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In this podcast episode, the hosts interview Jed Somerton about data storytelling and how it can inspire change. Jed explains that when trying to inspire change, it's important to use data storytelling instead of just presenting facts and figures. He emphasizes the importance of timing and catching people when they are receptive to new ideas. Jed also discusses the structure of data storytelling, which includes the foundation principles of ethos, logos, pathos, and chronos, as well as the sequence of what, so what, then what, and now what. Overall, data storytelling allows for a more emotional and persuasive connection with the audience, making them want to implement change rather than feeling forced to do so. Welcome to Lean into Excellence, a Workstream Consulting Podcast. I'm Liz Crescenti. And I'm Marco Bonilla. And we will be your hosts as we embark on our continuous improvement journey. Welcome back to another episode of Lean into Excellence. I'm your host, Liz Crescenti. And I'm your co-host, Marco Bonilla. And today we are very excited. We have Mr. Jed Somerton with us today. And we are going to be diving into data storytelling and using that to inspire change. So very excited about that topic today. Welcome, Jed. I had the pleasure of meeting Jed a couple years back. I got invited to come to the University of Denver for a weekend, what they call a weekend immersion for MBA students. And he just opened my eyes to the power of storytelling. So welcome, Jed. Great to have you here. Well, thank you, Marco. And it's a pleasure to join with both of you and your audience here today. And if I might give a little bit of background on myself because I presume that they know you. I have been in consulting and working internally in various organizations for the last 40 years, about 50% of my career in consulting, 50% as an internal decision maker. And I found that as a consultant, people call you to come in and try to inspire change. And when you're on the other side of the fence and you're internally, it's a very different perspective on the world. But either way, the challenges are to inspire people to want to change and not just give them the facts and figures and say they must change. It's human nature to be more receptive to an invitation than a mandate. And data storytelling is a good way to get people from the, hey, I don't know anything about this, to the, hey, I'm on board. Let's go do this stage. Outstanding, Jed. Absolutely. So, yeah, this whole episode is going to be on that part of how to communicate and how to influence, right, your audience. Yeah, we talk about it all the time because we're always discussing, you know, continuous improvement in these initiatives and rolling it out, you know, throughout the organization. And it's easy just to say, hey, this is what we're doing. But you really need to tailor that message and deliver that story to implement that change. So we're really excited about this topic. This is going to be great. So, Jed, can you tell us when the best time to storytell is? Well, timing is important, Marco. So thank you for asking the question. You don't want to tell it too soon. You don't want to tell it too late. So when's the best time? The best time is when you have a proposal in your mind and you've got some facts and figures and you have a good idea how to move forward. But you haven't really shared that with a larger group yet. So you want to catch them when they are ripe for hearing a new idea before they've heard what your idea is. Because if they've already heard it and it's circulated out in the background in a rumor, they might start getting some fear factor built up. They might be getting some resistance built up. And you want to catch it before that. So you have to be ready for a data story, even in the earliest stages, because somebody might walk up to you or you might pop into your boss's office and they say, how's it going? Well, I've got this great idea. And you might use the words in an informal setting. Imagine if we could fill in the blank and you get the creative juices going. And that's an informal time because then people will start talking about it. But you do have to be careful about not having enough information to answer the questions and not having too much information to start rumors and the bad chat in the background. Let's move a little bit forward to when you want to make a formal proposal and you want to put this out in front of the group. And maybe it's your chief executive and your COO and your CFO and CMO and all of that folks, all those folks. And you're going to go into a room. And after you've got a fully baked proposal and you've got the facts and figures and you've got an idea of how you want to move forward, then you can walk in before you actually kick off the project. You want to get people on board. So it's after the development, before the implementation. And you walk in and say, I've got some ideas. And we can talk about in a few minutes about how you go through that, what a structure of a data story is and some of the elements you need to have. But you get it going. It is actually the bridge, I believe, between design and implementation. It's the getting the people on board. So they want to implement rather than have to implement. Yeah, that's the biggest thing. They want to versus have to. It's not a chore. It's something that they want to go and run after with you. Yeah, they want to see what's down the road, right? They want to see what the big win is, right, the return on that effort. Well, we call that the WHFM, right, the What's In It For Me. That's what everyone has in the back of their mind every time you walk up to them. What's in it for me? It is because their plates are full. They've got a hundred things going on right now, and you're going to add one more. And they're going to think, how am I ever going to get home to my kids for dinner on time, right? So you have to spell it out for them. And it's different for the chief marketing officer than it is for the chief financial officer, very different for the chief operations officer. You get the idea, right? And I might add that the biggest difference between a business presentation and a data story is, a business presentation, you go in, you're updating everybody, here's the facts and figures, and it's all in the logical, cognitive side of your brain. A data story has the element of pathos, of passion, of emotional connection that makes people want to get on board. It does emphasize the WHFM. It makes them the hero, not you, right? It puts it on them that say, if you do this, we will collectively do really well, and you will look like a hero. It makes them want to do this and prioritize your idea above the 5011 or the things they've got on their plate. Oh, absolutely, right? They're thinking, how do we move the needle? This project, this effort, even listening in to a proposal, how is this going to better our lives, right? But you're right, WHFM, that's a great reference. I hear it all the time. So, Jed, what is the structure of data storytelling? Well, I think there's two parts to it. One is the foundation principles, and then the second is what I call the arc of the data story. So the foundation principles I borrowed shamelessly from the ancient Greeks. They had it right, and these are time-tested principles where you want to have ethos, your standing and your credibility, and the real rationale that you have. And then you've got the logos, which is the logic and the business case and the understanding of the process and the outcomes and those kinds of things. Then you've got the pathos, which I mentioned earlier, which is the passion and the empathy you want to get from the audience to want to get on board. And then the fourth element that the Greeks brought to us was chronos, which is timing. So the timing, as I mentioned in the opening segment, is really important, too. You don't want to do it too soon. You don't want to do it too late. Do it too soon, you don't have enough to justify and back it up. You do it too late, people might have already gotten their feet in concrete and don't want to move because a rumor started or whatever. So the chronos is important. So we've got ethos, logos, pathos, and chronos, and the pathos is the most important distinction between a data story and a regular business presentation. But once you understand you've got some kind of appeal to their emotion, it's very important to bring that out on an individual basis. And it's best done in a way that connects to their human side. If you know something about them and you can do that to their personal side and you've got some trust, that's really, really strong to do. But if you don't know all the people are in a very large audience, you probably want to use the values of the organization to say, this aligns with our values in this way. It supports our vision. It enables our mission. It's great for our stakeholder customers, our suppliers, and our employers and the other values of the organization. It might be integrity. It might be continuous improvement. It might be lots of other things. And say, this rings all those bells. And that's the pathos. And once you have that, then you have to put your data story together in some kind of sequence. And we've all watched dramatic movies where they have an intro, a development, a climax, and then an epilogue. And in data storytelling, for me, that looks like you're going to tell them, I call it the what sequence, a sequence of what are we talking about? What are the facts? What is the business case of why we want to change, really? And then, so what? How do we interpret those facts of what's going on in the business? We've done some analysis and say, here's a problem or here's an opportunity. That's the what. So what, what does this mean to us? And what might we want to do? And then you have the then what, which is, if we do this, then what will happen? Or if we don't do this, then what might happen that would be bad, for example? And so we've got the what, so what, then what? And then finally, it's the now what do we do, the call to action. And to tie that back to the beginning part where we've got the intro, that's the what. Then we've got the development, that's the so what. Then we've got the climax, then what? Imagine what we can do. Here's the opportunity in front of us to make our world and the bigger world a better place. And that's where the pathos really comes roaring forward, if we can do this well. And then you've got people on board and they say, OK, now what do we do? Now what do we do? And that is the epilogue, is the call to action. And you want to make that in the room while you're still there to get people to say, I committed to something. And it's not just, OK, we'll have another meeting next week. That's a commitment to, like, nothing. You want to have, we're going to get this fired up. When can we have the kickoff? And we'd like to do it next week. That's where we'd like to go. Yeah, nothing says pushing it off for everybody if you said we'll have another meeting, right, Jed? Yeah, our brains just shut down and said, all right, I'm going to put this aside in my head and move on to the next thing. Yeah, you have their, you know, attention and their commitment. You might as well just execute while, you know, they're all in front of you. Exactly. Jed, that's a fantastic breakdown and showing some of the fundamentals of storytelling. But that seems like a lot. So how long does this take? Data storytelling is 15 minutes or less, right? It's hard to get people pumped up for more than that unless you're Tony Robbins or something, but I'm not. So 10 to 12 slides the most. And you do not want to be behind a podium when you do this. You want to have those slides memorized like it's a TED Talk. So you can click through them and you're standing out in front of the room or if it's a round table, that's great. You don't want a square table where there's a head of the table. You want everybody in this together. So the physical setting is important. You don't want anything physical like a podium between you and the audience because then you've got a distance you have to overcome. We don't want that. You want to connect with the audience. And you want to be able to look each one of them in the eye as you talk. And not just scan around the room but hold their gaze for a moment because then they're listening. They're not looking down at their phones. They're not drifting off into the ether or whatever they might be, have other distractions. So 10 to 12 to 15 minutes is really good. And you set this up with the what, the so what, the then what, and the now what. And you weave your pathos throughout. And it is brief. And your visuals should be visuals, not word slides. And not just some kind of photo to complement words on the other side. You want the actual graphics to illustrate your point. And if you've got data, you should have good data visualizations to do that. And you can show some of the graphs or the line charts or whatever you've got to show that. And then you might want to, say, diagram an existing process and show what you're doing is going to change that process for the better. And ideally improve some of the metrics from that process. Increasing the effectiveness, the efficiency, and the quality. Decreasing the cost and those kinds of things. Improving the metrics. But you've got to keep it under 15 minutes. And that doesn't give people a whole lot of time necessarily to wander their thoughts, which is good. But it does give them enough time to interject with questions. Which brings me to another point. When we're delivering a data story, unlike a podcast, we need to have pauses of silence for people to absorb what we just said. And figure out and feel the what's in it for me from their perspective. If we just keep rattling on and we repeat ourselves or try to fill in the silence, it's going to wander. And we have to just let it sit and absorb sometimes. So five seconds, ten seconds of silence. Attentive silence while you're still looking at them and you're checking their bodily expressions and their facial expressions. You might ask if you have any questions. Or you might add an anecdote that says, you know, Mary, the CFO, has got a puzzled look on her face. You might say, well, Mary, let me go into the financials a little bit more. And I have a lot more we can cover offline. But here's the key points. And while you take the moment to do that, you can read the audience and you can see if there's objections. And you can catch them in the bud and address them right up front. Jed, I've got to tell you, you just touched upon a couple things that I wish I'd written them all down. But one is that awkward silence, it's not awkward for the audience, it's awkward for the individual. So for someone who's not as comfortable being in front of people and telling a story, that five seconds seems like a long time. It's like five minutes. Exactly. You hear crickets. You just hear the crickets going. I'm a STEM guy, right? I get it. I need to fill in that blank somehow, right? I can't just let them sit there. It's like dead air, right? You're like, oh, I can't have dead air. But it isn't. You need to give them time to absorb what you're telling them. So you don't want to distract them from that thought process and give them something else and move on to the next thing. The other thing you mentioned is about the number of slides, Jed. So, you know, we talked about typical STEM presentations that could go on for hours and hundreds of slides. That's my PowerPoint. So one thing I push to my students, and I don't know where I learned this. I go by this 10, 20, 30 rule. No more than 10 slides, no more than 20 minutes, no smaller than 30-point font, right? That's just a really basic thing, right? For the 20 minutes, you're protecting their time, right? You say, you know, I really respect your time. I'm not going to drag this out for too long. Plus, I'm going to give time at the end for questions and answers. 10 slides, as you said, 12 slides, whatever, as long as you're not burying them with slides. And you mentioned visual, you know, the visualization of the data. We could have a whole class on how to present data, right? Oh, we do. People overboard, as you know, right? They try to do a lot of animations, a lot of 3D graphs that are kind of confusing. They kind of contradict what they're trying to present. So you touched upon a lot of things, Jed, in the first few minutes here. It's just amazing the different techniques that you need to add to your presentation skills, right? It's not just the data, again. Very true, very true. And not adding too much, right? Because you don't want to leave the audience wanting less, like get out of here, I'm bored, right? Right. You want to inspire them and ask them to want more, and you'd be glad to meet with them afterward, to walk through it in more detail from their point of view. Don't try to cover everything you need to cover with that person in the data story. The data story will get them to want to engage with you to cover it offline later in much more detail. Maybe brief their staff, for example, bring them into the loop. And all of a sudden you've got this ball rolling, right? And more people are inspired, and you're starting to spread out. And if you started with senior-level people, then the other folks are going to attend the meeting that their boss calls for you to come in and spread the data story further. You're going to have to keep that element of pathos up front, so maybe you do an even shorter version of the emotional pathos part of the data story, and then you open up the Q&A or you go into some deeper examples for that particular audience, that particular functional group. Yeah, I usually tell, especially my technical people, leave all the technical references as an appendix. We're just going to ask you a lot of questions that is important, but not important to the room, right? So have it ready. It's not that you're not doing the analysis. You just keep it in your back pocket, right? Well said. Jed, what would you say your biggest struggle was when you were starting out? Well, it was really clear. I'm a STEM guy, science, technology, engineering, and math, and I thought it was all about the facts and figures. And then I have my bell rung. I walked out of a presentation where somebody said, my boss said, you know, you rang the bell, but nobody heard it. And interesting. I was like, okay, there's nobody in the room. Okay, that was bad. So the situation was I had put too much into the logic and not enough into the pathos. Because I thought the logic would carry the day, and I was the smartest guy in the room and all that kind of stuff back in my early days. And bringing the element of pathos into the conversation and not just telling them everything I know and leaving them wanting less, I should have been very much more selective on three points, just three. There's three things I can know. Here's the reasons why and how they appeal to you. And you can weave that throughout the entire what sequence. But adding the element of pathos requires you to be vulnerable to some degree. And I thought vulnerability meant weakness. Instead, though, when it's delivered correctly, it means connection to people because it's a human element. And one of my favorite quotes along this topic is from Teddy Roosevelt, former president. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And that means a lot. And I was pondering that and saying, man, I've got to up my pathos. And man, for a STEM guy, this just feels weird. It's very uncomfortable. Like the moment of silence you were talking earlier, it feels really awkward. But then you realize that the pathos, if you amp it up to twice as bad as you think it could possibly be, twice as much, and you think it's going to be over the top, it's usually about halfway there. No, not enough. You're going to feel the awkwardness and vulnerability in a way that you've never had before. And then you realize that people respond to that. And then you amp it up a little bit because you can't come in like Tony Robbins the first time because people know you're in the office, right? You can't just do this over the top, you know, parades and brass bands and all that. But you can amp it up a lot. I found that I could amp it up a lot more and just make it exciting without making it over the top. And people respond to that, even though it feels weird the first time. Yeah. You pull back a little bit on the data and increase the connection. Right, right. Don't tell them all the details. Oh, my gosh, no. Yeah. Instead, spend that time making the personal connection. Jed, I think part of it, too, is you want to make sure that they, I think the weaknesses, you want to make sure they're thinking that you actually did some work, right? That's part of the getcha, right? You're trying to present and say, look, I did a lot of work to show you that I put some effort into this. But what you're really doing is steering them away, right? But the implication isn't that you just did a lot of work. The implication is this is important. Right. This is important to them. It's worth your time. It's worth their time to invest some thinking and some emotion and some time and effort into making this a reality. Again, you can save the implementation details for later. I mean, how long is this going to take? It's going to take six months. We'll go through the details another time. I've got the plan mapped out. You're trying to light the fire. You know, you can show them a high-level GAN if you have it, one of those back pocket slides you were talking about, Morka. But that's not the point. The point is to get them to say yes, not to ask how, really. Right, right, right. Hey, Jed, so we've talked a lot about different things here. How do you put it all together? Well, I choose the right moment for a data story versus a business presentation. A business presentation is a good update. It's a standard course of business. We've all done 100 of them. Data stories are for special cases, special purposes, where you want to inspire somebody to go forth where the future might be uncertain, and that could be major initiatives or it could be just continuous improvement, because they're doing their job well now and you want them to change, and that could be uncertain or anxiety-producing for them. So choose your moments properly with a data story to be able to connect with them emotionally when they need it the most and do it sparingly. You might have one or two data storytelling episodes a year. You won't have every week when you go in. You'll exhaust people, and you'll reduce your future impact because they're like, here we go again. So choose your timing well. Choose your pathos well. Be vulnerable. Be willing to be vulnerable just a little bit. It makes you more human. It establishes better relationships, and it brings you to your desired result of getting them emotionally committed, because once you're emotionally on board, the rest is just stuff, activities you need to do. You've already overcome the major challenges. Now, you will have setbacks, and you've got to return them to that with them, and you've got to keep the ball rolling, but the data storytelling gets their buy-in from the beginning. After that, most people who do Lean Six Sigma know how to execute. So that's a good way to get people on board so you can do your thing. Okay, that's fantastic. You know what? I've got to tell you. I wish everyone on the planet could take your course because it was just sitting in your classroom, even though I wasn't there as a student, made a huge difference on the way I view storytelling or presenting data, right? And I've incorporated some of that into the coursework, you know, the training that we do in the Lean Six Sigma world, because we are – a lot of the stems really suffer through that end part, right, the connection part. Great job. Yeah, great job, Jed. Jed, thank you so much for coming on, and this is a great conversation, and it's so useful, and not just in, you know, the workplace, but just in life and just talking to people just in general. This is all great information to have for something we kind of take for granted and just have conversations, so this is fantastic. Jed, thank you for having me. Yeah, Jed, if someone wants to reach out to you and continue this conversation, is LinkedIn the best way to get a hold of you? I would say. That would be a good way, for sure. So thank you, Jed, for joining us. My pleasure, truly. Thank you. We'll see you in Denver. Hope to connect with you soon in person, not just via video. Looking forward to that. Thank you. Thank you, Jed. And just a reminder, new episodes are released every other Wednesday, and you can find Marco and I at WorkstreamConsulting.com, and we will see you next time. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. ♪♪♪
