The Unexpected Bond Between Data and Narrative

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An Essential Skill to Communicate Data

For decades, data and narrative have held opposite ends of the thinking spectrum, reflecting as they do, the analytical and logical left hemisphere of our brain juxtaposed against the imaginative, intuitive right hemisphere. Human beings have often perceived these concepts as worlds apart.

This misconception has usually caused analytical-minded people to look down at anecdotes as artifices that add no value to facts because believed to speak for themselves. In return, most story literates viewed data as content for an elite of scientists, analysts, or business executives, who accept it as the sole source of information in their decision-making process.

In the past fifty years, the exponential growth of data and the increase of complexity of our modern world, have led enterprises to the democratization of analytics, making data accessible to various roles in the organizational hierarchy and creating a demand for new skills to communicate data efficiently and comprehensively.

The ability to extract, analyze, interpret, and communicate data has become a crucial talent that bridges the realm of analytics to storytelling and finds the correlation between the two hemispheres by leveraging our brains’ singularity.

But to understand how narrative can serve data analytics in communicating or persuading the audience, we need to acknowledge the power of stories over human psychology first.

Here are four reasons why storytelling is a powerful ingredient to communicate data effectively

Narrative Reduces Scepticism

According to cognitive psychology and neuroscience studies, our brain follows two central systems: system one, which can respond to external stimuli and operates on autopilot, and system two, which receives in sequence system one’s findings and then processes information analytically. While we tend to believe system two to be the thinker who examines and processes information for the sake of making the right decisions, it is, in reality, a lazy controller, subject to bias and personal beliefs of system one, the actual driver, which is drawn to trust intuition instead. Ignoring system one’s functioning and role may lead to failing the objective of the data story, applying to the misconception that facts can speak for themselves. By assessing the audience’s knowledge or familiarity with the subject of the data story and tailoring the narrative around the listener’s values and bias, we overcome scepticism we would otherwise find as per system one’s default settings.   

Storytelling Enhances Comprehension

The human’s inclination to recognize narrative patterns recalls the brain’s ability to make up a story from a set of incomplete information. The most prominent example is the six-words story, a narrative technique that uses the general concept of telling a story with the absolute minimum of words. Also known as flash fiction, a six-word story can have all of the emotional themes of longer stories: for example, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn“, erroneously attributed to Ernest Hemingway, is a combination of words, that albeit incomplete, can generate an entire narrative in our mind, following the intuition and the brain’s capability to connect invisible dots to make sense. In this context, stories enhance the ability to comprehend complex or incomplete information so that we can share that understanding with others.

“The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.”  

 – Hans Rosling, professor and statistician

We Visualise Data. We feel Stories

When we receive information, different areas of our brain activate simultaneously. Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are responsible for processing the language, analysing information and working to understand meaning. The same applies to data too. When a sender communicates data, the receiver may interpret it according to personal knowledge and exposure to the subject-matter, individual bias, or system of beliefs. When attaching a purposeful narrative to data, we show and don’t tell, using a writing technique in which the story is related through sensory details and actions rather than exposition, and we create a memorable experience that drives actions. Most notably, through stories, the sensorial regions of the brain activate with the processes of language: smell, touch, and movement, contribute to feeling the data story leading the audience to see the insights generated by relevant analytics and an engaging narrative.

Data Stories Amplify Emotional Resonance

When data refers to attributes of human beings or to human units, e.g., poverty or wealth, as opposed to employees or inhabitants, a more profound connection called neuronal decoupling, is established between the data storyteller and the listener. The communication between the two occurs as if it resonated on the same frequency length, creating a more meaningful connection that causes the body to produce oxytocin, the empathy hormone. Similarly, when data leads to dramatic insights, the body produces cortisol, the stress’ hormone confirming how the involvement of emotions happens beyond our rationale. As for data, when we listen or read analytics, the body produces dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in how we feel pleasure, and which is a significant part of our uniquely human ability to decode the meaning of facts and story.

Many valuable insights may suffer if they are not successfully moulded into data stories. Leveraging the power of narrative enables communication to key insights, persuading anecdote-sceptics to engage with the audience. Not only does the lesson emerging from the data story become memorable, but it also leads the listener to make decisions, take action, and drive change to create value.

Data storytelling represents an emerging new field of expertise where art and science converge: a time many have been waiting for.