Are your data presentations too complex for your audience to absorb? Can you communicate your key insights in three minutes or less?
Distilling data is essential for effective communication. In Storytelling With Data, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic writes that focusing on the most important information helps listeners retain your key points. She introduces two frameworks designed to help you identify and emphasize what truly matters in your data.
Keep reading to discover how these techniques can transform your complex data into compelling, memorable stories.
How to Distill Data
Even the most interested listeners can only absorb so much information, which is why Knaflic emphasizes the importance of reducing complex information to its essential elements. The principle is simple but powerful: Before you can tell an effective story with your data, you need to identify the handful of key points that really matter. Knaflic offers two frameworks for this process of distilling data down to its most fundamental form:
- The “3-minute story”: A concise narrative that you can tell in a short amount of time. This forces you to focus on what’s truly important and eliminate everything else.
- The “Big Idea”: A single, compelling sentence that captures your core message. Think of it as the headline you want your audience to remember.
(Shortform note: Knaflic’s “Big Idea” might be more digestible than a “3-minute story” for most audiences. Psychologists say our attention spans are getting shorter, dropping from around 2.5 minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds in recent years. Experts attribute this to more frequent switching between tasks and digital distractions, which not only reduces our attention span but also increases our stress levels, makes us more prone to errors, and reduces our productivity since it takes mental effort to refocus. The rapid pace of modern media like TV, films, and online videos has also conditioned us to expect constantly shifting stimuli, eroding our capacity to focus on the same task—or story—for long.)
You can use a three-minute story or a big idea to communicate your message succinctly. For example, imagine you’ve analyzed a year’s worth of customer feedback data for a subscription service. Instead of presenting every detail, you might distill your data down to this Big Idea: “Our response time to customer complaints directly predicts their likelihood to renew.” Your 3-minute story would then focus on the key data points that support this conclusion, leaving out the non-essential details. By starting with this data distillation process, you can then build your visualizations around the points that matter most, making your critical insights clear.
(Shortform note: Knaflic’s 3-minute story and big idea are variations of “elevator pitches”—speeches that concisely convey an idea or proposal within a very short timeframe. The term seems to have originated with Elisha Otis’s 1853 demonstration of his new elevator safety brake. Otis gave a brief “pitch” for his invention by cutting the cable while standing on the elevator platform. The phrase gained popularity in the early 20th century Hollywood film industry, where screenwriters would seize brief elevator rides to pitch movie ideas to busy executives. The term later expanded beyond the entertainment industry, becoming widely used in the business world to describe a quick, persuasive proposal.)
