismissed as a mere
gimmi the only other innovations in living memory, both as it happens
from ar-rival Tetley. e round bag from 1989 was a cute idea (aer all,
99% of cups and mugs have round booms), but it did nothing to enhance
brewing or the taste. And the drawstring bag – designed to squeeze fresh-
brewed taste out of teabags relatively early in the brewing process – was
incredibly fiddly and liable to snap.
What the Imperial team did was to look to build the first teabag that
created and sustained a three-dimensional shape when it floated in the mug
or teapot. ere were some constraints, of course. It had to be of a shape that
could be manufactured by Unilever’s teabag-making maines with
minimum necessary modification. When teabags are made, the pieces of
porous paper are placed either side of the tealeaves and stited, pressed, or
thermo-sealed around them. Also, the finished shape needed to be
squishable so it could fit into boxes of a similar size to the 40, 80, and 160-
teabag boxes PG Tips made at the time. Aer all, supermarkets wouldn’t
suddenly give up twice the space on the shelves just because PG Tips had
anged the shape of its teabags, however mu beer the tea might taste.
What’s more, having been squashed, the teabags needed to spring ba
into shape when boiling water was poured over the top. ere would be no
ance to introduce a new ritual into the tea-making ceremony of – say –
shaking out the teabag into its 3D shape before popping it into the cup or
mug. It needed to perform as intended and improve brewing performance
when anyone was making a cuppa, half-asleep, bleary-eyed, or when
aending to a domestic or global crisis.
e thermofluids team got to work. ey made teabags of every
imaginable three-dimensional shape. ey made cubes, spheres, and
dodecahedrons. And because of the essential Britishness of tea and teabags –
and their waggish sense of humour – they also made top hats and bowler
hats. But the shape that won out – the shape that could be made using
existing maines, that squashed down into boxes but popped ba into
shape in the mug, and that gave the best brewing performance – was the
tetrahedron or four-faced pyramid. It was – as marketing manager Marcus
Marsden once observed in an agency meeting – “the teabag that works like a
teapot”. anks very mu, said the ad agency, niing the line for the
laun. And pyramid-shaped teabags were born.
Now, the way I tell the story to you is prey mu the way Fred Marquis
and his boffins told the story. To the PG Tips tenical team. To the Unilever
corporate team. To the agencies looking for stories (and coming away with
more than they could have hoped for). To Radio 4’s Today Programme and
BBC1’s Tomorrow’s World. Here’s Fred4 talking in The Independent in 1996:

[The pyramid-shaped teabag] tends to naturally float on the surface of the water,
allowing the water to flow more freely in and out of the tea bag. It is this extra
movement of tea leaves which helps the brewing process.

e teabag that works like a teapot with loose leaf tea.

Of course, there was a wealth of data and statistics underpinning the very
complex tenology required to produce a tetrahedral teabag. ermofluids
folks also use a lot of equations. But they kept them for their lab books and
computer simulations and the academic papers they published to justify the
superior brewing tenology the shape provided (academic papers are
always a useful weapon in the data-driven storyteller’s armoury – though
usually a source of weaponry and not the weapon itself). But they had the
empathy and the understanding to know who needed to know what, when,
and why. Whi is why Dr Fred Marquis is the first – and certainly one of
the finest – data-driven storytellers I’ve come across.
Fred was employed as an academic. He was contracted to run an
academic resear project to fuel a PG Tips product innovation. It was
because of his unusually well-developed sense of empathy that he was able
to provide the data-driven ammunition Unilever needed to tell a convincing,
compelling, evidence-based narrative. He could judge when it was
appropriate to be the scientist (with his team and his peers), and when it was
appropriate to be the storyteller (with his client and their agencies).
Fundamentally, he was able to avoid the Curse of Knowledge.
e Curse of Knowledge
When you learn about a subject, you know more than most people. It’s
impossible to unlearn what you’ve learned (though it is, of course, possible
to forget). e more you learn about it, the more expert you become. And
yet the more you know, the harder you find it to explain to others who don’t
know as mu as you do. is is called the Curse of Knowledge, and it can
have profound effects on how clearly you write or talk about your passion:
about your expertise.
In The Sense of Style, one of the best books about writing clearly and
eloquently, Harvard psyology professor Steven Pinker observes “the more
you know, the less clearly you write”. Academics oen suffer from the Curse
of Knowledge, although some display it as a badge of pride, using shortcuts
and jargon as a smokescreen to create an exclusive club with a secret
language that only the elite few can understand. Fred Marquis didn’t do
that.
Business writers do it too, particularly – though not exclusively – when
they’re writing about legal, medical, or tenical products or services that
are rooted in science. And while science is complicated, explaining the real-
world impact of science doesn’t need to be. If your product or service or
resear is as good as you claim it is – if it’s going to be helpful or useful to
as many people as it possibly could be – you need to talk about it simply
and clearly.
Avoiding the Curse of Knowledge comes down to empathy: to
understanding that those you’re trying to influence – your target audience –
don’t know as mu as about the area where you’re expert as you do. Whi
is why they’re coming to you in the first place – because you’re an expert
and because your product or service can take away their pain. ey don’t
need, and they certainly don’t want, to see your workings or hear your
rationale.
To avoid the Curse of Knowledge, you need to talk like Apple talks. Talk
like Virgin talks. Talk like HSBC talks. To get a very practical sense of what
this means, my corporate and brand storytelling business, Insight Agents,
scoured the internet to find examples of businesses that fail to avoid the
Curse of Knowledge.
In the three examples that follow, we’ve also scored the language on the
Fles–Kincaid scale for reading ease (see Chapter 2 for more details) to
make a second point. Prose that’s infected by the Curse of Knowledge is
very oen hard to read, harder to parse, and hardest yet to understand. is
is because it uses tenical language that would be more at home in a
tenical manual, and because it is wrien without empathy. When
organisations write with empathy, they want their audience to understand
what they’re saying and be as excited by it as they are themselves. ey
don’t want potential supporters, customers, or advocates to be unclear about
what they’re saying. is is why they put themselves in the shoes of these
people – into their minds – and explain themselves clearly and simply. ey
don’t assume knowledge, they assume ignorance.
Consider the case of a business called Regen SW. ey describe
themselves in this way:5 “We are an independent not for profit that uses our
expertise to work with industry, communities and the public sector to
revolutionise the way we generate, supply and use energy.” (Fles Kincaid
reading ease score 26.9).
Not the easiest start to a website homepage, and too mu information
paed into a single sentence. is is particularly true, considering it’s the
first sentence most first-time visitors will ever read about the business in
this, their digital shop window. ey’re so interested in themselves and their
not-for-profit values and the sectors they work with in su a revolutionary
way that, what they actually do (energy supply) doesn’t feature until word
30 of 30. And that’s before they start geing tenical with us, and say:

Domestic biomass growth indicates degression in April. Forecasting expenditure for

biomass is over its degression threshold at the end of November 2014 and therefore
requires a 10% degression in April. The question is whether we might see the
schemes first 20% degression due to the “super trigger” being hit.

(FK 44.1)

I’ve got a bit of a reputation for poking fun at storytelling that’s not clear or
simple or straightforward to understand, and particularly data-driven
storytelling like this. “What does it maer?” victims or fellow sufferers
retort. “We’re a business to business business, experts selling to other
experts. Why shouldn’t we talk in the language we talk in day in, day out?”
My simple response is that – of course – “I understand you’re experts and
brilliant at what you do. at’s why other businesses seek you out. You have
expertise that they don’t and that they need. But because you’re the expert
and your customers inevitably know less than you, you are doing yourself
an active disservice by writing so opaquely. By arrogantly and
unempathetically forgeing that everyone doesn’t know as mu about –
and certainly isn’t as interested in – your specialist area as you are. You owe
it to them to explain it simply and clearly. Simple and clear doesn’t mean
dumbed down or patronisingly. Shrouding yourself in jargon, being
deliberately opaque, and falling foul of the Curse of Knowledge means you
are actually limiting the potential you have to grow and succeed as a
business.”
I really mean that. Poor communication confuses people and they turn off
and go and look for a competitor who can explain what they do quier and
simpler. Having words like those pied out above on your home page
hamstrings a business. When I make that connection, I’ve seen hard-nosed
sales directors and bolshie heads of R&D go quiet. I oen wonder whether
the Chief Financial Officer mightn’t be a beer route to market for a
corporate and brand storyteller than the Chief Marketing Officer. I know
that econometric modellers find a sympathetic ear from the CFO, because
they show the CMO and her marketing teams whi half of their advertising
budget is wasted. CFOs give that kind of intelligence two thumbs up.
We’ve already talked a lot about the role of purpose in business. My
purpose in running a corporate and brand storytelling business is simple. It’s
to help companies and brands communicate beer, more authentically, more
simply. To cut out the jargon, to avoid the Curse of Knowledge, to find and
express their purpose, to plan and cra their communication more
empathetically. Ultimately – and we’ll come to this in Chapter 6 – to talk
that rarest of business dialects: Human. My purpose is a simple purpose, but
it’s one that can have real impact on organisational performance – for-profit
or not-for-profit; private or public sector; business, NGO, or arity.
One of the reasons that Simon Sinek’s Start with Why is the second most-
wated TED talk of all time is that he’s su a good speaker. It’s also
because what he says rings so true, and because his message is so simply
and elegantly delivered. His thesis is that people don’t buy what you do,
they buy why you do it. Advice he gives six times in 18 minutes, and it’s
advice that networking solutions business Zeea Networks should have
considered before they wrote this6 in the appealing-titled tab on their
website called “Our story”:

Zeetta Networks is a spin-out company from the University of Bristol developing

and marketing Open Networking solutions for heterogeneous networks based on
Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV)
principles. The company’s main product is NetOS®, a Network Operating System
which offers a “USB-like”, plug-n-play management of all connected network
devices and enables the construction of virtual “network slices” (i.e. separate
logically-isolated sub-networks) for the deployment of B2B or B2C services such as
Ultra-HD video distribution, City-wide Wi-Fi, Internet of Things (IoT) and M2M
deployments, etc.

(FK 22.3)

By introducing difficult concepts more simply and straightforwardly, these

companies could have made their products and services very mu easier to
understand. But by assuming the readers knew almost as mu as the
authors, these businesses have made themselves less accessible. Less
marketable. And less buyable. ey have fallen foul of the Curse of
Knowledge.
Jargon Monoxide Poisoning
For the first dozen years aer graduation, I worked in public relations. Ea
industry I supported had its own jargon, but thanks to the principles
drummed into me by my boss-cum-mentor, David Green – an elfin
Ulsterman who’d been the news editor of Farmers Weekly – I always
worked hard to ensure my prose was simple and jargon-free. Whether I was
working for the drinks industry, Big Pharma, insurance, or legal services.
When I went ba to sool in 2000, to study for a master’s and then a
doctorate in Experimental Psyology, I soon became frustrated by the
jargon I had to cut through to understand the areas I was interested in –
addiction, memory, and mood. Paper aer thesis aer presentation was
steeped in jargon so deep I concluded the authors didn’t want me to grasp
what they had found. Everyone seemed to take it as a badge of honour to
use language that deliberately excluded outsiders, piling up Latinate,
tenical terms rather than the earthy Anglo-Saxon I’d come to value so
highly. And this from someone whose first degree was in Classics, even if I
was always more of a Hellenist than a Latin lover.
Aer a couple of years, I worked out the reason behind all this jargon.
Rather than showing off learning or knowledge, I saw that many academic
psyologists I met were trying to confuse their audience and gloss over the
fact that their experiments weren’t producing the expected results. ey
coined new terms to cover up the shortcomings of their resear. Worst of
all, they were actively looking to keep others out who weren’t part of their
club, their tribe, their nie.
Social psyology observes the same about the origins and purpose of
street slang and argot, pidgins, and creoles. ey’re about communication –
and effective communication – but only between those in the know.
Language can be a powerful tool in building in-groups and out-groups. But
in the world of organisational storytelling – particularly storytelling fuelled
by data and statistics – those telling the stories should work hard to see that
jargon has no place. One of the original Mad Men, David Ogilvy, said: “Our
business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious
jargon.” What was a problem in 1940s Madison Avenue remains a problem
in twenty-teens cyberspace.
When I returned from academia to commercial communications, I vowed
to take three things with me: an ability to read, understand, and
communicate simply what a resear paper really means; a facility with
statistics, whi has since evolved into data-driven storytelling; and a total
rejection of jargon wherever possible: jargon – the smokescreen of the
insecure.
Ever since the year 2000, the U.K. Society for Storytelling has run an event
called National Storytelling Week, whi it uses to run events across the
country to promote the oral tradition of storytelling. My business, Insight
Agents, supports this event ea year. In 2016, we commissioned the
University of Sussex to talk to a cross-section of marketing professionals
about what they thought about jargon. We found, perhaps unsurprisingly,
that they didn’t like it.
We also found a very real sense that corporate structures oen make
jargon inevitable. Modern business is increasingly complicated and
tenical, and innovations to shout about are oen about the marginal gains
added in the lab or by finance. Our interviewees said that those who
generate really meaningful innovations oen don’t want their advances
dumbed down or explained away in simple terms. If only they could have
met or recruited Dr Fred Marquis.
Our resear concluded that some marketing and communications folk,
whose job it is to tell their corporations’ stories, can be prevented from
geing to the simple truth of what’s new. As a result, too oen the advances
companies make lay buried beneath a mountain of jargon. ey fail to have
the galvanic impact they could on corporate reputation and performance.
Counter-intuitively – our University of Sussex researers found – the more
complex and tenical a business is, the more prepared R&D are to allow a
straightforward story to be told.
Kathy Klotz-Guest is a marketing storyteller and founder of Keeping It
Human, a firm whose mission is to help companies turn marketing-speak
into compelling, authentic, human stories for customers and employees to
act on. Sound familiar? Kathy’s coined the brilliant phrase “jargon
monoxide”, reasoning: “Jargon is more than just lazy; it’s marketing air
pollution.” Common as it can be in corporate and marketing speak of any
organisation, it’s also commonly found in scientific, biomedical, and
particularly academic circles. e relatively recent requirement for
researers to report on and articulate the real world impact their resear
has outside of academia is anging this, but ange is slow.
I finished and presented my doctoral resear in a month under three
years, and its key finding was this: people repeatedly binge on booze
because they fail to learn from the bad things that happen to them when
they get drunk. ite simple, no? I could bore you for hours about the
experimental manipulations I ran, about the well-validated stimuli I used to
create a lab environment that best mimied a naturalistic drinking
environment, or about the multivariate analysis of variance tests I used to
analyse the more complex data sets. Indeed, I reon as many as 70,000 of
125,000 words in my thesis are in the results sections. But you’d by fast
asleep before you got to the second apter.
As a storyteller, the best moment of my viva defence – and perhaps the
highpoint of my PhD – was when my two examiners said: “Before we start,
can we congratulate you on the most jargon-free thesis we’ve ever read?”
Over a drink to celebrate, they reoned they’d examined 120 doctoral theses
between them. I’m not claiming it’s a page-turner, but I’m delighted it was
relatively jargon-free. And, therefore, a good read.
Some of those marketers our Sussex researers spoke to in our National
Storytelling Week resear said they used jargon in order to demonstrate
their expertise and develop trust with consumers. Former president of Yale,
Kingman Brewster, Junior, said that: “Incomprehensible jargon is the
hallmark of a profession”. Experience says this is true, but we also know that
while jargon may demonstrate expertise, it erodes trust in organisational
storytelling.
e Storytellers of Today and Tomorrow
e twin forces of Big Data and social media are anging the way that
more and more people are working in the knowledge economy.
e mass availability of data means that many more people have access to
– and need to interrogate and tame – data with statistics in order to thrive
in their jobs. If they’re going to convince people inside and outside their
organisations to take a particular course of action – if they’re going to
effectively move them to ange their behaviour – they have really powerful
tools at their disposal to help build an effective, evidence-based narrative.
Social media has transformed organisations. ey have moved from
narrow, command-and-control operations where communication with
external stakeholders is performed by a very select few to mu more free-
form organisations where many more voices maer. Traditionally structured
and siloed organisations may ki against this, but their people are voicing
opinions on Twier and LinkedIn and elsewhere outside the organisation’s
direct control. And where many more voices maer – where organisational
dialogue has been replaced forever by mu more of a two-way street –
storytelling becomes part of everyone’s responsibility.
In this new environment, earmarking and restricting skillsets into
particular individuals and departments no longer makes sense.
Yes, businesses will always need R&D departments to resear and
develop the next generation of products and services. But we need R&D
people to develop more storytelling skills to shape the data and statistics that
underpin their innovations into compelling, convincing narratives.
Yes, organisations will always need communications departments to be
the official conduit of communication between the organisation and its
publics. But marcomms people need to enhance their analytics skills to
harness the potential that data and statistics provide for beer, more
impactful, evidence-based storytelling.
What’s more, I have already seen a model in whi the communications
or marketing (or marketing communications) department of an organisation
plays mu more of an advisory or facilitative role than one that insists all
communications must flow through it and it alone. Working with the
thought leaders in the organisation, they prepare powerful, compelling,
emotional content that its people are then empowered to use. Marcomms
distribute so-called Bills Of Marketing (or BOMs) to anyone who might
interact with any of the organisation’s external stakeholders. ese BOMs
contain content on the same theme, delivered – say – in a long-form white
paper, a blog post, 50-word summaries for LinkedIn, quotes from thought
leaders, tweets, killer stats, facts, and soundbites. ose so empowered then
pi and oose the content they need – in the format and length they need
it – and get communicating. It’s like Blair, Mandelson, and the new Labour
pledge card – only more so.
Where this brave new, mashed-up world is going to have to run fastest is
in skills development.
ose with more outward facing roles need training in analytics – in
searing for, finding, and distilling great stories in data.
ose with more inward-facing, analytical, R&D-type roles need training
in storytelling – how to use the data and statistics with whi they’re more
familiar to tell beer, more human, more emotional stories. Stories that truly
move people to take action. Stories that make the organisation come alive in
the minds and imaginations of those it seeks to influence.
Training is one approa. Job shares and job swaps are two more. And
one that I’m just beginning to hear about involves R&D sending analytics
ambassadors to regular marketing communications meetings, and marketing
communications returning the favour to R&D. Cross-collaboration can even
be brought about by simple meanics like the compulsory morning coffee
and aernoon tea sessions that organisations su as the Medical Resear
Council’s psyology faculty at Cambridge imposed on its members –
however senior – some decades ago. e only excuse for non-aendance
there is being out of the building or running an experiment.
e new world of organisational storytelling doesn’t demand that
everyone performs exactly the same function in their jobs. Some will always
be more interested and able to cra narrative, while others will always be
more at home with data and statistics. But what this hybrid approa should
ensure is that everyone knows more about why the organisation exists and
what makes it different; they should be able to use the data generated by the
organisation to build the foundations of great stories; finally, they should be
able to cra and tell these stories. Organisations should therefore feel like
they’re working towards a common purpose, and those many more voices
that maer are mu more likely to be on-message.
Summing Up
Analytics and storytelling are the defining skills required by increasing
numbers of players in the knowledge economy.
Both disciplines need to merge and speak one another’s language.
Australian health educator Lisa Samuels is right when she says those in
the influence game shouldn’t try to browbeat others into accepting a new
way of thinking. at just leads to an entrened defence response and
rejection.
Historically, analytical types believe storytellers dumb down their data
and statistics, while storytellers get frustrated by analysts’ inability to
express their breakthroughs clearly.
e story of how researers at Imperial College developed the PG Tips
pyramid teabag is a case study in how to build a great data-driven story.
Being an expert on a subject has one major negative to it: the Curse of
Knowledge.
e Curse of Knowledge dictates that the more you know, the less clearly
you tend to write and speak. It is impossible to unlearn expertise.
What maers in data-driven storytelling is to wear your learning lightly
and explain clearly and straightforwardly.
e Curse of Knowledge reveals a la of empathy on the part of the
storyteller.
Shrouding an organisational story in jargon makes it very mu less likely
that the organisation will succeed to its full potential.
Writing infected with the Curse of Knowledge drives potential
collaborators, advocates, and customers into the arms of competitors who
take more care over their storytelling.
Jargon is a smokescreen put up the insecure to keep others out. It should
be avoided at all costs, particularly when telling stories with data and
statistics.
Jargon erodes trust in organisational storytelling.
Big Data and social media mean analysts need to become beer
storytellers and storytellers beer analysts.
 It’s not that everyone needs to do the same jobs, but training, job swaps,
and ambassadors from analytics to storytelling – from R&D to marketing
communications – and ba again can help make organisations work beer
together. Everyone understands their purpose.
Rather than insist on doing all the talking, progressive marketing
communications functions now provide everyone in an organisation with
Bills Of Marketing whi all those empowered can use for dialogue with
external stakeholders and media in the right format for them.
Give it a Go: e Killer Stat
What is the single most important data point that defines and aracter-ises
your organisation? Look at the favourite and current data that your
organisation puts out into the public domain. On your website. In your news
releases. In your blogs and social media.
Do you believe that your organisation is an effective data-driven
storyteller? Does it lead with data? Does it use just the right amount of data
or far too mu? How would you ange your organisation’s data-driven
storytelling strategy?
When you’ve found the killer stat, start socialising and sharing it with
colleagues. And see how long it is before the information comes ba to you.
Data-Driven Stories

e safest driver

What’s the organisation?

AVIVA
What’s the brand?
Car insurance
What’s the campaign?
e safest driver
What’s the story?
AVIVA used an app-based game to motivate customers to make their
driving behaviour beer and safer.
How did data drive the story?
e app captured actual driving data of thousands who participated,
enabling AVIVA to rate and rank those family/friendship groups who took
part in the allenge, report on trends among different types of drivers, and
beer inform their own policy teams on how their drivers actually behaved
on the road.
What was the outcome of the campaign?
ought leadership in the area of road safety, active engagement with a low
consideration category, validating the premium for AVIVA branded
insurance.

Insurance is a low interest category, and motor insurance is a low interest

product. It’s viewed by most as a necessary evil, something that has to be
sorted out and paid for. Once it’s sorted, it’s generally ignored until just
around renewal time. e only age groups for whom it’s a high interest
category and product are the young – particularly young men – aged 17–25,
for whom insurance premiums are punishingly expensive. is is because
young men are likely to drive faster, take more risks, have more accidents …
and so make more claims. Oh, and the parents of young drivers –
particularly young men – who are oen required to make a partial or full
contribution to the cost of these sky-high insurance premiums.
Interest in the insurance category has been hijaed over the past ten
years by the advent and the flourishing of price comparison web-sites
(PCWs): companies in the U.K. su as Go Compare, Compare the Market
(Meerkat), and Confused.com. Fierce competition among the PCWs –
including some of the biggest TV and digital sear budgets of any
advertisers in the country – has effectively commoditised the insurance
market, making price almost the only point of differentiation in a saturated
marketplace. Most motor insurance policies are bought aer resear and
oen instant redirection from PCWs.
is has brought the role of branding in insurance companies into
question. Of course, it’s important for insurance companies to have name
awareness and brand recognition for when their names appear on PCWs’
aggregated insurance deals. It’s not every customer – not even desperate
young men – who buy on price and price alone. Brand value and stature still
count in the category – particularly for those brands that refuse to sell via
the PCWs – even if it’s low interest. But the PCWs have not only
commoditised the market. In so doing, they have given branded insurance
businesses an existential crisis.
e branded insurers have started to fight ba. AVIVA has shaken off and
at the same time capitalised on a slightly fusty, paternalistic mantle of
“insurer knows best” to morph into a mu more active, sage brand that is
synonymous with encouraging and rewarding safer driving. And it’s done
that in no small part through a multi-annel, data-driven storytelling
campaign.
In early 2016 – always a noisy time of year for the insurance industry,
aer the complete turn-off of the month around Christmas – AVIVA
launed a new, integrated campaign called the AVIVA Drive Challenge. A
first TV commercial introduced us to the Joliffe–Austin family from
Newport, who were among the first to take up the allenge (hint – why
don’t you, too?). is was accompanied by content delivered through social
media sites, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twier.
 e minute-long ad told the story of how the Joliffe–Austins were going
head-to-head to see who was the safest driver in their family, using the
AVIVA drive app (hint – why don’t you download it?). In a brief 60 seconds,
we were exposed to gender and age stereotypes found in this – and probably
many other – families about who would be the beer driver. e kids, the
parents, or the grandparents. e men or the women. e cautious or the
devil-may-care.
e app measures driving for 200 miles and then gives a safe driving score
out of ten based on cornering, braking, and acceleration. What’s so smart
about this data-driven storytelling campaign is the way AVIVA is motivating
drivers to take interest in the issue of driving more safely – and interest in
AVIVA – by turning safer driving into a game. e opportunity to set up a
competition with family and friends is clever and humanises the initiative,
but there’s actually no need to run a competition alongside anyone else.
AVIVA says explicitly on its website in promoting downloads of its app that
it expects that 40% of drivers who score 7.1 or more out of 10 will receive an
average of £170 a year or more off comprehensive car insurance with
AVIVA.
What’s also smart about this campaign is that it uses the data and
statistics that AVIVA can capture from the telematics app to deliver direct
savings to its customers. By incentivising beer driving performance in
order to benefit from reduced insurance costs, customers are required to
continue driving safely in order to continue to benefit from the insurance
savings.
But AVIVA isn’t only interested in sourcing customer driving
performance data to reward those whose driving behaviour merits reduced
premiums. By having thousands of drivers using its app, drivers who are
required to register the demographic profiles against their unique identifier
and device, AVIVA is able to get a picture of how different types of driver
are driving without having to go to the expense of installing costly bla
boxes in their drivers’ vehicles. e motion sensors and GPS traing
systems built in to smartphones do away with the need for any AVIVA-
funded hardware. e hardware has already been bought by AVIVA’s
customers and app users in the form of their smartphones.
e data can be used for all sorts of purposes, including those related to
data-driven storytelling. AVIVA can use it to highlight who – not just in
ea family but also in ea TV region or city, with sufficient people using
the app – is the safest type of driver. And who the least safe. By aggregating
results on a regional and national level, AVIVA’s policy and premium seing
departments can have access to more, beer, and more up-to-date data about
those driving while covered by AVIVA than ever before. And since all of this
data will of necessity be anonymised, there’s no danger for individual
drivers that personally identifiable (aka PII) data with their name aaed
will go missing or be handed to any other third parties.
All in all, participation in the AVIVA Driver Challenge is a small price to
price to pay for eaper car insurance, safer driving, and a warm feeling
about a branded insurance business who’d been prey low down on the
interest or consideration list for many years before.
Notes
1 hp://bit.ly/2j071nx
2 hp://huff.to/2nZwXwo
3 Who on Earth Is Tom Baker? – An Autobiography (1998). HarperCollins.
4 hp://ind.pn/2omnQYJ
5 hp://bit.ly/2oUjTxA
6 www.zeea.com/our-story/
6
Talk Human
We’re all in sales, and selling isn’t just selling … we need to consider sales in a
broader sense – persuading, influencing and convincing others.

Daniel Pink (2013), To Sell is Human

Fustian Flummery and Flapdoodle
It’s a strange truism of corporate communications that, as soon as they’re
required to write “for” or “as” an organisation, perfectly eloquent individuals
oen adopt a register that’s never come out of any human mouth. It’s as if
being thrust in the spotlight paralyses usually clear and lucid people to start
talking gobbledygook and poppyco, balderdash and baloney, and all
manner of other nonsense so beautifully captured here by the online
glossary from Phronistery.1

aamaraus – baboonery – balderdash – ballyhoo – baloney –

bambosh – bilge – blague – blarney – bletherskate – brimborion –
bugaboo – buncombe – bunk – bushwa – ca – claptrap – clatfart –
codswallop – effutiation – eyewash – fadoodle – falderal – fandangle
– fiddlededee – fiddle-faddle – flam – flannel – flapdoodle – flimflam
– flummadiddle – flummery – fribble – fustian – galbanum –
galimatias – gammon – gibberish – grimgribber – haver – hibber-
gibber – hogwash – hooey – humbug – jabberwo – jiggery-pokery –
kilter – kidology – linsey-woolsey – macaroni – malarkey – morology
– mullo – mumbo-jumbo – narriskeit – nugament – phonus-
bolonus – piddle – pigwash – poppyco – posh – quats –
rannygazoo – razzmatazz – rhubarb – riddle-me-ree – roa –
smegeggy – shu – skiles – slipslop – spina – squit –
stultiloquence – taradiddle – tarradiddle – tootle – tosh – trumpery –
twaddle

When English is su a powerful, varied, colourful tool as this, how is it

that the function of organisational storytelling renders people so hopelessly
and helplessly unable to use language for its primary purpose: to
communicate and convey complex and oen abstract concepts clearly and
succinctly? is allenge is oen especially acute for those who use data
and statistics as the foundation of their organisational storytelling. Let’s
consider now some of the reasons why corporate speak oen misses the
mark and some ways you can ensure your statements can be expressed
rather less stultiloquently.

Psyology – For many people, speaking or presenting to an audience

brings them out in cold sweat. ey feel naked – or they’d rather
walk through their workplace naked than have to stand up and talk
to their peers or colleagues, to internal or external stakeholders. is
fear extends to writing about their organisation too, even when they
have time and es and balances, others to assess and improve
their copy. e very act of being asked to commit something to
words deprives some people of the ability to do what’s come
naturally to them since they first absorbed the language around them
as infants.
Top tips: If you’re writing for a tweet or a post or a blog or a webpage or a
paper, speak out loud what you write. Does it sound human? Would you
understand it if you heard it?

Time pressure – Corporate spokespeople are oen under immense

time pressure, from journalists and bloggers, bosses and colleagues,
to create copy and content. It might be in response to specific
questions. It might be because of publication deadlines. It might be
because a colleague is unexpectedly absent and the task has been
dropped on you. It might be because, if you can’t provide an answer,
the person demanding content will go elsewhere – to a competitor or
a rival. ese pressures are significantly increased in our social and
digital media world, where the timely response to a hostile tweet
could snuff out a story and stop it in its tras, whereas a tardy one
could add fuel to the flames of a crisis.
Perversely, time pressure can also force people to write more
words than if they’re allowed more time to write the right words.
More words, but oen mu, mu less clarity. As Winston
 Churill, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde are all said to have said: “I
would have wrien you a shorter leer, but I didn’t have the time.”

Top tips: Establish the absolute priority of the request for copy, comment, or
content as soon as you receive it. Give in to the tyranny of the urgent over
the important until you’ve dealt with what really matters.

Projected norms – Partly through observing how

companies/politicians/organisations oen talk, partly through
caricature and satire, and partly because communication has
traditionally been a function performed by a limited number of
people in an organ-isation, there is a projected norm about what
corporate-speak should be like. A folk memory representation, if you
like. While this is anging through the speed of social media and
the fact that many more voices maer, the caricature of corporate-
speak lingers on.
e projected norm of corporate-speak is a lile awkward and
stultified. It comes from the mouths of suits, happy to use long words
and longer sentences to deliver a message that says effectively
nothing. e fact that more and more people are thrust and are
thrusting themselves into the spotlight through social annels and
platforms is having a positive impact on corporate-speak. It is also
helping to correct the oen-erroneous projected norms of
organisational storytelling. Both have become more quifire and
casual – human, not slapdash.
Top tips: Learn from what a company active and effective on Twitter says
through there, more than what it says in its annual report. That said, those
organisations that have truly mastered how to talk human can do so in
every channel and medium at their disposal.

Organisational structure – By this I don’t mean silos and departments

– although these can oen be the origin of corporate multiple
personality disorder and different – sometimes conflicting or
competing – voices. No, rather I mean that organisations are abstract
concepts, with rules and governance, norms, and conventions.
However, fundamentally any organisation – a company, an academic
 department, an NGO or arity – is a collection of humans working
together for a common purpose. Yes, what they do may well be
powered to a greater or lesser extent by tenology; Spotify depends
more on te to deliver what it does than the Royal Society of Arts,
but they would both be nothing without their people. And people
aieve things by persuading other people to follow them – by
moving them through evidence-based, emotional appeals.

Top tips: Realise that, however tech-rich and data-driven, all organisations
are populated by people and that people make the decisions. They may be
guided by data and statistics, but no decision will be made without the
guiding hand of purpose and motivation. So, use arguments that appeal to
people – human-to-human – balancing evidence with emotion and
empathy. Algorithms matter, but not as much as humanity.

Fear of unintended consequences – Responding in the right or the

wrong way can have profound, career-limiting consequences. Say or
write the wrong thing to the wrong person or on the wrong
platform, and you can send the company share price tumbling or get
your organisation into legal hot water. In these circumstances, there
are a couple of tendencies to wat out for. Saying too mu is easy.
You’re asked for one figure or one statistic, and you give a mountain
in response. You think you’re being helpful, but you’re throwing bad
data aer good. Rather than using simple, straightforward language,
you lapse into jargon and the curious register of corporate-speak,
piling abstract noun onto tenical term. In fact, you’re helping no
one and sounding more stupid by the moment. Stop.
Top tips: Say what you need to and no more. Learn to love the sound of
silence. Don’t throw fuel on the fire by saying more and more when you’ve
already answered the question.

Poor planning – When you’re looking to control the flow of

information, particularly through 24/7 cycle of news and social
media, you need to realise that your organisation’s point of view will
very rarely be the only or dominant perspective to govern the story
that is ultimately told. is is true, even if the story starts with a
crisis (or an incredible success) driven by what your organisation has
 said or done. ere will be competitors and peers, regulatory
authorities, representative and/or trade bodies, politicians,
academics, and all manner of other stakeholders who can make the
story beer or different or carry on burning.
Top tips: Even in the eye of a crisis, take time out to plan what you’re going
to say. Be empathetic enough to understand what others want and need
from you, and don’t throw numbers or factoids at the problem – about how
you’re doing brilliantly everywhere other than where there’s a crisis, say –
to try to divert attention. Consider the impact of every response you may
make, and check with a member of your team whether what you’re about
to say sounds authentic and human.

Jargon – We considered the impact of the Curse of Knowledge in detail

in Chapter 5. is phenomenon – whi makes it hard to explain
simply something you know in detail – very oen makes
organisational storytellers sound like they’re speaking another
language. ey use tenical details and jargon as if everyone should
understand them. ey liberally sprinkle data and statistics through
their conversation or copy because surely anyone can see how
relevant they are, how they build the story up.
Top tips: Strip out the jargon. Assume no knowledge of your specialist area.
Use data and statistics as the rationale and the underpinning of the story
you’re telling, but never lead with them or use them as the story. Evidence-
based narrative is more effective and impactful than organisational stories
that are based on thin or hot air. But it’s the presence of data in the
background, data that can be brought forward on request if the questioner
is interested and asks, “Tell me more… ”, that matters. Not grandstanding
or talking like you’re trying to browbeat another into submission with
numbers, numbers, numbers. Though you can allow yourself one killer
number or stat to lead off a story, provided it truly is that.

e language of statistics – One of the joys of data and statistics is

that they are an incredibly dense and compact way of telling stories.
ere’s an awful lot paed into numbers that have been cruned
down from millions or billions of rows of data. But beware. Statistics
comes with its own jargon and shorthand, and it’s a dialect that
many either don’t understand or wilfully oose to ignore. is can
be dangerous. For example, even some science and medical writers
on leading news outlets have lile or no understanding or respect for
the concepts of relative and absolute risk. e term “statistically
significant” is very oen confused with the non-specialist word
“significant”. Why else would the Daily Mail routinely flip and flop
between “caffeine causes cancer” and “caffeine cures cancer” in its
health news reporting? What other explanation is there for the long
run that stru-off doctor Andrew Wakefield was given when he
tried to connect the MMR vaccine to autism?
Top tips: Follow the guidance issued and the principles set out by Sense
About Science (http://senseaboutscience.org) in reporting scientific news,
data, and research. Be judicious about how you present research findings or
analytics. When reporting health, drug trial, and environmental impact
data, make sure that it isn’t open to wilful misinterpretation, particularly
the “significance” of the findings. If one family member has been made ill
by a fast-food outlet’s hygiene standards, that’s a story (and very
“significant” to them). But if – in response – a corporate spokesperson gives
raw data or expected numbers of infections from e-coli or salmonella when
they’re serving millions of meals a day, that’s a full-blown crisis and a
tumbling share price. Be judicious and empathetic.
B2B, B2C, or Something Else Altogether?
Consumer-facing businesses and brands clearly understand the importance
of talking with a human voice to their customers: of talking like one person
to another. Many consumer brands have clearly defined personalities, oen
derived from Jungian aretypes – though that’s another (and someone
else’s) story. e human voice has long been used by consumer brands – so-
called business-to-consumer or B2C – for communications intended to rea
customers directly, through advertising, public relations activity, and,
increasingly, social media. When it’s done right, the company or brand
speaks with a single, coherent voice whi is instantly recognisable. Apple,
easyJet, and Disney are all good examples for B2C done human.
Speaking directly to consumers about consumery things is one aspect of
effective B2C communication. In parallel with the advent and growth of
social, many B2C businesses and brands have learned to expand their ability
to talk human across all of their communication, dealing with all external
stakeholder groups. is includes in their investor relations (dealing with
investors, analysts, and the City), in their public affairs (dealing with
legislators and regulators), and in their professional communications
(dealing with partner businesses, trade customers, and trade associations).
In many cases, a B2C business communicating to external stakeholder
groups apart from their customers have to communicate complex, tenical,
data-ri information, informed by resear and analytics. ose that do this
best use the same human voice, the same register as they do for their direct-
to-consumer communication. Many B2C businesses have identified and
expressed their purpose, and increasingly they follow Simon Sinek’s advice
and start with “Why?”
Business-to-business or B2B communication has always lagged behind
B2C in its willingness and ability to talk human. B2B has been the poor
relation of B2C. e justification (or excuse) has been that B2B businesses
are talking about more tenical or complicated issues than B2C and so they
can’t use su simple (or dumbed down) language as their brighter, more
sparkly cousins. e same excuse is made by many academics, professional
services firms (lawyers, accountants, consultants – but particularly lawyers),
politicians, bureaucrats, civil servants, and regulators. ey’re dealing with
difficult stuff and complex arguments, oen full of in-depth statistical
analysis of multivariate data sets. So, how can they possibly use language as
basic and pared ba as B2C brands to make their case? ey lapse into
jargon without any provocation – claiming it’s a shorthand that saves time,
when in fact it’s just keeping non-experts (oen the very businesses they’re
dealing with) out of a comprehensive understanding of what they’re trying
to say.
Jargon gets in the way when representatives of an organisation talk to one
audience but another audience inadvertently overhears what they’ve said.
is is almost inevitable in our social media world, where it’s next to
impossible to prevent corporate speak aimed at shareholders from being
overheard by the general public. And it’s why companies should try
wherever possible to speak with one voice, to tell one, true, authentic story,
not multiple versions in different registers.
For CEOs, lapsing into jargon reveals a fundamental disconnect between
the boardroom and their employees and customers. Just consider Tesco CEO
Dave Lewis, who recently praised the company’s “customercentricity” (all
one word, in spoken and wrien form); poor form from a struggling CEO in
a struggling business whi has been accused of routinely failing to put its
customers first in recent years. Mu worse, though, was when United
Airlines’ Oscar Muñoz spoke aer a passenger had been dragged off a plane
in spring 2017. He talked about “reaccommodating” and “deplaning” a
“disruptive and belligerent passenger”. He maintained that his staff were
“following established procedures”. at feels painfully close to “we were
only obeying orders”.
Let’s take another example – current at time of writing, and doubtless
current for many years to come: the effectiveness of online advertising. In
the second half of 2016 and the first half of 2017, evidence has been
mounting that online advertising is delivering very poor return on
investment. is is for reasons of fraud (advertisers paying for ads that never
appear), poor viewability (ads “seen” only by bots and not humans, or not at
all), and brand safety (ads being placed programmatically by algorithms in
unsafe environments). As a result, the global digital advertising industry is
falling over itself to put its roen house in order. Google, Face-book,
YouTube, and Twier – the main beneficiaries of boom in online advertising
– have made statements and issued ads aimed at reassuring other businesses
that their platforms are safe and effective and worth continuing to invest in.
Yet, because the problems have been in existence for many years and have
been talked about at industry conferences for almost as long, these
protestations and reassurances ring a lile hollow. Particularly when they’re
endlessly caveated by “we are just the medium, not the message”, and “we
don’t say who can say what, we just provide the tenology to enable
sharing of all the amazing creativity on the planet”. All the amazing
creativity like ISIS and Al-Qaida, like extreme right racist hate groups, like
paedophiles and abusive pornographers.
ese platforms have missed a tri. eir businesses ooze data. Google’s
very purpose is to organise the world’s information (not a bad one, though
not always perfectly realised). ey have it within their gi to use their user
and advertising data and a frank and comprehensive analysis of that data as
the basis for a powerful piece of organisational storytelling. To date, they’ve
not taken up that allenge. Certainly, not nearly as impactfully as music
streaming platform Spotify did, as shown in Figure 6.1.
Figure 6.1 Spotify business ad
Hitting the high notes: Spotify’s data-driven story to reassure advertisers during the
heat of the 2017 digital advertising crisis
 is ad is simple, frank, and informative. It anowledges the very real
difficulties of the environment and the very real concerns advertisers have
about fraud, safety, and effectiveness. Yes, it uses a sprinkling of tenical
language. at’s justifiable, because it’s addressing a tenical audience. But
it doesn’t go over the top, and it doesn’t make its prose unreadable or
incomprehensible, and least of all inauthentic to a lay reader. What’s more,
it uses light-tou data and statistics to reinforce key messages. Full marks,
Spotify.
Complexity and difficulty are not reasons or justifications. ey’re just
excuses. As we saw with Dr Fred Marquis. As we’ve seen with is Girl Can
and Tesco and AVIVA. It’s perfectly possible to talk human and still
incorporate complex data and statistics as the fundamental underpinning of
your organisational storytelling. It’s perfectly possible to make direct and
emotional appeals, from one human to another, whoever’s talking and
whoever’s listening. Not only is it perfectly possible, but it’s also
demonstrably more effective and impactful.
is is why business consultant and TED Talker Bryan Kramer has gone
so far as to say, “ere is no B2B or B2C: it’s human to human, #H2H.” is
makes perfect sense. As we saw in the introduction, humans are hardwired
to respond to stories and to story structure. e three-act story with a
beginning, a middle, and an end, first set out in Aristotle’s Poetics. e 12-
stage hero’s journey, that underpins so mu of what is great and works so
well in literature and films and epic TV series.
Using the principles of great storytelling – telling real stories about real
people, whi use evidence and facts and statistics as their foundation but
not as the stories themselves – organisations of whatever type can succeed
in Dan Pink’s “moving business”. ey can lay out the reasons, supported by
emotion, of why their target audience should listen to them. Should support
them. Should go on to become their advocates. Or reject them altogether.
But beer to get a strong reaction than a bland “Meh?” or a look of total
incomprehension because your organisation failed to realise the power and
the value of communicating human-to-human.
Know Your Audience
It’s been a dictum for storytellers from the beginnings of the oral tradition
onwards that to tell a good story, you really have to know your audience.
What are they looking to get out of the stories you’re telling and therefore
(a) how should you address them – including what type of language should
you use – and (b) and what should your stories be about?
Popularity alone is no absolute indicator that your stories are having the
desired effect. Yes, it’s a good marker of interest if theatres are paed out. If
your audience share is the highest on record. If night aer night a crowd of
several hundred gather round you in the Jemaa el-Fnaa on the edge of the
souk in Marrake. Yet you may only want to address a small and very
specific audience, in whi case a large audience would be likely to include
many whom you’re not seeking to influence or address. It’s not – necessarily
– that you don’t want them to hear your message, it’s just that they’re not
the people you and your organisation are seeking to move or motivate to
action.
Knowing your audience comes down – yet again – to empathy. One of
the golden threads running through this book is how organisational
storytellers can use data and statistics as the foundation for beer, more
impactful stories. But underpinning a lot of the rules and principles of data-
driven storytelling comes empathy: the ability to put yourself in your
audience’s shoes and see the world from their point of view. is requires
what developmental psyologists call a theory of mind, and it is the facility
that researers have shown is oen faulty or missing from those on the
autistic spectrum, and why one of the definitions or descriptions of the
condition is sometimes “mind blindness”.
Empathy requires a storyteller to put themselves in the position of the
individual or individuals she is trying to influence and wonder what it
would be like to hear the story she plans to tell. How mu detail do they
want? What should the balance be between fact and rhetoric? How should I
use emotion? What’s the role for data and statistics? Should I show my
workings out? Am I confident I know how I got to the answer I’m sharing?
Could I justify my thinking if pressed?
To be candid, empathy is a – the – fundamental human quality that
underpins brilliant storytelling. At least for humans who don’t also happen
to be psyopaths. Psyopaths tend to feel no or very lile empathy, whi
is why they find it easy to inflict mental or physical pain, to steal from or
torture others. is is because they are actually unable to transpose their
mental state into what it must be like to be the victim of the abuses to whi
they put their victims. But psyopathy is someone else’s story (and Jon
Ronson’s wrien a very good one).
e number of humans who can and who do tell stories on behalf of
organisations is spreading, thanks to the exponential growth of Big Data and
the ready availability of social media tools and platforms. Humans telling
stories that they want to be effective – an obvious purpose, for otherwise,
why bother? – need to max out their empathy radar and really get under the
skin of those they’re trying to influence. With the audience in mind, they
can mu more easily judge the role that data and statistics can and should
play in the totality of their tale. As I’ve said several times in this book, data
and statistics are readily available and really maer, but they maer mu
more as the underpinning and the foundations of an organisational story
than they do as the story itself. Being empathetic is all about observing the
principles of the Cotail Party Rule.
e Cotail Party Rule
Bear with me just a lile while for this Mad Men – era analogy. I do
appreciate that cotail parties aren’t either as frequent or as popular as they
were. I understand that society has moved on, in the types of gathering that
are popular and in the form and formats of psyotropic drugs that lubricate
many different types of social interaction – including the increasingly
popular “no drugs at all”.
But there’s something beguiling about the cotail party era, and
particularly about those who shone and captured others’ aention at these
events. Yes, of course, the aractive and the powerful and the influential
would always aract a crowd. But why – apart from high eek bones and
buxom figures, well-filled suits and cotail dresses – did those who drew
the crowds manage to do so? It certainly wasn’t always because they were
matinée idols.
In no small part, the reason that some cotail party guests rather than
others draw aention and gather a crowd is because they think before they
even enter the building about the audience they’ll talking to. As they enter
the room, they may need to adjust their empathy radar, based on whi
individuals and what type of people are present. Some they will know, but
most they will not, and they’ll have to quily judge the mood of the room
and the guests to know what they should talk about. For the Cotail Party
Rule states:

If you want to be boring, talk about yourself. If you want to be

interesting, talk about what matters to those who are listening.

Talk about what those you want to impress, to influence – to become your
friends and advocates – are interested in. Or else run the risk of being the
bore talking to themselves in the corner at the end of the evening.
 e Cotail Party Rule applies every bit as mu to a 1950s-cotail party
as it does to organisational storytelling in the late twenty-teens. It has
particular resonance for how you oose to use data and statistics as a core
foundation of your storytelling, but not as the story itself. Imagine how
quily your audience at a cotail party would scule away like
coroaes if you started to list off a reel of statistics to try to make your
point; if you used no emotion in your language; if you didn’t follow the
three-act structure in your anecdotes.
Being empathetic, talking human, and making judicious use of data and
statistics to build your story are all driven by knowing your audience. When
you sit down to write – a spee, a tweet, a blog, or a white paper – try to
imagine the individuals in your target audience around you as if you were at
a cotail party, Don Draper and Bey Olson on the fringes of your group.
And see if you can’t keep them hanging on your every word, rather than
slipping quietly away to engage with someone less boring instead. Hear the
Cotail Party Rule as you plan and write. Maybe even print it out and sti
it on your office wall. “If you want to be boring …”
One final point. e Cotail Party Rule is one of the reasons that
organisations creating content about issues not themselves – so-called
content marketing – has grown to be so popular and so successful; why
white papers about industry issues are downloaded so mu more
frequently than corporate broures or product information sheets. Once
they’re aware of who you are and what you do, potential customers and
collaborators have no doubt that there are things you could do for them. But
rather than hear how wonderful you are or how many offices you have or
what your revenue in their sector was last year, they’d mu rather know
what you think about the issues that are plaguing their sector today.
When you talk about the issues that maer to those who are listening,
you’ll soon draw a surprisingly big and engaged crowd. All because of the
power of the Cotail Party Rule.
What Talking Human Sounds Like
It makes sense to round out this apter – and the theory and advice section
of the book – with some examples of what talking human sounds like.
However so, calm, and conversational HAL 9000 was in Stanley Kubrik’s
film of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, he – it – was still a H
euristically programmed AL gorithmic computer, totally reliant on code.
However convincing the pioneering ELIZA was at asking low-level
psyiatric questions, she was still an early natural language processing
program developed in the 1960s at MIT, totally reliant on analytics. And
however depressed Marvin the Paranoid Android was in Douglas Adams’
five-part Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, he was totally reliant on
circuits that fizzed with humanoid-made algorithms.
e advances in language processing and comprehension have made great
strides in recent years. IBM’s Watson is an extraordinary corpus of
programming that can do truly amazing things with language. Its
comparative analysis of Trump and Obama’s inauguration speees run by
IBMer Jeremy Waite just hours aer @POTUS45’s was delivered was
remarkable for many reasons – its speed, its length, and its counter-intuitive
insights and conclusions. For all of those reasons, it was also remarkable for
the tens of thousands of likes and shares it received. If you’ve not read it yet,
put this book aside for the 40 minutes it’ll take you to digest his blog. Sear
for “Waite Trump Obama”, cli on one of the many links, and enjoy.
Where language processing falls down and will doubtless continue to do
so is in original content generation. Yes, it’s true that algorithms have been
wrien to scour news wire sources and compose articles for online
publications; articles that human readers cannot detect as being wrien by
non-humans. I know news journalists who are quaking in their shoes at this
tenology. But those algorithms and no algorithms yet conceived can come
close to being brilliant organisational storytellers. e context, the nuance,
the history, the purpose, the direction, the audience, the “news just in”, all of
these factors make me confident that craing organ-isational stories in the
language of humans will remain the preserve of people for the foreseeable
future.
So, here are some examples of data-driven stories, from public and private
sectors, that I truly believe read and sound human. As with the examples in
Chapter 5, I’ve scored these on the Fles–Kincaid reading ease scale too. I
wanted to make the point one last time that simple, clear sentences with
fewer, shorter words are so mu more impactful.
Here’s a great example of human aer from the U.K. Home Office’s Fire
Kills campaign:2

Test your smoke alarms monthly. Last year over 200 people died in fires in the
home. You’re at least 4 times more likely to die in a fire in the home if there’s no
working smoke alarm. When you test your smoke alarms, you could test the smoke
alarms of an older family member, neighbour or friend who needs help. It only takes
a moment to test and gives your family and people you care about a better chance of
surviving a fire.

(Fles–Kincaid reading ease score 83.9 – see Chapter 1 for details)

Invoking discussion with neighbours and family members adds a human

tou, allowing a serious – and highly important – message to be conveyed
simply and effectively.
Cancer Resear U.K. talks human in the next extract.3 While maintaining
a serious tone (as befits a cancer arity), this section has a conversational
edge whi feels friendly. It’s easy to read and explains facts clearly.
We want survival in the UK to be among the best in the world. We’re focusing our
efforts in four key areas – working to help prevent cancer, diagnose it earlier,
develop new treatments and optimise current treatments by personalising them and
making them even more effective. We’ll continue to support research into all types
of cancer and across all age groups. And we’re keeping our focus on understanding
the biology of cancer so we can use this vital knowledge to save more lives.

(FK 54.3)

And finally, here are three, great examples of simple, clear, data-driven
storytelling. e first one comes from those pioneers of brand storytelling,
Innocent Drinks:4
 We started innocent in 1999 after selling our smoothies at a music festival. We put
up a big sign asking people if they thought we should give up our jobs to make
smoothies, and put a bin saying “Yes” and a bin saying “No” in front of the stall.
Then we got people to vote with their empties. At the end of the weekend, the “Yes”
bin was full, so we resigned from our jobs the next day and got cracking. Since then
we’ve started making coconut water, juice and kids’ stuff, in our quest to make
natural, delicious, healthy drinks that help people live well and die old.

(FK 77.6)

Second, from new kids on the home security blo, Cocoon:5

Traditional home security doesn’t work for most people. It’s too expensive, too
complicated, and false alarms happen so often that we’ve learnt simply to ignore
them. In 2014, our founding team decided that the future of home security is to make
using it as simple and intelligent as possible. We set about creating a technology
that would protect the whole home from a single device, and this is how Cocoon
came into the world. We believe in making homes safer and simpler. Often the
people that need home security the most are the people that don’t have access to it.
Whether you’re renting, own your home or travel between homes, everyone should
feel safe at home with the minimum of fuss.

(FK 62.5)

And last of all, not sounding like a business at all, we have new wave
cosmetics business, Lush.6 e language combines a positive tone of voice
with a straightforward line in storytelling. Focusing on the idea behind the
brand makes it easy for the reader to forget they’re being sold a product at
all.
Here at Lush we have never liked to call ourselves an Ethical Company. We find the
term rather a difficult concept, because it seems to us that it is used to describe
companies who try not to damage people or planet with their trade practices – when
surely this should not be regarded as “ethical” but as normal business-as-usual. All
business should be ethical and all trade should be fair.
Individual companies should not stand out simply by not being damaging or
unfair. No company should be trading from an unethical position and society has a
right to expect as the norm fairness and resource stewardship from the companies
that supply them. We always wish to conduct our business so that all people who
have contact with us, from our ingredients suppliers through to our staff and
customers, benefit from their contact with Lush and have their lives enriched by it.
No company is perfect and we strive daily to get closer to the ideal vision that all
Lush people share. We will always want and demand more from Lush, so that our
business practices match our own expectations, our staff and customer expectations
and the needs of the planet.

(FK 55.5)
Summing Up
Dan Pink is right. We’re all in sales, whether we represent a business, a
arity, or the public sector, whether we’re a doctor looking to convince her
patient to complete a course of medication or a teaer requiring students to
complete homework tasks.
Organisations are abstract entities, but they’re made up – primarily – of
people. So, their language should be human, too.
But when they’re put in the spotlight, many people produce words and
content quite unlike normal human spee and communication.
Organisational storytellers oen produce complex, difficult, confusing
words for the following reasons: psyology, time pressure, projected norms,
organisational structure, fear of geing it wrong, poor planning, jargon, and
the language of statistics.
B2C businesses are generally good at talking clearly and simply to their
customers, as well as to other external stakeholder groups. B2C talks human.
B2B businesses lag behind B2C in their ability and willingness to talk
human. e justification (or excuse) is that they’re talking about more
complex, specialist issues. Not so.
TED talker Bryan Kramer says there is no B2B or B2C. It’s now human-
to-human or #H2H.
Use your storytelling to stimulate a response. Mu beer to get an
outright rejection than a bland “Meh?” or a look of total incomprehension.
To tell a good story, you have to know your audience. Know how you
should addresses them, what language you should use, and what your
stories should be about.
Knowing your audience is all about empathy – the ability to put yourself
in your audience’s shoes using an organisational theory of mind.
Empathy is a – the – fundamental human quality, and corporate and
brand storytellers should always have their empathy radar swited on.
Being empathetic in organisational storytelling is all about observing the
principles of the Cotail Party Rule.
 e Cotail Party Rule states that: “If you want to be boring, talk about
yourself. If you want to be interesting, talk about what maers to those who
are listening.”
ink before you enter a room – before you open your mouth – before
you put fingers to keyboard about who your audience is and what they want
to get out of interacting with you. As well as what you want to get out of
interacting with them.
Algorithms might be able to write the news. But they’re very unlikely for
the foreseeable future to take over an empathy-driven, data-driven,
organisational storytelling role.
Give It a Go: What’s Our “Why?”
Have you ever considered what your organisation’s real purpose is? I don’t
mean “to make money” or “to be the best”. I mean its purpose. Its “Why?”
First, wat Simon Sinek’s TEDx talk from Puget Sound 2009, “How great
leaders inspire action”.7 Even if – like me – you’ve wated it dozens of
times before, along with 35 million others. Next, get together a small and
diverse team of different individuals in your organisation. Get them to
wat it. And then go into a room with no phones or laptops or distractions
of any sort and work out why it is your organisation exists.
Be ruthless and pressure-test the answer. If it’s too bland or indistinctive,
work at it some more. And when you’ve got something compelling and
distinctive, get agreement from the organisation to get everyone in the
enterprise to build on and share in and communicate your purpose. It will be
truly transformative and the yardsti by whi you judge future action.
Data-Driven Stories

Campaign for Real Beauty

What’s the organisation?

Unilever
What’s the brand?
Dove
What’s the campaign?
Campaign for Real Beauty
What’s the story?
Unilever’s flagship beauty brand, Dove, was being beaten by its
competitors. It needed to refresh its proposition and find a purpose. Aer
several false starts, it ose to ampion “real types not stereotypes” and
tale head-on the high-pressure tactics of the global beauty industry.
How did data drive the story?
e campaign was based on the resear finding that, all around the world,
only 2% of the world’s women would describe themselves as beautiful.
What was the outcome of the campaign?
A brand rejuvenation. Purpose - to allenge the stereotypes of the beauty
industry - built into the heart of new product development strategy.
Millions of conversations with tweenage and teenage girls worldwide about
beauty. e concept of purpose shied to Unilever’s corporate brand and
many other product brands, too. CEO Paul Polman now leads a truly
purpose-led organisation.

So mu has been wrien about Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty that – if
this book didn’t have the very clear purpose of demonstrating the power and
impact of data-driven storytelling – it would be difficult to know where to
start to write something new about it.
 For years, Dove had been slowly losing market share to both non-branded
competitors and, in its flagship market of North America in particular, to
Nivea. Something had to be done to reverse the decline. In the early 2000s,
lead advertising agency Ogilvy made a number of promising starts at
looking to position Dove as the anti-beauty industry beauty industry brand
ampion. But the creative expression of the disruptive idea wasn’t quite
stiing.
en Dove formed a strategic partnership with Joah Santos, the
advertising creative reputed to have developed an approa to advertising
known as “mission marketing”. Santos led a multi-market resear campaign
working with leading academics around the world. From the wealth of data
Dove generated from its resear, the single most important nugget of data
that provided the insight to create the Campaign for Real Beauty was this
haunting statistic: in every market Dove asked the question, only 2% or
fewer of all women described themselves as beautiful.
Dove set out on a mission to celebrate real beauty – the real, everyday
beauty that lives inside every woman, and had a mantra to celebrate: “real
types not stereotypes”. is positioning set the brand in opposition to the
overwhelming majority of the established beauty industry. From 2004
onwards, Dove launed wave aer wave of films that taled the issues of
beauty industry, fashion industry, and fashion media aitudes to what
defined beauty. e brands looked to help redefine beauty and women’s
aitudes to their own beauty, thereby enhancing their self-confidence.
e films Dove made – including Evolution (2006) and Onslaught (2008)
and the most recent, Real Beauty Sketches (2013); you’ll find them all on
YouTube – hardly needed to be advertised. ey contained su powerful
messages that they quily went viral. Billboard campaigns featuring non-
traditional (for the beauty industry) images of women with ti boxes asked
the public to consider whether they were: for an older woman “withered or
wonderful?”, for a redhead with freles “flawed or flawless?”, for another
older woman with a mane of grey hair “grey or gorgeous?”, and for two
fuller-figured women “fat or fit?” and “extra-large or extra-sexy?” In the
infancy and then early ildhood of social media, people happily and
spontaneously shared the billboards as well as the films, giving them vastly
more exposure than had been paid for. Dove had started a movement.
 e movement included the creation of an organisation called the Dove
Self-Esteem Fund, whi set out on its own mission – whi it easily
surpassed – to have millions of conversations with tweenage and teenage
girls about what beauty meant to them and how they shouldn’t be
browbeaten into accepting stereotypical perceptions of beauty. All girls and
women are beautiful, the campaign contended, still smarting from the
original, killer statistic – still using that as the underpinning and justification
for the campaign – and they should all celebrate that fact.
It took a lile time for the campaign to translate into sales performance
for Dove. When it really started to take off was when Unilever developed a
new wave of products specifically designed for peri- and post-menopausal
women, its Pro-Age range. From the very earliest days of the campaign,
Dove had celebrated the beauty of older women. By creating a sub-brand
tailored for this oen-overlooked demographic and at the same time turning
its name into a campaigning slogan (“At Dove we are Pro-Age”), the
campaign was made to align with the product proposition. For there would
have been no point in running a stunning, viral, socially responsible
campaign that generated unprecedented levels of free publicity and yet
didn’t sell another tub of face cream.
e campaign was galvanic in recruitment and retention of staff within
Unilever, and the allenge Dove faced was threefold: (a) no staff wanting to
leave, (b) enormous numbers of staff wanting to transfer onto Dove from
other Unilever brands, and (c) sa loads of unsolicited CVs and servers full
of emails from marketers outside of Unilever wanting to join the cause. Real
Beauty won all of the advertising world’s top awards, including numerous
Lions at Cannes. It was also named by U.S. trade publication Ad Age as one
of the five best campaigns of the century.
Unilever’s founding father, William Hesketh Lever, was the Victorian
philanthropic businessman who built the model town of Port Sunlight on
the Wirral for the workers at his Lever Brothers soap factories. Regular
handwashing with soap was known in Victorian times to reduce siness
and even prevent death, even if the meanism of bacterial infection was not
properly understood. Lever was on a mission to make soap widely available
to the masses, but like other Victorian businessmen in rapidly industrialising
Britain – men like the Colmans of Norwi and the Cadburys and
Bournevilles of Birmingham – he also believed successful businesses had
both the opportunity and the responsibility to create sustainable and
affordable housing for his workers near their places of work. Enlightened
self-interest, of course. But real business on a mission or, as we’ve said time
and again in this book, with a purpose.
Dove’s conversion to mission marketing came at a pivotal time for
Unilever. e company acquired Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in 2000, a social
enterprise from its foundation. Aer a couple of well-documented false
starts, the company found meaningful roles for founders Cohen and his
partner, Jerry Greenfield.
ey brought mission-led marketing to all Unilever’s brands and
ultimately to its corporate brand. e success of Real Beauty and Unilever’s
conversion to purpose-led marketing enabled CEO Paul Polman to embed
sustainability at the heart of the company’s growth strategy. And it all
started with the data-driven storytelling campaign, based on resear about
the world’s women and real beauty.

Key takeaway: Sometimes what appears to be a small and

insignificant nugget of insight can fuel a data-driven storytelling
campaign so profound that it anges the direction of even the world’s
biggest businesses.

Note: After more than a decade of extraordinary, ground-breaking work,

2017 was something of an annus horribilis for Dove – at least in the U.K. –
with three campaigns misfiring badly. The first used different body shapes
as the basis to create actual bottles for products, the second gave a platform
for critics of breastfeeding in public, and the third implied skin-lightening
effects of a Dove body lotion. The brand needs to take care not to unpick the
great work and good will engendered by the Campaign for Real Beauty.
Notes
1 hp://phrontistery.info/nonsense.html gives definitions to all these words in a
glossary
2 hps://firekills.campaign.gov.uk
3 hp://bit.ly/2kIs8LF
4 hp://bit.ly/1vx8bQo
5 hps://cocoon.life
6 hps://uk.lush.com/article/lush-ethical-company
7 hp://bit.ly/1fJPwPe
7
Five Gods of Data-Driven Storytelling
That’s what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instil hope
again and again and again.

Tom Hanks as Walt Disney in the 2013 movie Saving Mr Banks

On the Importance of Being Important
John Simmons is a significant figure in British corporate and brand
storytelling. He founded the collective of business writers simply known as
e Writer, as well as 26, a representative organisation for writers, editors,
publishers, and language specialists. He’s the author of notable books in the
area of brand language and storytelling, including Dark Angels, The Invisible
Grail, and We, Me, Them, And It. And he’s a prolific trainer in the area of
writing for business.
Many years ago, I was a delegate on one of John’s writing courses. Now
John believes in the “beautiful constraint”; that by puing boundaries and
rules down on what you write and how you are allowed to express yourself,
you can produce beer, more interesting work. Among the many exercises
John asked everyone on my course to perform, one has stu with me for
more than a decade. “Write a description of the god of your business!” John
urged the financiers and pharmaceutical marketers and PR folk who filled the
room. I probably wrote something about a quisilver, Hermes-like figure,
though as I was working in PR and had started there in the late 1980s,
Dionysus might have been more appropriate.
John, of course, would be one of deities of the wrien word in business,
along with Martin Clarkson of the Storytellers, and Peter Mandelson for his
time revolutionising communications at the (new) Labour Party. ere are
others, too, I’m aware of, but, by and large, we’re a difficult breed to tra
down and identify, preferring to be a hidden hand behind the businesses we
write for. Like the aretype of Heracles – exemplified in James Bond, Han
Solo, and Domestos – we do the dirty work to keep the real gods happy. And
as for the verbal side of data-driven wordsmithery, I’d say the field is too
early in its lifecycle for many to have more than demigod status.
But there are gods of data-driven storytelling who inspire our clan, gods
who take data and make pictures with it that ange the way we think about
the subject areas they’re focusing on, data more broadly, and the world in
general. eir work has influenced governments and legislators, medical
authorities and regulators, and individual members of the public to ange
their minds and take direct action. ey are masters of the “moving business”.
And while this book is not a how-to guide in data visualisation – and there
are many, many of these, including some wrien by a couple of those singled
out for god status in this apter – it’s important that we round out our
discussion of data-driven storytelling by paying homage to those noble few
who have done so mu to tame and make beer use of data through data
visualisation. For just as lyrics are to music in songs, so pictures can be to
words in narrative by numbers.
Florence Nightingale
Ask most people who have been educated in the U.K. what they know about
Florence Nightingale, and they’ll tell you that she was a very important
figure in nursing. During the Crimean War, she pioneered advances in
nursing in the theatre of war that lived through Vietnam and on to even
contemporary theatres of conflict. ey might know that her work also
anged practice in regular hospitals, too. And the slightly older ones will tell
you she used to be on the ba of the old £10 note, celebrating her
extraordinary work during the Crimean War.
What they’re very unlikely to be able to tell you is that she was also a
pioneer of data-driven storytelling. Having put in place a wide range of very
practical measures to reduce the spread of infection and disease in British
military field hospitals – from improving ventilation to removing roing
animal carcases that had been bloing the water supply – Nightingale
observed and recorded the fact that mortality rates of the injured dropped
dramatically in response to her interventions. Dedicated to understanding
cause and effect, she kept meticulous records of the deaths from wounds,
diseases, and other causes among the soldiers under her care.
Figure 7.1 Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale’s pioneering coxcomb design that changed hospital

design

Keen to share her findings with the military authorities and even een
Victoria herself, Nightingale realised she needed to develop a new and visual
way to present her findings that wouldn’t have non-specialist, non-
statisticians glazing over with boredom. She was on a mission to ange field
hospital policy across the army in order to give otherwise healthy, fit, and
strong men the best possible ance of survival aer injury. She couldn’t bear
the fact that many – without her types of intervention – died needlessly
through la of sanitation and poor field hospital design.
So rather than present her findings in tedious tables of data or standard bar
arts, she devised novel ways of representing and visualising the data that
enabled her to tell her story at a glance. Julie Rehmeyer explains1
Nightingale’s revolutionary coxcomb visualisation in a 2008 edition of
Science News:
 Each month is represented as a twelfth of a circle. Months with more deaths are
shown with longer wedges, so that the area of each wedge represents the number of
deaths in that month from wounds, disease or other causes. For months during the
first part of the war, the blue wedges, representing disease, are far larger than either
the red ones (for wounds) or the black ones (for other causes). For months after
March 1855, when the Sanitary Commission arrived, the blue wedges start becoming
dramatically smaller.

Nightingale said her coxcomb graph was designed “to affect through the
eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears”.
While I’d never accept that it’s impossible to use words and words alone to
build and make a convincing, data-driven argument, sometimes a killer art
works alongside a killer statistic or analysis. Nightingale’s data visualisation
was certainly impactful. Her coxcomb led to fundamental anges in how
both field hospitals and fixed, domestic hospitals are designed and operate.
All through a lile bit of effective, data-driven storytelling, sprinkled with
the emotion of saving young men’s lives.
Dr John Snow
Our second deity is another Victorian, this time the physician Dr John Snow,
one of the founding members of the Epidemiological Society of London.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a devastating olera
outbreak in Soho. Hard though it is to imagine today, the provision of mains
water plumbing and clean and safe water was still under development and
roll-out. Even 175 years ago, the Industrial Revolution was still to have its
effect, even in significant parts of central London. People had to collect their
water from water pumps.
Figure 7.2 John Snow

Dr John Snow’s dot map of cholera outbreaks related to a tainted water

pump in Soho, 1854

By talking to locals, Snow identified that the origin of this particular

outbreak and spread of the disease was a water pump on Broad Street, and he
convinced the authorities to disable the water pump by removing its handle.
Because the germ theory of disease had not yet been discovered, Snow was
unaware of the meanism of transmission of olera from the water pump.
But by visualising the number of deaths occurring in the vicinity of the water
pump with his now legendary dot map, he was able to demonstrate the
source of the infection and the spread of disease. e map, reproduced below,
shows one dot per death by olera, with the intensity of dots increasing
with greater proximity to the infected water pump. Snow was able to prove
that the water company was bringing water taken from parts of the River
ames polluted with sewerage and distributing it to the water pump in
Broad Street.
Snow used a compelling visualisation of data he collected – aer being
tipped off by local residents about the source of their drinking water – to tell
a powerful, evidence-based, policy-anging story. What’s more, his work led
to the establishment of one of the most important and impactful branes of
medicine: epidemiology.
Hans Rosling
God number three is another epidemiologist, the impish, infectiously
enthusiastic, and sadly recently deceased Hans Rosling.
Rosling learned about disease, poverty, the impact of family size on life
prospects, and mu more besides by working as a researer and medical
officer in some of the most allenging and under-served parts of the
developing world, including India, Mozambique, and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. He spent more than 20 years studying and
aracterising the epidemiology of konzo, a paralytic disease that leads to
permanent disability of the limbs, particularly the legs.
He came to international prominence thanks to his mission to make sense
of complex global heath data sets through dynamic, animated visualisations.
His approa was to present, clearly and straightforwardly, multiple variables
interacting simultaneously, su as time, wealth, disease, geography, and life-
expectancy.
Rosling and his ildren founded the Gapminder Foundation, an NGO that
promotes sustainable development through beer understanding of statistics
about social, economic, and environmental development. Gapminder –
named in honour of the London Underground safety announcement, “Mind
the gap” – is also the open-access repository of vast public health data sets.
ey are made available to encourage researers – indeed, anyone with an
interest or an idea – around the world to use the data to make sense of the
world and put forward possible solutions.
Gapminder also developed pioneering Trendalyzer soware platform using
Rosling’s trademark bubble and motion arts that help make so
Figure 7.3 Gapminder
Mind the gap: output from Hans Rosling’s Trendalyzer software, showing time (year),
life expectancy (Y-axis), every country in the world (dots), region (colour), population
(relative size of bubble), and GDP per capita (X-axis). African countries are in dark blue
(lowest life expectancy and GDP).

mu sense out of multivariate data sets. Although acquired by Google in

2007, elements of Trendalyzer are available for public use. A typical output is
shown above.
Rosling’s public lectures were delivered with a trademark blend of
humour, extreme clarity, and an infectious sense that because he understood
the world so clearly, so could you. His TED Talks and BBC documentary, The
Joy of Stats, have all been wated millions of times, and mostly by those
who are neither epidemiologists or statisticians. If you’ve not seen them, get
over to YouTube now.
Edward Tue
Edward Tue is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and
Computer Science at Yale. He’s been described as “the Leonardo da Vinci of
data” by the New York Times and – not to be outdone – “the Galileo of
graphics” by Business Week.
I first came across Tue when a friend and mentor gave me a copy of his
wonderful book – big, square, LP-sized, more of a manifesto – The Cognitive
Style of PowerPoint. It’s a treatise against the ubiquity of Power-Point based
on the way that the strictures and templates of PowerPoint make us think
dumber. “Slideware,” Tue says, “reduces the analytical quality of
presentations … weakens spatial and visual reasoning, and almost always
corrupts statistical analysis.”
Tue is the closest the world has to a philosopher – perhaps a philosopher
king – of data visualisation. But that doesn’t make him a reeré recluse
with no understanding of the dynamics of pragmatics of business. Far from
it. He’s a philosopher of the stripe of Alain de Boon, concerned that his
thinking about thinking can shake the frustrated mainstream out of their
torpor of data presentation hell and into the sunny uplands of mutual
understanding. at makes him a man commied to showing mere mortals
how to use, share, and understand information beer. To have shorter, more
meaningful, more impactful meetings and, in that way, aieve more.
Tue’s workshops promise a lot, including “fundamental design strategies
for all information displays: sentences, tables, diagrams, maps, arts,
Figure 7.4 Minard
Minard’s map of Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign – an early but exceptional data
visualisation

images, video, data visualizations, and randomized displays for making

graphical statistical inferences.” What’s more, Tue believes that – done right
– data visualisations communicate what prose alone cannot.
Tue uses a broad array of visualisations, including maps, graphs, arts,
and tables like Minard’s map of Napoleon’s failed Russian campaign of 1812,
shown in Figure 7.4. e line radiating from the Western front to Moscow
and ba again conveys the following variables: time, trajectory, size of the
army (thiness of the bar; as it gets thinner, Fren soldiers are dying from
Russian aa, famine, and the cold), temperature over time, and even two
splinter campaigns. Advance for the main bulk of the army and the two
splinter campaigns is shown in grey; retreat is shown in bla.
For Tue, data visualisation and presentation are very mu about the
giver and the receiver, and about the empathy required for the former to
enable the laer to understand, be moved, and get benefit from what the
former shares. It’s very mu a two-way street, and he provides strategies for
spectatorship and consuming reports and data every bit as mu as he gives
advice about how to share and present data to an audience.
All his books are recommended reading, starting with the classic The
Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
David Mccandless
At the end of a warm day in May 2014, I queued up outside the splendid
Georgian folly that is Brighton Pavilion, cluting the tiet that would admit
me to the 1,700-seater Dome theatre. Over 20 years in Sussex, I’ve seen this
capacious auditorium host everyone from the Bootleg Beatles to Marc
Ronson, the London Philharmonic to a couple of TEDx curate’s eggs.
But that spring evening, there was an extra crale in the air. e others in
the queue were more fanlike than any audience I’d experienced at the Dome
before. Plus, there were more piercings and many more beards – long,
expertly sculpted, like Fren footballer Olivier Giroud’s or Zeus’, only mu,
mu bigger – than I’d seen ever in one place. It was as if all of Brighton’s
digerati had le their desks and studios in Silicon Seaside and floed to see
their all-time favourite act. None other than the unassuming ro god of
data-driven storytelling, David McCandless. is Arts Desk review2 of the
event captures it well.
McCandless is the author of the peerless Information Is Beautiful, followed
up since he roed Brighton by Knowledge Is Beautiful. He’s created and run
and sold several different businesses in the data-driven storytelling area, and
his current passion is VIZsweet (“visualisation suite” – geddit?), whi
describes itself as “a high-end cloud-based tool for creating beautiful,
interactive data-visualizations”.
His purpose is to use data visualisation and information design to tell
stories. Before running his own businesses, he was a data journalist for both
Wired and the Guardian, where he was one of the core team behind the
newspaper’s Data Lab, a power-player in data visualisation and data-driven
storytelling in the first half of the twenty-teens. Sadly, cuts by the Guardian’s
owners, the Sco Trust – whi loses tens of millions a year on the title –
have put paid to the Data Lab.
In Chapter 2, we considered the fact that when numbers get too big, they
lose their meaning (a phenomenon that McCandless’ visualisations deal with
routinely). Talking about the totality of U.K. Government spending, I
concluded that £750bn was “a number so far outside most people’s grasp or
comprehension that it just becomes a circular definition.” In May 2010, the
Guardian Data Lab produced a stunning visualisation of U.K. public spending
2008–9, whi I strongly recommend you go and seek out and download.3
e visualisation was published before then-Chancellor Gideon Osbourne
had made the promised cuts to public spending as part of the Coalition
Government’s so-called austerity so-called strategy. e visualisation was
intended to inform the Guardian’s readers exactly where U.K. plc was
spending at the time and what the cuts might mean for their priority areas.
Even though the figure was at the time almost a fih smaller than it is
today, it still cloed in at a mind-bending £620.7bn. And although
McCandless’ visualisation doesn’t make it simple to understand, it does give
a very helpful sense of scale and priorities for Government, with the top five
spenders:

1. Department of Work and Pensions, £135.7bn

2. HM Treasury, £109.5bn
3. Department of Health, £109.4bn
4. Department for Children, Sools & Families, £63.18bn
5. Ministry of Defence, £44.6bn

What’s more, the infographic was printed on the double-page, centre spread
of the Berliner-sized paper. As well as making an aractive poster, its life-
sized version easily enabled closer scrutiny when stu to the wall. You could
get the big picture from the overall illustration, and then drill down on
particular departments you were interested in.
e visualisation is et McCandless who, despite his ro-star status,
remains humble and accessible – in person at his talks, and via his presence
on Reddit, here hp://bit.ly/2ov5K8w.
Summing Up
e words aributed by the makers of the movie Saving Mr Banks to Walt
Disney summarise precisely what the best data-driven storytellers aieve
with their visualisations: “instilling hope again and again and again”.
For a godless man like me, data-driven storytelling deities come in
different forms, from different places, and from different eras. Tenology is
relevant, but not necessary, and it can oen prove to be a distraction.
Florence Nightingale, John Snow, and Edward Tue’s favourite, Minard,
drew everything by hand, but that doesn’t make their data-driven
storytelling any less accurate, impactful, or clear. Yes, tenology allows you
to do more in a shorter time, both in terms of data analysis and visualisation.
Big Data tools and tenologies take the drudgery of data analysis, improve
the speed exponentially from slow human hands and eyes to gigaflops of
processing speed. ey also remove the opportunity for human error.
But when you’re looking to tell stories with data and statistics, tenology
should never be your starting point. As discussed in Chapter 3, data-driven
storytelling is never, initially, a tenology problem. It’s a problem of
purpose, a allenge to identify and articulate your purpose in the data-
driven story you’re looking to tell. Finding your inner “Why?”
If you know why you want to make a particular case – if you know whom
you want to move to do what – you’ll soon discover what you want to say.
How you’re going to say it – what data sets, whi statistical test, what
analytics tools, whi data visualisation platforms and paages you use – all
that will fall into place. e more oen you do it, the more quily you’ll
discover your favourites. And remember Steve Jobs’ founding purpose for
Apple that we toued on in Chapter 3: “to remove the barrier of having to
learn to use a computer”. Keep that in mind, and make tenology your slave,
not your master – whi just happens to be another of Apple’s declared
purposes over time.
en you come to your other, and perhaps the most important, “how”.
What’s the story going to be like? Is it a three-act structure, a hero’s journey?
What role do data and statistics play in supporting your core narrative?
What’s the killer statistic and the money-shot art? How do you resist the
temptation of throwing more and more facts – more and more data – at the
audience? How do you talk as a human, about human issues, in human
language? What role does emotion play (probably a mu bigger one that
you ever imagined)? And is your empathy radar turned up to 11 to make sure
you’re thinking every bit as mu as a receiver as you are a transmier of
information.
If you take this approa to data-driven storytelling, I’ll warrant you’ll
become a master of the “moving business”, persuading more people to see the
world from your point of view. Standing on the shoulder of the giants we’ve
met briefly in this apter, you might just aain demi-god status within your
own organisation. It’s got to be worth a shot.
Notes
1 hp://bit.ly/1ldD73v
2 hp://bit.ly/2pcwgBT
3 hp://bit.ly/2oYyYee
8
Why Facts Matter More an Ever
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about.

Benjamin Franklin, Washington DC Evening Star, 7 January 1853

e 2016 victories of both Vote Leave and Donald Trump were unexpected,
to say the least. ey were, in Benjamin Franklin’s words, most definitely
worth writing about, even if the media – and particularly the social media –
content produced by both campaigns are less likely to stand the test of time.
Brexit–Trump were behind in the opinion polls in the weeks leading up to
both votes – sometimes a long way behind.
e polling industry, political pundits, most of the media, and most
strikingly of all the bookmakers were predicting Remain–Hillary, not
Brexit–Trump. Even aer Brexit, and even aer Trump declared just ahead
of polling day that the 2016 Presidential election would be “Brexit Plus Plus
Plus”. It was.
Sure, the polls tightened as the election got closer. e polls always do
that. Pollsters get more nervous as their reputations get put to the test.
Well, in these two elections, the pollsters almost all got it spectacularly
wrong. Even Nate Silver – right in 49 out of 50 congressional districts in
2008 and all 50 in 2012 – didn’t call for Trump. Admiedly, he and his 538
crew were among the least wrong. But in the polling business, being “least
wrong” is a bit like being “half pregnant”. Or buying a ocolate teapot.
Brexit–Trump has caused an existential crisis in the polling industry,
indeed in mu of the resear business where political punditry has its
home. e smart folks that help brands know whi ads are likely to work
best, what consumers want out of their next car, and whi trends will
shape the next season/year/decade are all scrabbling around to reinvent
themselves and their methodologies. Mu of that scrabbling feels like
moving the deairs on the Titanic.
Yet I sense that some of this panic may be excessive, if understandable.
Organisations will continue to need resear and understanding and insight.
ey just might need a few more reassurances from their vendors – and
they might treat them a lile meaner than they have historically – until
confidence is restored.
But there’s no denying that Brexit–Trump was seismic, and the
aershos will continue to reverberate around the world long aer no one
can remember who Nigel Farage was. And they’ll also eo way beyond the
polling and market resear industry.
Post-Truth, Fake News
One of the defining aspects of Brexit–Trump was the fall and fall of facts
and the growing la of importance placed by candidates on evidence and
data and, well, the truth. As we observed in Chapter 2, Miael Gove
contended during the EU Referendum campaign that “people in this country
have had enough of experts”. Facts, we were told, did not maer. ey
maered so lile that, when the Vote Leave campaign ose to use their
own – like the purported £350m weekly contribution from U.K. plc to EU
Inc. whi the Leavers pledged to redirect to fund the NHS – they turned
out to be not so mu truths as untruths. Gross, not net figures. Or – to be
candid – lies.
Time and again during Trump on the stump, when facts were used, they
turned out to be as reliable as those pedalled by the Brexiteers. Ever since,
forensic examination of the supporters and consultants and tenologies
underpinning both campaigns – and supporting the dissemination of these
true lies – have been found to be the same businesses. Conspiracy theories
rage all around.
As a result, ever since Brexit–Trump, there’s been a concern – in mu of
the media, not just the liberal wing; in academia; in the polling industry; and
in the broad resear community – that, if elections can be won by either no
facts or lies, we must have entered a post-truth society. It didn’t seem like
the world was heading in this direction, and then all of a sudden, the rules
of engagement have been turned upside down and what applied before
doesn’t apply any more. Whereas people tuned into the BBC and CNN to
get their news in previous elections, apparently they’re now happy to get
their fake news regurgitated via Facebook and Google. Has the world gone
dumb?
e well-established oracle of the twenty-teens Wikipedia describes
“Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics)” as “a political
culture in whi debate is largely framed by appeals to emotion
disconnected from details of policy, and the repeated assertion of talking
points to whi factual rebuals are ignored”. As we’ve already observed,
“post-truth” was the Oxford English Dictionary’s “word” of the year for
2016.
As someone seing out his stall as a data-driven storyteller, you might
think I’d be worried. roughout this book, I’ve talked repeatedly about the
importance of using data and statistics to form the foundations and
underpinning for organisational storytelling. Surely (you might be tempted
to argue) if people don’t want and don’t care for facts in elections – whi,
in theory, determine the shape, colour, and direction of their country of
residence for at least the next four years – they won’t give a fig for the facts
any organisation might care to share with them.
In fact, I couldn’t disagree more strongly. We live at a time when facts
have never maered more. But as I’ve said time and again throughout this
book, arguments are not won by facts and facts alone. On our journey, we
talked a lile about rhetoric and the skills of the orator. In fourth century BC
Athens and first century BC Rome, Demosthenes and Cicero were the
leading figures in the “moving business”; professional orators, politicians,
and their societies’ leading legal eagles.
Facts maered very mu to the cases that they were making, but form
maered just as mu as content. As anyone who’s ever read (a translation
of) The Philippics or Against Cataline will know, it’s not one damn fact aer
another that sways and wins the day. ere’s a huge amount of emotion
involved, too. And it’s these twin barrels of rationality and emotionality that
hold the key to the most effective form of storytelling. For politicians and for
organisations of all stripes.
David McCandless, one of our five gods of data visualisation, learned
some of his trade while at the Guardian’s late, lamented Data Blog. at
blog carried the strapline “Facts are sacred”. In that, they were right. Just as
Sense About Science is right in its mission to promote respect for scientific
evidence and good science. But as the New Scientist observed in its hair-
shirted editorial in the immediate aermath of Brexit, “For reason to
triumph, scientists need to learn to engage with emotion”. Cognitive
psyology shows us that the more we try to convince people that we’re
right and they’re wrong with fact aer fact aer fact, the more they’ll dig in
their heels and look for evidence that reinforces their own position to enable
them to reject ours.
 e heady mixture of fact and emotion – evidence-based persuasion – is
what was behind April 2017’s Mar for Science
(hps://satellites.marforscience.com). In the first three months of the
Trump presidency, @POTUS45: started to dismantle Obama’s Clean Power
Plan; abolished a rule requiring large federal agencies to consider how large
federal projects affect climate ange; made swingeing cuts to the
Environmental Protection Agency (among other bodies) from an annual
“$8.1bn to $5.7bn, eliminating a quarter of the agency’s 15,000 jobs”;1 failed
to appoint a special scientific adviser; and appointed to head of the EPA one
Sco Prui, who had stated publicly before his appointment that he doesn’t
accept that CO2 emissions are a primary cause of climate ange.
roughout his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly called climate
ange a hoax.
ree months into the new administration, the U.S. (and global) scientific
community had had enough. ere were hundreds of rallies around the
world under the banner of the Mar for Science. When scientists take to the
streets in an out-of-aracter, emotional outpouring, data-driven storytellers
can reflect that the community most closely associated with evidence-based
narrative have got the message. President of the Union of Concerned
Scientists, Kenneth Kimmell, wrote in the Observer that the Mar for
Science represented a significant fightba against Trump’s “unprecedented
aa on science, scientists and evidence-based policy making [that is]
underway in the U.S. federal Government”.2 e worm has turned, and it’s
learned – unlike the Remain campaigners – to present rationality with a
veneer or sugar-coating of emotionality.
e reasoned yet emotional, academic fightba against fake news is
captured nowhere beer than in a new course at the University of
Washington entitled Calling Bullshit In the Age of Big Data (see
hp://callingbullshit.org). e course is run across two sools by Carl T.
Bergstrom and Jervin West from the Information Sool and the Department
of Biology. e course aims to redress the balance in academia and public
life where – as they say, “politicians are unconstrained by facts and science
is conducted by press release (not journals)”.
is new course – whi operates as a MOOC and so is available to any
citizen of the world with a Wi-Fi connection – is designed to equip the next
generation of graduates with the critical faculties they need to call bullshit
on the misuse of data and statistics in public discourse. It should be
compulsory viewing for every student of anything everywhere.
In the first lecture of the course – and they’re all available on YouTube –
Bergstrom and Jervin use a 1710 quote from the satirist and essayist
Jonathan Swi to discuss the Pizzagate debacle from the 2016 presidential
elections: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping aer it”. Fake news
(falsehoods) travel faster than truths.
To refresh your memories on Pizzagate: Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in
Washington D.C., was said to be harbouring a paedophile ring with
connections to Hillary Clinton. e accusations led a “concerned citizen” to
run into the restaurant and start shooting. Even though no one was injured,
that’s hardly the point. And even though this bizarre conspiracy theory has
been completely refuted and rejected – including by those who were helping
to spread it – concerned U.S. citizens repeatedly turn up at the White House
wearing t-shirts showing they believe that Pizza-gate is true and they want
to take action against it.
To repeat Swi’s maxim: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping
aer it”. Bergstrom and Jervin are to be applauded for using deliberately
emotional language (and content) to stimulate interest and take up in their
data-driven storytelling course. ey also make a very good point about the
permanence of stories and images online, and that the sten of fake news
lingers longer than idle gossip did in a pre-mediated, pre-digital age.
Fighting Ba Against Fake News
e bale against fake news is not insignificant, and it’s my hope (not a
strategy, I know) that Narrative by Numbers can do a lile bit to help in this
bale. Producing evidence-based narrative in a veneer of emotional
wrapping is my prescription for using the twin skills of analytics plus
storytelling to have lasting influence. But I’m not arrogant enough to think
I’ll succeed alone.
e mainstream media – until Trump’s constant sneering and sniping, the
trusted brands and toustones of truth – have a significant role to play in
countering fake news. To be clear, Trump has rather a narrow definition of
fake news. He tends to mean any reporting that is of others’ agendas and not
his own, reporting that paints his idiosyncratic decision-making and
approa to governance in anything other than a glowing light (i.e. not the
alt.right). And while Trump is the trumpet voluntary of fake news, he and
his supporters are not the only players in the game. It’s just that – as the
journalist Christiane Amanpour said3 in a recent interview with TED’s
Chris Anderson – when the single most powerful individual in the free
world cuts so fast and loose with the truth, that legitimises other less
reputable leaders to adopt similar or lower standards. Her nightmare vision
is of a race to the boom. I’m not so pessimistic.
Separately, the apparent creation of hundreds of bogus social media
profiles by Russian agents – with the express purpose of promulgating and
sharing fake news in order to highja the legitimate functioning of Western
democracies – needs addressing by the social platforms themselves. Post
Trump’s election, some governments – most notably Emmanuel Macron’s in
France – have taken a stand and been vigilant enough to root out some
elements of the fake news underbelly.
For many years, Facebook, Twier, and Google – including Google-
owned YouTube – have deliberately described themselves as annels and
means of distribution, rather than publishers. at protest is starting to wear
thin when both independent and external investigations have revealed the
extent of Russian and alt.right influence in using their platforms to share
fake news. is argument is wearing particularly thin, given that these same
platforms have clearly been shown to benefit financially from the ads served
on fake news sites and profiles they carry and enable.
But the media worm is also starting to turn in the bale against fake
news, and the establishment news outlets have a significant role to play in
countering it. ey can do this by re-establishing their status as tou-stones
of free and independent thinking, devoid of politiing and partisanship.
However Trump may sneer in news conferences at the BBC, the New York
Times, CNN, and the Guardian, these institutions have a role and a
responsibility to point out what is fake and what is not, and they’re rising to
this allenge and in so doing re-establishing their role in both news and in
truth vs lies.
For instance, the speed with whi bogus reports about the Vegas mass
murderer Stephen Paddo were debunked – reports in corners of the
alt.right dark web that said Paddo was a Democrat and making an anti-
Trump statement by shooting more than 500 people at a country music
festival – was dizzying. And deeply encouraging. It took less than 12 hours
for the first reporting against the fake news to appear, and aer 24 hours,
most of the offending – and wrong – content was no longer online.
e Role of Established News Brands – Old, and
New
And more than just rapid rebual, news organisations are becoming part of
the anti-fake news mainery. One very good and very strong example is the
permanent Reality Che team established by then head of BBC News,
James Harding, in January 2017. e purpose of the dozens-strong unit is to
fact-e and debunk deliberately misleading content that masquerades as
news.
Harding said at the time of laun:
The BBC can’t edit the internet, but we won’t stand aside either. We will fact check
the most popular outliers on Facebook, Instagram and other social media … Where
we see deliberately misleading stories masquerading as news, we’ll publish a Reality
Check that says so. And we want Reality Check to be more than a public service, we
want it to be hugely popular. We will aim to use styles and formats – online, on TV
and on radio – that ensure the facts are more fascinating and grabby than the
falsehoods.

Facebook and other platforms that have been used to share fake news are
also starting to take their responsibilities seriously. is is in part seen in the
internal investigations they are running to assess how they were haed by
Russia in the 2016 presidential election. But it is also seen in the initiatives
they are taking to help its users spot and understand what is fake and what
is genuine, and to report and act against clearly fake content. Time will tell
whether this self-regulatory approa is strong enough to deal with the fake
news phenomenon. e only shame is that it took Facebook so long to take
part (and so – even tangentially – admit its role), and that they insist on
their own definition of the problem as “false news”.
What this all Means for Narrative by Numbers
More generally, though, the communications business appears to have been
ahead of even tenology platforms and the scientific community. From the
Mad Men era of David Ogilvy and Bill Bernba onwards, it’s long been
known that for campaigns to succeed they need to balance and blend the
rational and the emotional. For Remain–Hillary, perhaps, the world view
was just far too rational, while the opposition to these rational arguments
was emotion all the way.
For Brexit–Trump, the orestrators revved emotion to the max, as
emotion (excuse me) trumped rationality. Yes, Brexit–Trump used facts, even
if they were, ultimately, lies. But Brexit–Trump’s empathy radar was more
finely auned to their electorates than Remain–Hillary’s, whi was mind-
blind by comparison. ey thought more about their audience and their
opponents’ audience and most particularly the audience of floating voters in
the middle for whom emotions overpowered evidence.
e world has anged and lured to the right, but facts and data and
statistics and analytics haven’t suddenly become redundant, just as voters
haven’t suddenly become idiots.
e need for everyone in the “moving business” to understand this and
learn how to more finely calibrate emotion and facts is upon us.
And provided our empathy radar is on and we’re thinking about everyone
we’re communicating with, then, do you know what, I’m prey sure
everything’s going to be alright.
“Once upon a time there was a bold and courageous statistician …”
Notes
1 hp://nyti.ms/2onrPpA
2 hp://bit.ly/2oziw4e
3
www.ted.com/talks/ristiane_amanpour_how_to_seek_truth_in_the_era_of_fake_
news
Epilogue
On a fresh but grey aernoon in early Mar 2017, I was siing for the first
time in the Meeting House of the University of Sussex. is was surprising for
three reasons.

Surprise number one – is was the first time I’d set foot in this
stunning building, and, dull as the day was outside, it was alive with
light dancing through a rainbow of single-colour stained glass
windows. At that moment, I’d lived in Sussex for nearly 20 years.
What’s more, I spent most of the first four years of the early
Noughties studying and researing at the University, first for a
master’s and then for a doctorate in Experimental Psyology.

During my studies, day aer day – as I used more and more data to tell
beer and beer stories about the effects of alcohol and memory – I’d walk or
ride or scule past this intriguing, circular building. But I never went in,
curious at its aritecture but put off by its religious associations. Aritecture
can do that to a godless man. My revelation at the building’s beauty on my
first visit made me curse my narrowmindedness. I should have remembered
that the gods tend to get the best buildings, from the Parthenon to Pantheon,
Stonehenge to L’Église Saint-Eustae.

Surprise number two – e man whose life we were celebrating in the

Meeting House had a philosophy of education that, for the first time,
made sense of the multiple paths I’ve pursued in my own sooling,
my work, and my life. Asa Briggs, Lord Briggs of Lewes, le Oxford in
the late 1950s to set up “Oxford by the sea”, or so family legend claims
he called out as he headed south with a spade and unbounded
optimism. Soon he was Vice Chancellor of the new university.
 Figure 9.1 Meeting House

Because I’d come to Sussex with one aim in mind – to add scientific rigour
and understanding to a mind that had taken a different path at sool and
university; I was a Classicist first time around – I had osen Sussex for
reasons about me, not reasons about the institution.
Retraining aer a decade in the workplace following graduation, I had
determined with the help of an excellent organisation called Career
Psyology to pursue, erm, a career in psyology. Perhaps sometimes I can
be a bit literal. I ose Sussex because it had one of the best three master’s
courses in psyology in the country, because they offered me a place aer I
taught myself the first-year course and sat an exam, and because it was four
miles up the road from new centre of our universe in Lewes. I ose Sussex
for a combination of academic and practical reasons, not because what it
espoused as an educational philosophy: the mantra (for want of a beer word)
of interdisciplinarity.
When Briggs was given the task of creating the academic infrastructure of
Sussex, he coined the phrase “redrawing the map of learning”. One of the
crucial elements of his approa was to ensure that students of any subject
didn’t just study narrowly in that one subject area. As in the best of North
American universities, students would major in one area and minor in
another. Briggs was passionate about what thinking about one subject could
do in helping to draw connections and make breakthroughs in others. He was,
among other things, the Professor of Mash-up, and his long shadow ensures
this principle lives loud at the University today, 55 years aer foundation.
I didn’t know that when I ose Sussex. I wanted an environment in whi
I could move from my narrow classical baground and become
psyological. Nor did I know that while I was studying and researing
there. But during Briggs’ memorial service in the Meeting House, the theme
came up time and time again. Colleagues, students, collaborators – all sang
his praises as the ampion of interdisciplinarity. Of the man who made them
see the value of considering problems of social history through the lens of
poetry, mathematics via apiculture, Fren literature via genetics.
An unhelpful recruitment consultant once described my CV as aotic,
labelling me “unplaceable”. is was the mid-1990s, when moving from a PR
firm to a trade association made small-minded recruiters find it hard to
understand su giant leaps. It was as if – in Steven Berkoff’s memorable
description of poorly applied make-up – my CV had been typed by “a
drunken epileptic on a rollercoaster”.
When I heard the praise for Briggs in the Sussex Meeting House that dull
spring day, my own oices to blend classics with hardcore biology and
statistics made perfect sense. I understood why I’d done it. And I understood
perfectly what I could do with it, and share with others. All the tools and
teniques I’d pied up along the way – from reading Aristotle to analysis of
variance, from Tacitus to t-tests – are ways of making sense of the world, of
using evidence to tell stories. ey’re all just languages and codes for cleverer,
clearer communication with real impact and emotion.
I was drawn to Briggs’ memorial service for a number of reasons. He’d
known my father at Oxford in the 1950s. Aer a first degree in Mods & Greats
(Latin and Greek to anyone outside of Oxford) in the 1930s, my father
returned to that university in the late 1940s to set up and run the Institute of
Economics and Statistics. Of course he did. e natural next step for a curious
Renaissance man like Kenneth Knowles, who also saw both beauty and story
structure in numbers.
 When I was starting secondary sool, my father was retired from Oxford,
spending his time engraving ur windows and inventing Gothic typefaces.
Whenever I stumbled across a subject I couldn’t quite understand and I’d
exhausted the extensive library at home, I’d ask my father what I should do.
Remember, this was many years before the domestic internet.
“Call Geoffrey!” my father would say, writing his number of a scrap of
paper. Geoffrey was a friend who knew something about the subject –
perhaps slavery in Sparta – and he could help me out. I’d call Geoffrey and
introduce myself as my father’s son, and without exception, I’d be welcomed
into a conversation of what felt like peers. I’d scribble notes and cra the
question and thank Geoffrey and put the phone down. en I’d report ba to
my father that Geoffrey had, indeed, been very helpful. And as I turned to go
and write my essay on slavery in Sparta, I’d ask my father, “And who is
Geoffrey?” He’d look up from his crossword and reply, “Oh, I think he’s now
the Emeritus Professor of Greek History at Oxford. Geoffrey de Ste Croix.”
I quily came to learn not to ask the job title of those my father suggested
I call before I called them. And I remember very clearly the industrial
revolution quandary I was in when my father said, “Call Asa!” and gave me a
number that began with a Sussex prefix.
When we moved to Sussex, to Lewes, ten years aer my father died, I was
impressed by an imposing house at the foot of a steep hill and at the boom
of our road. I was even more impressed by the collection of Maoist statues in
the window. And it didn’t take more than four or five years before I found out
that the inhabitant was one Lord Briggs of Lewes. What serendipity! We
corresponded warmly, and though we never met, I felt secure and happy in
the knowledge that he lived at the end of my road. Every time I passed it, I
heard my long-dead father’s encouragement to “Call Asa!”
So, I was drawn to the memorial service by family and personal
connections, by my time at Sussex, by respect. I didn’t know more than a
handful of faces in the crowd, but it felt good and right to be there. And I was
delighted to have this breakthrough insight during the service that gave
meaning to my educational and career oices, all annelled through Asa.
Storytelling plus data analysis equals data-driven storytelling. It’s a classic
example of interdisciplinarity in microcosm.
 Surprise number three – It is possible for a godless man to have a
quasi-religious experience in a ur. As the light came through the
windows of the meeting house, I was like “Joliet” Jake Blues in The
Blues Brothers when he understands why they simply have to put the
band ba together.

For mu of my career, I’ve been drawn to and involved in storytelling. I’ve
always read and looked for paerns and learnings from experience. And I’ve
always wrien. I’ve wrien a lot. e diversion ba to university, retraining
as an experimental psyologist, gave me the ability to look at a set of
numbers – including table aer table of Big Data spreadsheets – and then do
the “Where’s Wally?” bit and find the nuggets of insight that unlo the story.
To mine data sets to find the evidence base to tell a more convincing, more
compelling, evidence-based story. One that moves people to do something in
response because it’s grounded in truth born of facts.
As I trust I’ve shown throughout this book, I truly do believe that these
skills are among the most important for business today, and will prove to be
even more critical in the years ahead. My personal journey may have been
aotic and unpredictable – at least for conservative recruitment consultants
of the 1990s. But what that moment in the Sussex University Meeting House
showed me is that it’s all been for a purpose. And it is to help those arged
with telling evidence-based stories do a beer job with the persuasiveness of
their stories – and their use of data in meeting this objective – that I’ve
wrien this book.
ank you for your consideration.
Where to Find Out More

Books
Anderson, Chris (2016) TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public
Speaking. Headline.
Baker, Tom (1998) Who on Earth Is Tom Baker? An Autobiography.
HarperCollins.
Baron-Cohen, Simon (2003) The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the
Extreme Male Brain. Penguin.
Blamore, Susan (1999) The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press.
Campbell, Joseph (1949) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New World
Library.
Carnegie, Dale (1915/2017) The Art of Public Speaking. Dover Publications.
Dubner, Stephen, & Steven Levi (2014) Think Like a Freak: How to Think
Smarter About Almost Everything. Allen Lane.
Field, Andy (2016) An Adventure in Statistics: The Reality Enigma. Sage
Publications.
Greenfield, Susan (2015) Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are
Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains. Rider.
Heath, Chip, & Dan Heath (2008) Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold
and Others Come Unstuck. Arrow.
Kahneman, Daniel (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Penguin.
Mayer-Sönberger, Viktor, & Kenneth Cukier (2013) Big Data: A Revolution
That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. John Murray.
McCandless, David (2009) Information Is Beautiful. HarperCollins.
McCandless, David (2014) Knowledge Is Beautiful. HarperCollins.
McKee, Robert (1999) Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of
Screen-writing. Methuen.
Nussbaumer-Knaflic, Cole (2015) Storytelling with Data: A Data
Visualization Guide for Business Professionals. John Wiley & Sons.
Pink, Daniel H. (2011) Drive. Cannongate Books.
Pink, Daniel H. (2014) To Sell Is Human. Cannongate Books.
Pinker, Steven (1999) How the Mind Works. Penguin.
Pinker, Steven (2014) A Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to
Writing in the 21st Century. Allen Lane.
Ronson, Jon (2011) The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness
Industry. Picador.
Silver, Nate (2013) The Signal & the Noise. Penguin.
Simmons, John (2000) We, Me, Them, and It. Urbane Publications.
Simmons, John (2003) The Invisible Grail. Texere Publishing.
Simmons, John (2004) Dark Angels. Urbane Publications.
Sinek, Simon (2009) Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to
Take Action. Penguin.
Snow, C.P. (1959) The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution: The Rede
Lecture 1959. Cambridge University Press.
Tasgal, Anthony (2015) The Storytelling Book. LID Publishing.
Tue, Edward (2001) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
Graphics Press.
Tue, Edward (2006) The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out
Corrupts within. Graphics Press.
Vigen, Tyler (2015) Spurious Correlations. Haee Books.
Ted Talks
Amanpour, Christiane, in Conversation with TED’s Chris Anderson (2017)
How to seek truth in the era of fake news. hp://bit.ly/2i6AoUV
Chalabi, Mona (2017) 3 ways to spot a bad statistic. hp://bit.ly/2mLt96d
McCandless, David (2010) The beauty of data visualization.
hp://bit.ly/1p1Njxv
Palmer, Amanda (2013) The art of asking. hp://bit.ly/1lk3MBX
Rosling, Hans (2006) The best stats you’ve ever seen. hp://bit.ly/1rP9yP8
Sinek’s, Simon (2009) How great leaders inspire action (aka “start with
‘why?’”). hp://bit.ly/1fQ1qY0
Treasure, Julian (2013) How to speak so that people want to listen.
hp://bit.ly/2g4RpYY
Wellington, Ben (2015) Making data mean more through storytelling at
TEDxBroadway. hp://bit.ly/1XzrMAd

And finally … Marillion keyboard player Mark Kelly on how the progressive
ro dinosaurs from Aylesbury I grew up with only went and invented
crowd-funding last millennium. A great story, compelling told, data-driven,
and from a most unlikely source hp://huff.to/2gKIhwo
Index
academic data 52
Ad Age 124
Adams, Douglas 117
adjectives 75–6
Against Cataline 144
Amanpour, Christiane 146
Amazon 14
analysis of variance (ANOVA) 54
analyst reports 50
Anderson, Chris 146
Apple 7
Aristotle 9, 16, 113
Art of Public Speaking, The 67, 74
asking the right questions 47–8
Atlas of Emotions 70
audience, knowing the 113–15, 121
Automated Readability Index 34
AVIVA 98–101, 113

Baker, Tom 83
BBC 45, 86, 143, 147
Benn, Tony 83
Bergstrom, Carl T. 145, 146
Bernba, Bill 148
Bieber, Justin 68
Big Data: asking the right questions about 47–8; avoiding false positives in 48–55;
avoiding too mu 22–3; Boolean language for managing 44; easyJet use of 18–20;
intimidation with bigness of 43–4; rise of 6–8, 15; sources 49–52; starting with
“why?” in using 45–6; storytelling using 10–12, 17–20; see also data analytics
Bills of Marketing (BOMs) 95
Blamore, Susan 24
Blair, Tony 26–7
Bloomberg, Miael 51
Boolean language 44
Bootleg Beatles, the 136
brain functioning 5–6, 71
Brandwat 8
Brewster, Kingman 94
Brexit 23, 25–6, 28–31, 32; and cost of EU membership aer rebates as function of all
U.K. government spending in 2015 29–31; post-truth and fake news and 141–6, 148–
9; predictions about 59
Briggs, Asa 152–5
business-to-business (B2B) communications 109–13, 121
business-to-consumer (B2C) communications 109–13, 121
Business Week 134

Calling Bullshit In the Age of Big Data145

Campaign for Real Beauty 46, 47, 122–5
Campbell, Joseph 9
Cancer Resear U.K. 118–19
Carnegie, Dale 67, 74
causation versus correlation 56, 58
Churill, Winston 105
Clarke, Alan 22
Clarke, Arthur C. 117
Clarke, Philip 65
Clarkson, Martin 128
Clinton, Hillary 145, 148–9
cluster analysis 54
CNN 143, 147
Cotail Party Rule 73, 115–17
Cocoon 119
cognitive heuristics 4
Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, The 134
Coke 45
Coleman-Liau Index 34
compound variables 25–6
Confessions of an Advertising Man 1
content marketing 116–17
context 28–9
corporate communications: B2B or B2C 109–13, 121; Cotail Party Rule 115–17;
knowing your audience for 113–15, 121; language of 103–9; talking human in 117–
20
correlation(s) 53–5; spurious 55–8
Cukier, Kenneth 6
Curse of Knowledge 87–91, 96–7
Daily Mail 61, 108
Daily Telegraph 31, 61
Dark Angels 127
Dashboard Syndrome 59
data, effective 23–9; avoiding the inconvenient truth of context 28–9; big numbers in 24;
oosing the killer statistic in 32–3; compound variables in 25–6; repeated ad
nauseam 26–7; rounded out numbers in 24–5; simplicity in language and 33–6;
simplicity of 24; as understandable 26
data analytics: avoiding overuse of 22–3; aracteristics of effective 23–9; oosing the
killer statistic in 32–3; danger in separating storytelling and 81–3; detecting the
signal from the noise in 58–60; five “whys?” of 16; growth of 6–8, 15; importance of
skills in 2–4, 81; la of education in 2–4; looking for relationships between data
sets 53–5; newspapers and 61–2; predictive 58–9; psyology and 4–6, 15;
storytelling with (see storytelling); see also Big Data
data-driven stories: Campaign for Real Beauty 46, 47, 122–5; by David McCandless
136–8; Dear Person 76–9; by Dr. John Snow 130–2; easyjet 17–20; by Edward Tue
134–6; by Florence Nightingale 128–30; by Hans Rosling 132–4; by John Simmons
127–8; Producers as Heroes 62–5; e Safest Driver 98–101; is Girl Can 39–42
data sources 49–52
data visualisation 134–8
Dear Person campaign (Spotify) 76–9
de Boon, Alain 134
“Dirt is Good” campaign (Unilever) 59–60
Disney, Walt 127, 138
Dove Campaign for Real Beauty 46, 47
Drive 45
drug trial data 52
Dubner, Stephen 10

easyJet 17–20
education 2–4
Ekman, Paul 70
emotion 70–2, 78
empathy 73–4, 78, 148–9; avoiding the Curse of Knowledge with 88
employee data 50
energy 72, 78
engagement 67–9, 74
English: expression of energy in 72; nonsense words in 103–4; power of 69–70
EU referendum see Brexit
Euromillions Loery 24

Facebook 69, 111, 147, 148

factor analysis 54
fake news 142–6; fighting ba against 146–7
false positives 48–55
Farage, Nigel 23
Farbman, Seth 79
Farmers Weekly 91
fear of unintended consequences 106–7
Feynman, Riard 33
Field, Andy 53, 55
Fire Kills campaign 118
fishing expeditions 47, 52, 55–6, 58, 61
Flanders, Miael 3
Fles-Kincaid ‘reading ease’ score 34–6, 35, 39, 118; avoiding the Curse of Knowledge
with 88–91; typical scores for leading publications 36–7
Framingham Heart Study 51
Franklin, Benjamin 141
Freakonomics Radio 10
Fry Readability Formula 34

Gapminder Foundation 51, 132–4

Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO) 55
General Motors 21
Gingri, Newt 23
Giroud, Olivier 136
Girsky, Steve 21
Google/Google+ 69, 111, 147
Gove, Miael 22–3, 71, 142
government spend data 51–2
Green, David 91
Gregory, Riard 5
Guardian, The 71, 137, 144, 147
Gunning Fog Formula 34

Haman, Gene 43
Haji-Ioasnnou, Stelios 17–18
Hanks, Tom 127
Harding, James 147–8
Harvard Business Review 21
health data 51
Health Employees Superannuation Trust of Australia 81
Heath, Chip 23
Heath, Dan 23
hero’s journey 9, 18, 113, 139
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 117
Hobson, Neville 8
Hopkins, Katie 68
How the Mind Works 6

IBM’s Watson 8, 117

IKEA 45
Information Is Beautiful 137
Innocent Drinks 119
Instagram 69
International Baccalauréat 4
Invisible Grail, The 127

jargon 91–4, 97, 107–8

jargon monoxide poisoning 91–4, 97
Johnson, Boris 26, 31, 32
Joy of Stats, The 134

Kahneman, Daniel 4, 33
Kimmell, Kenneth 145
Klotz-Guest, Kathy 93
Klout score 69
knowing the audience 113–15
Knowledge, Curse of 87–91, 96–7
knowledge economy, the: job skills for 1–2, 15, 81; storytelling with data and statistics
in 12
Knowledge Is Beautiful 137
Kramer, Bryan 113, 121
Kubrik, Stanley 117

Lagnado, Silvia 46
language: fear of unintended consequences and oice of 106–7; jargon use in 91–4, 97,
107–8; nonsense in corporate 103–4; nouns, verbs, and adjectives in 75–6; poor
planning in oice of 107; power of English 69–70; projected norms in 105–6;
 psyology of corporate 104; simplicity in 33–6, 38–9; of statistics 108–9; talking
human 117–20; time pressure and 104–5
Lever, William Hesketh 124–5
Levi, Steve 10
Lewis, Dave 65, 110
LinkedIn 95
Lush Cosmetics 119–20

Macron, Emmanuel 147

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive & Others Die 23
Maire, Pierre Emmanuel 59–60
Mandelson, Peter 26–7, 128
Mar for Science 144–5
market data 50
market resear and polling data 50
Market Resear Society 14
Marquis, Andrew (Fred) 85, 86–7, 92, 113
Marsden, Marcus 86
mathematics education 3–4
May, eresa 31
Mayer-Sönberger, Viktor 6
McCall, Carolyn 18
McCandless, David 136–8, 144
McKee, Robert 9, 15
Medical Resear Council 96
Moore, Gordon 7
Moore’s Law of exponential growth 7
Muñoz, Oscar 111

National Institutes of Health, U.S. 51

National Storytelling Week 92, 94
New Scientist 23, 72, 144
news organisations: data and analysis 49, 61–2; fighting ba against fake news in 146–
7; post-truth politics 142–6; role of established 147–8
New York Times 58, 61, 134, 147
Nightingale, Florence 128–30, 138
Nintendo 46
Norgrove, David 31
norms, projected 105–6
nouns 75–6
Nussbaumer-Knaflic, Cole 13, 25

Obama, Bara 59, 117, 144

Observer 145
Office of National Statistics, U.K. 52
Ogilvy, David 1, 15, 92, 148
Onion, The 56
organisational structure 106
Osbourne, Gideon 137

Paddo, Stephen 147

Perry, Katie 68
PG Tips 83–7
Philippics, The 144
Pink, Daniel 1, 21, 45, 73, 103, 113, 120
Pinker, Steven 16, 87
Poetics, The 9, 16, 113
poor planning in communications 107
Popper, Karl 58
popular neuroscience 5
post-truth society 71–2, 142–6
Power and Peril of Stories, The 9
predictive analytics 58–9
presidential election, 2016 U.S. 58–9, 141–2
Procter & Gamble 59
Producers as Heroes campaign 47–8, 62–5
projected norms 105–6
Prui, Sco 144
psyology 4–6, 15; of corporate speak 104; jargon monoxide poisoning and 91–2
psyopathy 114–15
Pullman, Philip 9
purpose 46

Radio 4 9, 86
Ranieri, Claudio 4, 5, 53
Readability Formulas 38
Reality Che 147–8
Red Bri Road 63
Regen SW 88–9
regression analysis 54
Remain campaign 25, 28, 31, 71, 148–9
reputation data 50
Reymeyer, Julie 130
rhetoric 21
Ronson, Jon 115
Ronson, Marc 136
Rosling, Hans 51, 132–4
rounding out of numbers 24–5

Safest Driver campaign 98–101

sales data 50
Samuels, Lisa 81, 96
Santos, Joah 123
Saving Mr Banks 127, 138
Science News 130
Sense of Style, The 87
Shakespeare, Tom 9
Signal and the Noise, The 59
Silver, Nate 58–9, 141–2
Simmons, John 127–8
simplicity: of data 24; in language 33–6, 38–9
Sinek, Simon 43, 45, 46, 60, 90, 110, 121
single-factor solutions 4–5
SMOG Index 34
Snapat 69
Snow, C. P. 3, 138
Snow, John 130–2
Snow, Shane 35, 36
social media 7, 48, 54; data and analytics 49–50; driving engagement with 67–9; easyJet
use of 18–20; fake news and 146–7; storytelling with 10–12, 94–6
social psyology 92
Sport England 39–42, 47
Spotify 76–9, 112, 113
spurious correlations 55–8
Start with Why 43, 90
STEM education 4
Stoele, omas 8
storytelling: Curse of Knowledge and 87–91, 96–7; dangers in separating analytics from
81–3; with data and statistics 12–15, 17–20, 21–2; data sources for 49–52; Dear
Person campaign 76–9; driving engagement with 67–9, 74; easyjet 17–20; effective
data use in 23–9; emotion in 70–2, 78; empathy in 73–4, 78; energy in 72, 78; by
 everyone using social media and Big Data 10–12; importance of skills in 1–2, 81;
jargon monoxide poisoning in 91–4, 97; knowing the audience in 113–15; PG Tips
and 83–7; power and impact of 9–10, 16; power of English and 69–70; Producers as
Heroes 47–8, 62–5; Safest Driver campaign 98–101; social media in 10–12, 94–6; is
Girl Can campaign 39–42; of today and tomorrow 94–6; see also corporate
communications
Storytelling Book 13
Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business 13
Swann, Donald 3
System 1 thinking 4

Tableau 8, 55
talking human 117–20
Tasgal, Anthony 13
teabag tenology 83–7
Tech Times 79
TED Talks 46, 51–2, 90, 121
Tesco 47–8, 62–5, 110, 113
Thinking, Fast and Slow 4, 33
Think Like a Freak 10
is Girl Can campaign 39–42, 47, 113
Tide detergent 43
time pressure 104–5
Today Programme 86
Tomorrow’s World 86
To Sell Is Human 1, 103
Trump, Donald 68, 117, 141–7, 148–9
Tue, Edward 134–6, 138
Tversky, Amos 4, 33
Twain, Mark 22, 105
Twier 111, 147
2001: A Space Odyssey 117
“Two Cultures, e” 3

Unilever 46, 59–60, 84; Campaign for Real Beauty 46, 47, 122–5
Union of Concerned Scientists 145
United Airlines 111
United Kingdom, the: Brexit and 23, 25–6, 28–31, 32, 59, 141–2; cost of EU membership
aer rebates as function of all government spending in 29–31; new Labour party in
 26–8, 128; Remain campaign 25, 28, 31, 71, 148–9; Vote Leave campaign 23, 29, 71,
141
University of Sussex 151–6
USA Today 61

variables, compound 25–6

verbs 75–6
Vigen, Tyler 55
Visual Display of Quantitative Information, The 136
Vote Leave campaign 23, 29, 71, 141

Waite, Jeremy 117

Washington, Denzel 43
Washington DC Evening Star 141
We, Me, Them, And It 127
wealth and income data 51
weather and holiday data 52
Wellington, Ben 51, 73
West, Jervin 145, 146
“whys?” of data 16
Wilde, Oscar 105
Wired 137
World Health Organization (WHO) 51

YouTube 111, 147

Zeea Networks 90–1