There certainly is a gap in terms of ability to ask the right questions, understand which data is relevant, how to test the validity of the data, interpret the data to provide meaningful outcomes and create easy to comprehend visualizations giving the big picture to leadership teams. A few key questions that will help data science professionals to narrate a compelling story that will engage and add value to senior management decision making:
- How does one contextualize data?
- How does one create meaning out of data?
- How does one corelate disparate data points?
- How does one get to the most important point quickly?
- How does one present a meaningful business hypothesis?
- How does one simulate an effective visual representation?
While I am saying all this, let’s also acknowledge the fact that this is not a new-age technology world problem. More than 100 years ago, Willard Brinton in his book Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts stated – “Time after time it happens that some ignorant or presumptuous member of a committee or a board of directors will upset the carefully-thought-out plan of a man who knows the facts, simply because the man with the facts cannot present his facts readily enough to overcome the opposition. As the cathedral is to its foundation so is an effective presentation of facts to the data.”
The Role of Storytelling with Data in Enhancing Decision-Making
One of the reasons for this problem to have taken a monumental proportion is the fact that data analysis tools come bundled with data visualization tools and a natural expectation because of that has been that the same person should be able to analyze, interpret, visualize and communicate the data story effectively. Over the last few years organizations have been in a mad rush to recruit data scientists with deep technical skills and almost none with data story telling skills. Organizations cannot leave the task of teaching this skill to academic institutions. They will have to train their resources just like Hansa Cequity is doing to ensure that the plot is not lost in a heap of slides! The future belongs to professionals with the ability to interpret and communicate the data story impactfully and compellingly, enabling decision-making at the highest level easier.
