**Building a Strong Culture of Data Storytelling**

As organizations look to integrate data storytelling into their culture, it's essential to consider how to approach this initiative effectively. One key aspect is support for data storytelling, which can come from both top-down and bottom-up approaches. Top-down support involves having a leader who values and understands the importance of data storytelling, taking time to weave stories out of data, and using storytelling in strategic decision-making. This approach can help spread the culture of data storytelling within an organization.

However, bottom-up approaches also show promise. By identifying specific actions that require clear communication and presentation, such as discussing a particular issue or weighing options, organizations can harness the power of data storytelling to drive change. To achieve this, consider planning your content in a low-tech way, ensuring that graphs are clear via contrast and words, and making it easy for others to understand what you're trying to convey.

When implementing data storytelling, it's crucial to think about your audience, get clear on your message, and plan your content carefully. If done effectively, data storytelling can lead to excitement within an organization, with team members clamoring to learn more and provide feedback. However, not every organization or culture is ready for this level of engagement, so it's essential to assess the readiness of one's environment before attempting to implement a strong culture of data storytelling.

**The Evolving Nature of Data Storytelling**

As AI technology continues to advance, data storytelling will become increasingly important in its application. The ability to ask good questions and think critically about the information generated by these tools is becoming crucial. This requires the development of skepticism and the ability to frame complex issues in a clear, understandable way.

In the context of emerging tools like AI, the skill set required for effective data storytelling will need to adapt. This includes learning how to harness the capabilities of these tools while being mindful of their limitations. By teaching children about data storytelling through examples such as Daphne's "Draw Data" book, we can empower future generations with the skills necessary to navigate this rapidly evolving landscape.

**The Role of AI in Data Storytelling**

As AI technology advances, it will play an increasingly important role in data storytelling. The ability to work effectively with these tools will require a new set of skills, including the capacity to ask good questions and think critically about the information they generate. By embracing this evolving landscape and developing our skills accordingly, we can unlock the full potential of data storytelling.

In particular, AI's ability to provide insights and suggestions will need to be tempered by skepticism and critical thinking. By learning how to frame complex issues in a clear, understandable way, we can harness the power of these tools while avoiding common pitfalls. As we continue to develop our skills and navigate the rapidly evolving world of data storytelling, one thing is clear: effective communication and collaboration will be key to unlocking the full potential of this powerful tool.

**The Importance of Skepticism**

As AI technology advances, skepticism and critical thinking will become increasingly important skills for anyone working with these tools. By learning how to approach complex issues in a nuanced, thoughtful way, we can unlock the full potential of data storytelling while avoiding common pitfalls.

This requires more than just technical expertise; it demands a deep understanding of the assumptions underlying AI-driven insights and the ability to frame complex issues in a clear, understandable way. By teaching children about these skills through examples like Daphne's "Draw Data" book, we can empower future generations with the tools necessary to navigate this rapidly evolving landscape.

In conclusion, building a strong culture of data storytelling requires careful planning, effective communication, and a willingness to adapt to changing circumstances. As AI technology continues to advance, it will play an increasingly important role in this effort, but only if we approach it with a critical, skeptical mindset.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoo often we communicate with ourselves in mind and assume that other people are going to see what we see other people have the same preferences as we do and so just a little bit of time thinking about the people on the receiving end of what you're going to communicate and then doing these things with them in mind just helps communication happen better everywhere coess bound it's great to have you on data framed hi Adele it's great to be here for those who are not aware of what you do you are a legend in the data storytelling space I mean definitely are and your books really popularized and mainstream the concept of data storytelling so maybe to set the stage uh well what inspired you to turn your attention to children's book with your new book DNE draws data what was the motivation behind it yeah one of the things that we often hear so I run a company called storytelling with data uh where we teach workshops to individuals and organizations uh about how to communicate effectively with data and one of the things that we often hear is oh I wish that I had learned these skills earlier and when you think back we don't really get exposed to data storytelling or communicating with graphs very much in school and so simultaneous with that I was watching my kids grow and start school and seeing the homework that they came home with and there there was this idea in my head ever since having kids I think which is they develop language at such a long young age and it's by repetition and being immersed and the their minds are like sponges when it comes to being able to read and write and you know carry on a conversation and it really seemed to me that we could be taking the visual language of numbers of graphs and teaching that a whole lot sooner because one core concept I think or core skill that any good analyst any good you know just person working in the business world has is the ability to ask good questions and then understand how to get answers to those questions and I think this applies for the analyst who's working with data day in day out but also you know for an executive who needs to know when to question and how and who to go to for different things and kids have this innate curiosity they ask questions about everything I actually I was in New York City with my family a couple weeks ago it was our last trip of Summer before school started back and I was walking with my daughter and my son was in front of me and and my other son and every two seconds one of them was asking me a question mommy how did this happen Mommy what's that mommy it over and over and over again which I think is fantastic I mean it can get a little annoying right but if we can teach them how to hone their natural inclination to ask questions right because it's their way of piecing in the puzzle of how does the world work and what's my place in the world that if we can teach them how to hone that and you know instead of incessantly asking questions you do keep asking questions but also think about which are the most interesting questions or what which ones could we collect information and answer ourselves or talk to other people as a means of testing assumptions we we can teach this all at such a young age and it would be so impactful when it comes to developing foundational skills that will serve kids as they grow in school and in basically any field uh which I think could be really empowering yeah that's wonderful and you know I read the book and I thought it was amazing and Dean is very curious uh dinosaur maybe can you share with us she's a dragon she's a dragon yeah that is that is true that is true stanie is a very curious Dragon maybe could you share with us a bit about the story and the characters what can you know readers expect what can parents expect uh their kids to take away from it so the the main book is a story a fully Illustrated picture book and and it focuses on Daphne she is a dragon with a unique talent in that she really loves to draw and the thing that she loves to draw more than anything else is data and so she gets uh in a bit of an argument with her brother about this who you know he tells her well that's not dragony enough and so she leaves her cave in search of a place where she can be herself and she goes on an adventure and she goes to some different places uh meets different creatures and in every case helps them solve a problem or a challenge that they're facing by collecting and then drawing data uh really pictoral forms of graphs where a child looking at it it's not probably even going to realize that they're looking at a graph uh and I won't ruin the ending but it's a happy one where Daphne finds her place and recognizes that her unique talent is actually what makes her really powerful and special and then to further learning the story is accompanied by a graph glossery at the end of the book that where there's a page devoted to each of the four main types of graphs that she draws in her adventures bar charts line graphs pie charts and Scatter Plots so each of those talks more about what is this when would you use it what sort of questions can you answer with it uh gives examples from Daphne's journey and then also has an activity for kids where they can collect data about themselves and use it to draw the given type of graph I love that and one of the things that I my favorite aspects about the book is that it really challenges some of the limiting beliefs that we you know as people we often internalize as children think about the idea I'm not a numbers person or I don't know math like that type these types of limiting beliefs tend to be developed quite early or if you're a math person astoundingly early and it can go either way I'm a math person I have a degree in math Applied Mathematics and it's been interesting for me to see the way that that influences my children so I have two boys and a girl they're right now 11 10 and eight and with my oldest he says you know mommy's great at math I get my great math skills from my mom uh which is awesome uh my little girl said to me one day recently I don't like math it's hard I was like where did that come from like the hard things are good because and one of the ways you learn in math is by making mistakes and understanding why it wasn't right or why it could be done differently it's a puzzle Math is fun and she's come around because actually I was overhearing her talk to someone else the other day and she said her one of her favorite subjects is math so they are so influenced by so many things at that age that all it takes is some portrayal of you know math being for nerds or being uncool or being hard and now you've just potentially turned this child off of a really powerful discipline because for me I think with math and yes I use math uh and and have in different uh parts of my career quite deeply but I think for me the bigger thing that math has taught me is just the ability to think logically and break down a problem that might be ambiguous into component pieces that I can attack systematically and put back together and those are skills that again will be helpful in any sort of role you think about you know kids growing up and you know the research they should be doing in in school and just the skepticism that they need to have uh towards the information that comes at them so these are are definitely things that we should be fostering and helping them hone and not doing things that are inadvertently going to shut down their curiosity or their interest I I couldn't agree more and I love especially your point on how math is not just you know the ability to do formulas or stuff like that it's meta skills that help you solve problems in life and maybe kind of related to these uh limiting beliefs uh right why do you think these limiting beliefs pop up in the first place and why do they still persist in today's day and age and maybe follow question here how intentional were you when writing the book to kind of focus on these limiting beliefs and tackled them yeah really great questions I I don't I don't know where it comes from I think but it's been pervasive for so long I think of you know even TV shows or movies that portray kids in in school in different ways of it's typically like the nerdy kid with glasses on who is like the smart one who does hard things like m and Science and that that persists it's just it's been that way or I think of even books children's books that my kids have and and some of them are books that I love right there's one for example that's called nerdy corn but again it's about it's and and the message is amazing which is it's a girl unicorn who loves science and sort of a similar like she gets made fun of by friends at school but then ends up being the one who saves the day but she's nerdy she's got glasses it it's just these little things she got fun she got made fun of by her friends F yeah exactly that yeah I think it's it's these little things that we maybe don't even realize culturally that are influencing kids at really young ages and for some reason especially girls and so you asked about how intentional was I going in and trying to I don't know counter some of these conceptions it honestly it wasn't super intentional going in I knew that I wanted to do something that my kid that would introduce my kids or kids like mine other kids to these Concepts uh I mean it made sense for Daphne to be a a girl Dragon because girls are cool and powerful and so I guess I guess from that sense that uh that maybe there was a little of that in there but that reading of it has come kind of since it all came together but I'm happy that it's there I love that as well and it's great how it organically came up and you know you mentioned a lot of the concepts in the book you know data storytelling can be a complex topic right depending on how you want to approach it so even for adults which makes me wonder like what do you think there's a right age to start introducing these Concepts if you're a parent I think there's a lot of parents in the audience I'd love to kind of think how how do you think about introducing these topics as a parents to your to your children I honestly think the early are the better once they've got language and a bit of logic I mean as soon as you're reading to them I think there can be pieces of this and yes data storytelling can be complex but it doesn't have to be and oftentimes it's it's not the data storytelling that's complex it's the you know the analytics that might be happening behind the scenes but that you don't need to you know we don't need to be teaching our four-year-old statistics but we can definitely be pointing out the structure of story I think of some of the things that I creatively tried to do with my kids to keep them entertained when we were uh learning at home when uh during the pandemic and you know I would draw from my work for that so I remember us getting books out and I had mine was haral in the Purple Crayon I love that book but we were talking about story structure in a simple way of you have a plot a Twist and an ending so this like really simple story mountain and so you can boil down any good book to that like any book that has a story any movie that or show that has a story to it you can also boil down pretty much every business problem or communication to this where you've got the context the so what and then the or the like the peak of the tension and then the resolution and so we do that we started off simple and then we thought well but there's actually a lot more going on in the story there's not just one up and down there are kind of all these ups and downs like I picture it like a jagged Mountain where you have this you know little tension introduced and resolved and introduced and resolved and then there's like the the peak the climax and tension and then you go down the mountain in the same stepwise fashion and so we did this with a few different books we read The Wizard of Oz and we had fun doing this because there's so many of things right on their Journey Down The Yellow Brick Road and trying to get to the wizard they encounter all of these different issues you know the flying monkeys or the poppy fields and in every case it gets resolved and it gets them closer to where they're going until you know the the the uh uh ruse is over and they realize that the wizard is not who he said he was and so so you get this Jagged mountain and part of the point of that is I think when you then well one you're teaching kids the structure of story and we did the same thing with Harold in the purple cray that was why that came up um but you're also teaching them how things can connect how they can connect in little ways how they can connect in big ways and you can draw parallels when it makes sense to stories and you know story at the jagged Mountain level versus story at the uh you know just up and down level you can relate that to different things that happen in their lives or different ways that they might interact with other people right if you're introducing yourself to someone do you give them your whole life story or do you boil it down to the sentence right that's similar to the every detail versus high level and fast forwarding to when they are in the working world that ability to bounce back and forth between full detail and high level or know which Peaks and valleys to include and which to not when you're talking to different people is a really important life skill yeah I couldn't agree more and then you mentioned here um you know uh reading down with sitting down with your kids you know looking over like structures of stories I'm sure you've shown uh that draws data to you know few kids here and there you know as you as you are releasing the book and testing the book how are they engaging with the material in ways that maybe you expected or surprised you yeah my kids so again I have three and they were my first test cases and they were heavily involved all along the way so they've grown to Love Daphne as much as I do but it has definitely been fun to see other kids uh so I went before the school year ended last year I read to each of my kids classes so they were then in fifth grade fourth grade and second grade and and I read to them in that order from old youngest and one of the things that was very interesting to me is in the fifth grade class the kids were already reserved they were clearly before they raised their hand to ask a question they were looking around the room they they were starting to care what other kids thought through how they interacted with me and so they there was this feeling where they they felt a little guarded and then the fourth grade CL they had great questions but they definitely were censoring themselves which I guess is is a good skill to develop um the fourth grade class was less uh less censored I would say and there were more questions and and some more maybe offthe wall questions but then the with the second grade class it was just pure joy it that just question after question after I mean they asked me probably a hundred questions in the time that we and it just they wanted to know everything they're so curious and so I guess one of the great things is well and so I left that going wow I could read to second grade classes all day long that was is the best thing ever um but I guess part of what what I see now actually just reflecting on it here with you is there is that natural censoring happening as kids are getting older uh which is a good skill to develop but I'm I'm not sure we're teaching them how to do that in the right ways because there were some really interesting questions that came up that were maybe off the- wall with the younger kids that I think the older kids wouldn't have asked that may end up being more interesting or have greater impact in how they do things so I think one thing that's been interesting for me just again seeing my own kids come home with homework or what they're working on in school is they they're not encountering many graphs but when they do when they're either looking at graphs or making graphs they're really boring they are they're text bookie they are describing things that either aren't interesting right how many blocks are yeah who who cares how many blocks there are they're not your blocks uh and half the time they're black and white so they're not even colorful or anything or you know it's something mundane like the weather something they already experienced and I think if we could teach kids the power of good questions that we can answer with data they could actually learn new things about themselves or about how they spend their time or the impact that doing different things has on their mood or their sleep and learn things that would Empower them to say yeah that's good I want to keep doing that or oh actually now that I understand that I want to make changes and that's what the activities in the book are really driven to do is for kids to collect something about themselves that will at the end of it be actionable right what are you eating is it colorful are you getting a variety of different nutrients or how is your uh sleep compared to or your mood compared to how much sleep you got these things that are more personal and interesting and actionable yeah I love the takeaways at the end because you know they do make the the activity of you know thinking about the question and coming up with the data and drawing it very fun as well and you know maybe you mentioned here going to read the book for kids of different ages you know as an author who usually writes long form non-fiction for adults how was it adapting a lot of what you've been you know thinking about writing about for years now to such a different audience how do you decide when is too much information to add how do you decide how long the book should be like I'd love to kind of see the mindset shift that happened here when re creating a children's book versus you know a data storytelling for business users or data practitioners type of book very different so with the adult books I was basically able to say everything I wanted to say right the the L latest one storytelling with you is like 880,000 Words uh which is a lot uh and you would think that that's harder than writing a children's book but after going through the children's book process I don't know if that's the case uh and so I think initially I I didn't do my research I just needed to write and I ended up writing something that was about 5,000 Words which is way too long for a picture book that's more like early chapter book length uh and so but there were some things that I learned through that because that was that was where the dragons came into the picture U because in that longer form story uh which also took like an hour to read out loud which most parents are not going to want to uh spend that time in a single sitting uh I will say from experience they it was children were the main characters but then they they had gone to a world of dragons and they were solving like population Dynamic sort of issue so it was way too complicated for what I wanted to do and but there were nuggets of that I needed to get it out and then there were nuggets of it like the dragons that uh came forward into Daphne and then I stepped back and did my research and learned that a traditional children's picture book is exactly 32 Pages that's because of how the paper runs through the printing press and gets folded into signatures uh it is less than a thousand words uh ideally a lot less than a thousand words but you definitely want to max out at something like that and it's different in that you you don't have to say everything because the pictures do a lot of the communication of the story so it's really important how the pictures and the words work together which makes sense all these things seem very obvious once you know them you know them it's like oh yeah and then something else that I learned along the way and actually this I didn't come to on my own this was a feedback that I got from One reviewer and I will be forever ever grateful because I wrote the the original manuscript for Daphne was written first person present tense because that's how I've always written right my business books it's me it's the voice is me I am writing to you so you're reading we're kind of having a conversation as we go through the books makes total sense in that uh for that purpose it doesn't make sense for a kids book though because when you think of how kids books are read either the child is reading it or a teacher or parent is and so then if I am reading as I am Daphne that like it just or versus the Nar like it gets very confusing very quickly and that would not have even occurred to me and also the present tense piece and so it was that was the a big Aha and and again the feedback that I will be forever grateful for that uh changed it from first person present tense to third person past tense and so now it's the you know the the the um reader is the the narrator recounting the story of what happened to Daphne and her friends which yeah is again is obvious now and it would have been a totally different book uh had that not happened indeed and you you talked about kind of the power of the visuals in the children's book to kind of convey the message maybe what was it like as well you know you've definitely had a lot of visuals in your previous book but books but they tend to be you know visualizations and uh and data data visuals in a lot of way a lot of ways so maybe um yeah walk me through kind of the process here of also looking at illustrations like think about like how do you tweak and illustrations I'd love to kind of learn learn that person from you yeah so in the original manuscript I I drew some things so I drew I we had a version of Daphne that I had drawn uh I I had fun with the kids they got involved as well uh there are some scenes with aliens and so at one point we had a big roll of butcher paper out and they were drawing aliens and spacecraft and so then I I redrew some I picked some out of those and redrew those and then I drew all of the graphs because I needed to make sure that those worked and that they made sense and that they were easy to interpret uh and the there was the underwater scene in particular went through a lot of iterations or the the scenario there uh to get to where it ended up um I think probably because that's the scatter plot which is arguably the uh most complicated of the graphs that Daphne draws um but I think we landed in in a good place there um so I drew everything and then I I'll tell you a little story so there's a presentation that I've given I think the first time I did it was at the tapestry conference in like I don't even know what year it was a long time ago um but that I'd done in several Keynotes where it's a story about my son Dorian and it was when he was two okay this tells you how old he is cuz he's uh 10 now so eight years ago so he's two and he's got this book I've got this picture of him reading uh and the book He's reading is called Larry gets lost in Seattle it's by John skws he's written a whole series about a little boy Pete and his dog Larry and so I tell the story of Larry getting lost in Seattle I use some of the illustrations from John's book and i' reached out to him when I wanted to do this to make sure he was okay with it get his permission and so I used it in giving Keynotes several times and then I reached out again when I was writing the yellow book storytelling with you because I wanted to draw on some of the um presentations and and show again some of these images and how they influen the style of the presentation uh it was in the slide design part and so he says yes great and then I reached out to him a couple years ago to say I've been thinking about writing a children's book uh you know if I do this is this anything you'd be interested in partnering on and at that point in time he said ah you know I know I just started a new thing no time right now and turns out I wasn't ready to do it yet because that was when I you know started writing and went in all these weird directions and then I'd shove it for a while and write it another book instead uh but then when I came back to it in Ernst and had the manuscript I reached out to John again and said hey what about timing now it's been a couple years and he said yeah you hit me at the perfect time I'd love to do it and so I gave him my manuscript which again it had Daphne it had some characters it had all the graphs and the first thing so and John had he's an amazing illustrator and has a lot of experience like he worked for Hannah Barbara and uh and and right has a lot of experience uh doing character design so the first thing that he did was design Daphne and uh I remember my husband saying this as I was waiting to see the initial like oh what's she going to look like and my husband Randy said to me what if John comes back with something that's totally different from your Daphne I was like well that's not going to happen and he's just going to take my Daphne and make her better and so then I uh almost couldn't even uh show Randy when I got the email that had the the were two versions of Daphne uh because they were both completely different from my Daphne one was like petite and purple and the other one was big and green and uh I was just kind of like huh but then John and I got together and we talked through the three Daphne now and talked about what fit for the character and what didn't and out of that conversation the ultimate death uh emerged and she's perfect uh we I mean she makes me smile every time I see her and we're doing really fun things like I've got one here of like making stuffed animal Daphne and that and so so Daphne came about and then John took my manuscript and the rest for me was like magic because he he went through and the first thing he did was roughs and so they were just no color black and white sketches and he does all of it on his iPad and so sketches of all of the scenes he's the one who he laid out the book in terms of which parts of the story would be on which page um which is an interesting way to do it I when he does his own books those pieces happen together which makes a lot of sense and I think were I to write uh if I write another children's book I would be I would have that going in as well of of what's going to fit on each page uh and the initial thing he came back with I made very few comments H and then once he added color uh I printed everything and I had it all laid out on my floor and there one of the things that I love is there are so many thoughtful details when you get the book you'll see just there's a lot of different paper textural like graph paper or lined paper uh just embedded in either backgrounds or elements of things like tree uh which is a really fun touch but there's also this neat progression of color where you get Daphne leaving the cave and it's in one uh color and then you know it's very Green in the jungle uh and very purple in space but actually in space with the pages laid out and this is something I never would have even seen I don't think had we just been you know had I just been flipping through the pages but seeing them laid out on the floor and you see the progression of color really clearly there was one space that just didn't have enough purple and so it became more purple so there there was a lot of back and forth of just everything we tested out because I also worked with a designer then so John did the illustrations I wrote the words and then all of that needed to be put together which you would think oh that seems simple no there's a big art to that as well because you have to you have to pick fonts and size and placement and and you know designing the jacket or the cover and so there's a lot that goes into it so uh Matt was my designer and he's worked with me on every book since the the blue one let's practice uh out of California flight design and he's fantastic and so he did the layout and we we everything was pretty straightforward until we got to the glossery uh because the glossery initially was like a lot of words and one picture I was like that's not going to work it needs to be really fun and easy to navigate and hopefully draw kids in and a block attack isn't going to do that and so we did a lot of iterating to come up with the design there yeah it really shows you what a labor of love it is as a book and it's awesome to see so maybe you know we talked about uh DNE draws data and data story data storytelling for kids but maybe let's shift a bit of focus and uh go back to data storytelling for adults which is where your work has been uh truly uh impactful in the space you know for those who might be new to the concept I'd love to learn you know what is Cole's theory of data storytelling like what are the foundational elements that every data Storyteller should have when when we're teaching this in a shorter form session so maybe this will be a good way to do it you know a half day or a full day workshop the concepts that we are generally teaching have to do with just a few foundational areas and it's none of it's rocket science but a lot of these Concepts that seem obvious after you say them aren't obvious until somebody says them to you uh so simple things like we shouldn't start by generating content by making slides or making graphs we should start by thinking about our audience understanding who are they what do they care about where do where do our needs overlap with theirs uh you know what's the tension in the situation for them and how can we use that to build upon when we think ahead to story so we spent a lot of time on the things that don't have a lot to do necessar neily with the data but more about communicating in general who's your audience what is your message how can you say that concisely so that you are so aware and clear on it that it becomes easier to then put together content that's going to support it uh I am a big fan of sticky notes uh small sticky notes for plotting out uh any sort of communication once you've done the analysis and you have something you're going to communicate to say okay who's your audience what's the message and now what pieces of content are going to support that uh and not inadvertently work against you right it's very much like the jagged Mountain that we talked about earlier where there's a big desire on you know if you've done the analysis or you've done some sort of in-depth study there's an understandable desire to want to take everything you've done and communicate that but that would be taking that Jagged Mountain that we talked about earlier and trying to get your audience to sit with you through every up and down that you faced and a lot of that's not going to matter to them at the end of the day it matters to you it was hard work it took time you needed to go through it probably to get to your result but for any audience it's going to be a subset of that or it might be higher level in some cases and so that's really where the storytelling comes in is understanding which pieces which ups and downs are going to be the ones that you need to communicate to your audience given what they need and who they are and uh what you want them to do and so we spent a lot of time just getting people to understand that and giving tools to plot that uh again lowtech paper pen Post-it kind of tools uh we also spend time on just the basics of graphs and the graphs that are used most commonly in a business setting and it's it's the few I mean it doesn't spand much beyond what we talked about with Daphne honestly it's bars and lines that you should probably be using most of the time so understanding when do you choose the different ones what are the pros and cons uh of each uh and then when it comes to visualizing data for purposes of communicating we spend time talking about decluttering and getting rid of the elements that don't need to be there and then focusing attention on what remains uh so that your audience can't help but see what you want them to see and the most powerful thing there is to use color sparingly so if you make everything gray and just put color where you want people to look first uh and then if you add words to that to tell them why you want them to look there then that becomes a graph that is effective that you can now weave into that overarching story that you've planned so I think it's part story it's part data and graphs it's part design and it's mostly just it all boils down to being thoughtful about how you're communicating to other people because I think too often we communicate with ourselves in mind and assume that other people are going to see what we see that other people have the same preferences as we do and so just a little bit of time thinking about the people on the receiving end of what you're going to communicate and then doing these things with them in mind just helps communication happen better everywhere so quite a few things to unpack there but one thing I want to focus on first is traing compiling visualizations but I couldn't agree more here on you know using colors bearingly making sure you focus the attention of the audience and something I often think about is that you know people's attention is uh becoming a rarer and rarer commodity as time goes on there's so much stimulus in today's world we're so connected I think you know uh an average workday you get so many notifications that it's easy to miss so many details and a lot of the graphs and tables that we see so maybe I'd love to if you can expand a bit more on the relationship between attention and how we perceive visualizations and then a bit go into a bit more depth of okay how do we actually create a data visualization that sticks and is compelling so when it comes to attention there've been different studies on this but ballpark wise you put something in front of someone you've got like on the order of three to eight seconds during which that person is going to decide whether they're going to continue to look at what you've put in front of them or turn their attention onto something else right move on to the next thing so if you've focused attention such that the first place people look is what you want them to see you're able to capitalize on that even if they don't spend more time and that's where the pairing of color and words or contrast and words becomes really powerful because if you think of a graph or a slide and you draw attention via contrast color again is the most powerful tool for that or one of the easiest to where you want them to look and then you title the slide or put an annotation right there that says why you want them to look there now you've given them some information and then when you talk about stickiness or if you're wanting to hold their attention longer then you have to make that information relevant to them why should they care uh so if you can think of anytime you show a graph you need to answer the question for your audience of so what what does this mean for me why should I care why should I spend more than a cursory glance at this and if you can do that if you can pique their interest by this thing that is you unusual and important for some reason then you can get them to stick with it and remember it and like actually read the details and certainly when you are there in person live with them there are ways that you can use yourself as the communicator and your voice and your body and you embed things into a story in different ways uh but when you're just relying on the thing that you create to do that then color and words and using those intentionally and thoughtfully are going to be the lowest hanging fruit and again coming back to audience what are they going to care about how do you how do you make them care about the thing you want them to care about and where do those things meet yeah there's an additional component here which is a narrative right being able to build a story and also present that story in front of a room of Executives colleagues Etc now putting here written reports on the side right so I think a big probably a big idea or a big uh Big Challenge data practitioners or analysts or data scientists have right is you know I'm not necessarily A A presenter on stage right I not I'm not like the most excellent at public speaking how do you get better at public speaking how do you get better at presenting Data Insights to a broad group of folks yeah it's a myth right there is no such thing there very few like naturally fantastic speakers most of the speakers you see who are good have put in an incredible amount of practice and I think for me the story that people tell themselves right I'm not I'm not a public speaker is the same as the story we talked about earlier I'm not a numbers person like no put those outside anybody can do both of these things and do them well uh I I am an introvert I my comfortable place is behind my computer in a room by myself right that's my happy place however I learned pretty early on that if I stayed there I wasn't going to be able to do the things that I wanted to do or impact the kind of change that I wanted to and for me personally it was just my I think early just passion around visualizing data and wanting to teach others how to do this that carried me through some probably really awful presentations uh because at least the passion was contagious and then over time was able to hone the speaking skills to catch up um but I think that is actually a really important thing is you need to find the thing that interests you about what you're talking about what you need to communicate because if you aren't interested if you don't sound interested and you need to find the Nugget of interesting thing to genuinely sound interested there is no way you can get other people interested uh so I think figuring out why it's interesting to you because then that in and of itself can be helpful in both I think propelling somebody who might have some nerves but then also in uh connecting with an audience practice is also really important and I am a big fan of practicing aloud and this this should be by yourself right because what you don't want and especially in a case where it's something important you don't want the important words coming out of your mouth to be for the first time when you're doing it for real like again if there are any nerves involved that's not going to be a good scenario for you or for anybody else in that room so uh huge proponent of practicing aloud and when I'm practicing aloud I tend to do it in and and I do this before any important thing that I'm going to do when I have a topic and I'm going to talk and I know what it's going to be ahead of time which is uh I practice aloud with my materials I practice allow without my materials uh and I feel like there's a third I'm missing it right now anyway those are the most important because practicing aloud with your materials and I think alloud is important because it forces you verbalize the transition between things versus if you're in your head flipping through graphs or slides it's easy to focus on what you're going to say in a given Place uh but not necessarily the connections and actually smooth transitions from one thing to the next can help an overall communication presentation or um something that you're delivering to others feel really polished uh without your materials can be useful because it forces you to forces your brain to do a lot of work forces you to remember what comes next as you're talking and without the cue of your slides or your graphs and if you can do it then it'll make it much easier you will be you'll have to use less of your brain when you are there in the moment which then leaves that open for some other things leaves you open to be able to observe the posture of people in the room which can give you cues on whether what you're saying is landing or not or how you might adjust uh so practicing aloud and and also practicing aloud you may find that you talk through things in a different way that actually works better and so can lead to uh improvements in your uh supporting materials as well and that really is the way to think about any communication you're going in with when you're the one presenting is you don't want slides or graphs to compete with you they should be a helpful assistant they they can remind you of the next thing that you want to say they shouldn't say the next thing you want to say uh and often a little bit of Animation uh in small ways right things appearing or disappearing or becoming transparent can be helpful guides for how you speak uh and then one more thing I'll say on this topic is just especially for anyone who's nervous going in and if it's something important I think I'm I'm never a fan of memorizing but I am a fan of committing certain things to memory so if in your opening you know there are these three key points you want to hit then practice that aloud in different ways right allow yourself to figure out what are those different Pathways I can use to connect the three things and get there verbally so that you have multiple different paths to draw on when you're there in the moment just means you won't be stuck searching for a word or trying to figure out how to get to the next thing because you've already committed that to memory and often it's just getting through that first like 30 seconds even that if that goes well then you are fine being in the moment and that the nerves subside and can help with the rest of it I've always felt that the scariest part of a presentation is the five minutes before the presentation then when it starts it just clicks and it you know even if it goes good or bad right like at least you're in the moment and then yeah you're in it and then it's like being on a roller coaster a lot of the uh and a lot of ways well if you can reframe right because the the nervous energy that I think most people have before or they do something important uh think of that as something that's going to fuel you you just need to harness it and not let it overtake you yeah do you find that there are activities that are like non-w work rated that can help in becoming a better speaker one thing that has helped me for example when I was a college student I took theater classes for example that really helped in like at least dispelling the nerves around being on stage in front of people right because I would do it I think three times a week almost that's fantastic and then you get used to not only do your nerves subside but then you get used to projecting your voice and moving your body and all of the or you become aware of how you're doing that and watching others perform you see what works and what doesn't and so yeah there's a lot of that that I think we we all can do even just watching other people or putting ourselves in positions that might feel a little uncomfortable but where it's productive discomfort you ask about what what other things non work I know so on the theater B Simon on my team uh always talks about the Improv as being really useful I I've never done any anything on stage before uh this but um I think one thing you can do is just talk to other people and use every opportunity to be observant in how that goes how that exchange is how do you sound what are you doing when people are leaning in and smiling and interested and this doesn't have to be anything about work this can be when you're talking to your friends or you know a family member and notice notice how you can take the best parts of that and tap into that when you're talking about work things as well and I think when it comes to work just uh talking with your work about about your work with colleagues can be a useful thing right you can see when people tune out and then use that to say all right what happened there did I go into more detail that they didn't care about was I being too monotone in my how I was doing things did I need something visual or something else there to break things up where you can take these cues and actually really use them to hone and uh roll into how you practice speaking maybe you know as we wrap up here it's dat AI literacy month tons of organizations are looking at you know watching this listening listening to this thinking about okay how do I integrate data storytelling into my organizational culture right you've advised a lot of organizations on how to approach this how do you build a strong culture of data storytelling within your team within your Workforce what are the first steps I think support for it uh certainly is one thing and and that can be uh Bottoms Up or or tops down where if you have if there's a leader at your organization who cares and who understands the value of you know not just throwing data on a slide but really taking time to weave that into a story U because it does it takes time it takes a different skill set than just turning out graphs so if you have a leader who values that um figure out how how that can spread right who might they influence uh and and how can you use that I think there also is a great Bottoms Up approach and honestly as I think back through my different roles working in different analytic capacities it was usually this or or some combination of the to which is pick things that are going to work well as data stories uh and that would be you know it's something where you you need somebody to take a specific action and you are going to recommend that and it may not even be specific it might be you need to discuss this thing or you need to weigh these options like some action that you need an audience to take at the end of it is is the scenario that generally lends itself best to this versus any sort of like purely for information s sort of communication uh and if you can take the time to do some of the things we've talked about right think about your audience get clear on your message plan your content in a low Tech way make sure your graphs make it clear via contrast and words where to look and what to see H what you find happen is when that works it just everybody sees it and then what you start to get is other people coming to you to say how did you do that or can you give me feedback on this or I saw that worked really well and don't get discouraged if it doesn't work beautifully the first time it's a skill that you've got to develop so you can use every time as learning and then decide what you might tweak or try differently the next time or try it in a lowrisk space right your weekly team update or something like that where you can say hey I just want to try something new today and get your reaction uh you know I'm going to spend five minutes and go through this in story structure and let me know what you think where you can you can bring your team into this as well uh and then I think in the right if if the culture is right you can develop excitement through that uh if the culture is wrong and these are skills that you really want to be using uh then you have to decide are there ways for you to do that successfully in your current environment or do you need a different environment not every organization or culture uh is ready for it I think and if you try to go too far beyond the norm that's not usually a recipe for success and then maybe as we close out Cole how do you see the data storytelling skills evolving over the next few years especially when you have a big elf in the room such as J of AI that can you know help out assist or maybe hurt a data stories so I'd love to kind of see how you uh at least learn how you see the the the evolving nature of the skill set as well as how it intersects with with the emerging tools here yeah I think for this I'll come back to Daphne and the ability to ask good questions because that becomes a really important skill as we think about doing things with AI and as we think about not just taking the first thing it spits out but really honing how it is you know quote unquote thinking and doing things of the ability to ask questions the ability to be skeptical and dig in uh and frame things so that you fully understand when using it what you're getting out of it and what that means and what assumptions are going in so that you can understand when it makes sense to do that and and when it might not so again if we can start teaching that ability sooner I think these skills will naturally evolve so that we can be using these new technologies in smart ways so teach your kids first and Daphne can teach everybody she's cute for all ages 100% I couldn't agree more everyone do get the book Daphne draws data it's an amazing children's book very very useful and I think this is a great place to end today's episode Cole thank you so much for coming on data friend thank you Adel this is funtoo often we communicate with ourselves in mind and assume that other people are going to see what we see other people have the same preferences as we do and so just a little bit of time thinking about the people on the receiving end of what you're going to communicate and then doing these things with them in mind just helps communication happen better everywhere coess bound it's great to have you on data framed hi Adele it's great to be here for those who are not aware of what you do you are a legend in the data storytelling space I mean definitely are and your books really popularized and mainstream the concept of data storytelling so maybe to set the stage uh well what inspired you to turn your attention to children's book with your new book DNE draws data what was the motivation behind it yeah one of the things that we often hear so I run a company called storytelling with data uh where we teach workshops to individuals and organizations uh about how to communicate effectively with data and one of the things that we often hear is oh I wish that I had learned these skills earlier and when you think back we don't really get exposed to data storytelling or communicating with graphs very much in school and so simultaneous with that I was watching my kids grow and start school and seeing the homework that they came home with and there there was this idea in my head ever since having kids I think which is they develop language at such a long young age and it's by repetition and being immersed and the their minds are like sponges when it comes to being able to read and write and you know carry on a conversation and it really seemed to me that we could be taking the visual language of numbers of graphs and teaching that a whole lot sooner because one core concept I think or core skill that any good analyst any good you know just person working in the business world has is the ability to ask good questions and then understand how to get answers to those questions and I think this applies for the analyst who's working with data day in day out but also you know for an executive who needs to know when to question and how and who to go to for different things and kids have this innate curiosity they ask questions about everything I actually I was in New York City with my family a couple weeks ago it was our last trip of Summer before school started back and I was walking with my daughter and my son was in front of me and and my other son and every two seconds one of them was asking me a question mommy how did this happen Mommy what's that mommy it over and over and over again which I think is fantastic I mean it can get a little annoying right but if we can teach them how to hone their natural inclination to ask questions right because it's their way of piecing in the puzzle of how does the world work and what's my place in the world that if we can teach them how to hone that and you know instead of incessantly asking questions you do keep asking questions but also think about which are the most interesting questions or what which ones could we collect information and answer ourselves or talk to other people as a means of testing assumptions we we can teach this all at such a young age and it would be so impactful when it comes to developing foundational skills that will serve kids as they grow in school and in basically any field uh which I think could be really empowering yeah that's wonderful and you know I read the book and I thought it was amazing and Dean is very curious uh dinosaur maybe can you share with us she's a dragon she's a dragon yeah that is that is true that is true stanie is a very curious Dragon maybe could you share with us a bit about the story and the characters what can you know readers expect what can parents expect uh their kids to take away from it so the the main book is a story a fully Illustrated picture book and and it focuses on Daphne she is a dragon with a unique talent in that she really loves to draw and the thing that she loves to draw more than anything else is data and so she gets uh in a bit of an argument with her brother about this who you know he tells her well that's not dragony enough and so she leaves her cave in search of a place where she can be herself and she goes on an adventure and she goes to some different places uh meets different creatures and in every case helps them solve a problem or a challenge that they're facing by collecting and then drawing data uh really pictoral forms of graphs where a child looking at it it's not probably even going to realize that they're looking at a graph uh and I won't ruin the ending but it's a happy one where Daphne finds her place and recognizes that her unique talent is actually what makes her really powerful and special and then to further learning the story is accompanied by a graph glossery at the end of the book that where there's a page devoted to each of the four main types of graphs that she draws in her adventures bar charts line graphs pie charts and Scatter Plots so each of those talks more about what is this when would you use it what sort of questions can you answer with it uh gives examples from Daphne's journey and then also has an activity for kids where they can collect data about themselves and use it to draw the given type of graph I love that and one of the things that I my favorite aspects about the book is that it really challenges some of the limiting beliefs that we you know as people we often internalize as children think about the idea I'm not a numbers person or I don't know math like that type these types of limiting beliefs tend to be developed quite early or if you're a math person astoundingly early and it can go either way I'm a math person I have a degree in math Applied Mathematics and it's been interesting for me to see the way that that influences my children so I have two boys and a girl they're right now 11 10 and eight and with my oldest he says you know mommy's great at math I get my great math skills from my mom uh which is awesome uh my little girl said to me one day recently I don't like math it's hard I was like where did that come from like the hard things are good because and one of the ways you learn in math is by making mistakes and understanding why it wasn't right or why it could be done differently it's a puzzle Math is fun and she's come around because actually I was overhearing her talk to someone else the other day and she said her one of her favorite subjects is math so they are so influenced by so many things at that age that all it takes is some portrayal of you know math being for nerds or being uncool or being hard and now you've just potentially turned this child off of a really powerful discipline because for me I think with math and yes I use math uh and and have in different uh parts of my career quite deeply but I think for me the bigger thing that math has taught me is just the ability to think logically and break down a problem that might be ambiguous into component pieces that I can attack systematically and put back together and those are skills that again will be helpful in any sort of role you think about you know kids growing up and you know the research they should be doing in in school and just the skepticism that they need to have uh towards the information that comes at them so these are are definitely things that we should be fostering and helping them hone and not doing things that are inadvertently going to shut down their curiosity or their interest I I couldn't agree more and I love especially your point on how math is not just you know the ability to do formulas or stuff like that it's meta skills that help you solve problems in life and maybe kind of related to these uh limiting beliefs uh right why do you think these limiting beliefs pop up in the first place and why do they still persist in today's day and age and maybe follow question here how intentional were you when writing the book to kind of focus on these limiting beliefs and tackled them yeah really great questions I I don't I don't know where it comes from I think but it's been pervasive for so long I think of you know even TV shows or movies that portray kids in in school in different ways of it's typically like the nerdy kid with glasses on who is like the smart one who does hard things like m and Science and that that persists it's just it's been that way or I think of even books children's books that my kids have and and some of them are books that I love right there's one for example that's called nerdy corn but again it's about it's and and the message is amazing which is it's a girl unicorn who loves science and sort of a similar like she gets made fun of by friends at school but then ends up being the one who saves the day but she's nerdy she's got glasses it it's just these little things she got fun she got made fun of by her friends F yeah exactly that yeah I think it's it's these little things that we maybe don't even realize culturally that are influencing kids at really young ages and for some reason especially girls and so you asked about how intentional was I going in and trying to I don't know counter some of these conceptions it honestly it wasn't super intentional going in I knew that I wanted to do something that my kid that would introduce my kids or kids like mine other kids to these Concepts uh I mean it made sense for Daphne to be a a girl Dragon because girls are cool and powerful and so I guess I guess from that sense that uh that maybe there was a little of that in there but that reading of it has come kind of since it all came together but I'm happy that it's there I love that as well and it's great how it organically came up and you know you mentioned a lot of the concepts in the book you know data storytelling can be a complex topic right depending on how you want to approach it so even for adults which makes me wonder like what do you think there's a right age to start introducing these Concepts if you're a parent I think there's a lot of parents in the audience I'd love to kind of think how how do you think about introducing these topics as a parents to your to your children I honestly think the early are the better once they've got language and a bit of logic I mean as soon as you're reading to them I think there can be pieces of this and yes data storytelling can be complex but it doesn't have to be and oftentimes it's it's not the data storytelling that's complex it's the you know the analytics that might be happening behind the scenes but that you don't need to you know we don't need to be teaching our four-year-old statistics but we can definitely be pointing out the structure of story I think of some of the things that I creatively tried to do with my kids to keep them entertained when we were uh learning at home when uh during the pandemic and you know I would draw from my work for that so I remember us getting books out and I had mine was haral in the Purple Crayon I love that book but we were talking about story structure in a simple way of you have a plot a Twist and an ending so this like really simple story mountain and so you can boil down any good book to that like any book that has a story any movie that or show that has a story to it you can also boil down pretty much every business problem or communication to this where you've got the context the so what and then the or the like the peak of the tension and then the resolution and so we do that we started off simple and then we thought well but there's actually a lot more going on in the story there's not just one up and down there are kind of all these ups and downs like I picture it like a jagged Mountain where you have this you know little tension introduced and resolved and introduced and resolved and then there's like the the peak the climax and tension and then you go down the mountain in the same stepwise fashion and so we did this with a few different books we read The Wizard of Oz and we had fun doing this because there's so many of things right on their Journey Down The Yellow Brick Road and trying to get to the wizard they encounter all of these different issues you know the flying monkeys or the poppy fields and in every case it gets resolved and it gets them closer to where they're going until you know the the the uh uh ruse is over and they realize that the wizard is not who he said he was and so so you get this Jagged mountain and part of the point of that is I think when you then well one you're teaching kids the structure of story and we did the same thing with Harold in the purple cray that was why that came up um but you're also teaching them how things can connect how they can connect in little ways how they can connect in big ways and you can draw parallels when it makes sense to stories and you know story at the jagged Mountain level versus story at the uh you know just up and down level you can relate that to different things that happen in their lives or different ways that they might interact with other people right if you're introducing yourself to someone do you give them your whole life story or do you boil it down to the sentence right that's similar to the every detail versus high level and fast forwarding to when they are in the working world that ability to bounce back and forth between full detail and high level or know which Peaks and valleys to include and which to not when you're talking to different people is a really important life skill yeah I couldn't agree more and then you mentioned here um you know uh reading down with sitting down with your kids you know looking over like structures of stories I'm sure you've shown uh that draws data to you know few kids here and there you know as you as you are releasing the book and testing the book how are they engaging with the material in ways that maybe you expected or surprised you yeah my kids so again I have three and they were my first test cases and they were heavily involved all along the way so they've grown to Love Daphne as much as I do but it has definitely been fun to see other kids uh so I went before the school year ended last year I read to each of my kids classes so they were then in fifth grade fourth grade and second grade and and I read to them in that order from old youngest and one of the things that was very interesting to me is in the fifth grade class the kids were already reserved they were clearly before they raised their hand to ask a question they were looking around the room they they were starting to care what other kids thought through how they interacted with me and so they there was this feeling where they they felt a little guarded and then the fourth grade CL they had great questions but they definitely were censoring themselves which I guess is is a good skill to develop um the fourth grade class was less uh less censored I would say and there were more questions and and some more maybe offthe wall questions but then the with the second grade class it was just pure joy it that just question after question after I mean they asked me probably a hundred questions in the time that we and it just they wanted to know everything they're so curious and so I guess one of the great things is well and so I left that going wow I could read to second grade classes all day long that was is the best thing ever um but I guess part of what what I see now actually just reflecting on it here with you is there is that natural censoring happening as kids are getting older uh which is a good skill to develop but I'm I'm not sure we're teaching them how to do that in the right ways because there were some really interesting questions that came up that were maybe off the- wall with the younger kids that I think the older kids wouldn't have asked that may end up being more interesting or have greater impact in how they do things so I think one thing that's been interesting for me just again seeing my own kids come home with homework or what they're working on in school is they they're not encountering many graphs but when they do when they're either looking at graphs or making graphs they're really boring they are they're text bookie they are describing things that either aren't interesting right how many blocks are yeah who who cares how many blocks there are they're not your blocks uh and half the time they're black and white so they're not even colorful or anything or you know it's something mundane like the weather something they already experienced and I think if we could teach kids the power of good questions that we can answer with data they could actually learn new things about themselves or about how they spend their time or the impact that doing different things has on their mood or their sleep and learn things that would Empower them to say yeah that's good I want to keep doing that or oh actually now that I understand that I want to make changes and that's what the activities in the book are really driven to do is for kids to collect something about themselves that will at the end of it be actionable right what are you eating is it colorful are you getting a variety of different nutrients or how is your uh sleep compared to or your mood compared to how much sleep you got these things that are more personal and interesting and actionable yeah I love the takeaways at the end because you know they do make the the activity of you know thinking about the question and coming up with the data and drawing it very fun as well and you know maybe you mentioned here going to read the book for kids of different ages you know as an author who usually writes long form non-fiction for adults how was it adapting a lot of what you've been you know thinking about writing about for years now to such a different audience how do you decide when is too much information to add how do you decide how long the book should be like I'd love to kind of see the mindset shift that happened here when re creating a children's book versus you know a data storytelling for business users or data practitioners type of book very different so with the adult books I was basically able to say everything I wanted to say right the the L latest one storytelling with you is like 880,000 Words uh which is a lot uh and you would think that that's harder than writing a children's book but after going through the children's book process I don't know if that's the case uh and so I think initially I I didn't do my research I just needed to write and I ended up writing something that was about 5,000 Words which is way too long for a picture book that's more like early chapter book length uh and so but there were some things that I learned through that because that was that was where the dragons came into the picture U because in that longer form story uh which also took like an hour to read out loud which most parents are not going to want to uh spend that time in a single sitting uh I will say from experience they it was children were the main characters but then they they had gone to a world of dragons and they were solving like population Dynamic sort of issue so it was way too complicated for what I wanted to do and but there were nuggets of that I needed to get it out and then there were nuggets of it like the dragons that uh came forward into Daphne and then I stepped back and did my research and learned that a traditional children's picture book is exactly 32 Pages that's because of how the paper runs through the printing press and gets folded into signatures uh it is less than a thousand words uh ideally a lot less than a thousand words but you definitely want to max out at something like that and it's different in that you you don't have to say everything because the pictures do a lot of the communication of the story so it's really important how the pictures and the words work together which makes sense all these things seem very obvious once you know them you know them it's like oh yeah and then something else that I learned along the way and actually this I didn't come to on my own this was a feedback that I got from One reviewer and I will be forever ever grateful because I wrote the the original manuscript for Daphne was written first person present tense because that's how I've always written right my business books it's me it's the voice is me I am writing to you so you're reading we're kind of having a conversation as we go through the books makes total sense in that uh for that purpose it doesn't make sense for a kids book though because when you think of how kids books are read either the child is reading it or a teacher or parent is and so then if I am reading as I am Daphne that like it just or versus the Nar like it gets very confusing very quickly and that would not have even occurred to me and also the present tense piece and so it was that was the a big Aha and and again the feedback that I will be forever grateful for that uh changed it from first person present tense to third person past tense and so now it's the you know the the the um reader is the the narrator recounting the story of what happened to Daphne and her friends which yeah is again is obvious now and it would have been a totally different book uh had that not happened indeed and you you talked about kind of the power of the visuals in the children's book to kind of convey the message maybe what was it like as well you know you've definitely had a lot of visuals in your previous book but books but they tend to be you know visualizations and uh and data data visuals in a lot of way a lot of ways so maybe um yeah walk me through kind of the process here of also looking at illustrations like think about like how do you tweak and illustrations I'd love to kind of learn learn that person from you yeah so in the original manuscript I I drew some things so I drew I we had a version of Daphne that I had drawn uh I I had fun with the kids they got involved as well uh there are some scenes with aliens and so at one point we had a big roll of butcher paper out and they were drawing aliens and spacecraft and so then I I redrew some I picked some out of those and redrew those and then I drew all of the graphs because I needed to make sure that those worked and that they made sense and that they were easy to interpret uh and the there was the underwater scene in particular went through a lot of iterations or the the scenario there uh to get to where it ended up um I think probably because that's the scatter plot which is arguably the uh most complicated of the graphs that Daphne draws um but I think we landed in in a good place there um so I drew everything and then I I'll tell you a little story so there's a presentation that I've given I think the first time I did it was at the tapestry conference in like I don't even know what year it was a long time ago um but that I'd done in several Keynotes where it's a story about my son Dorian and it was when he was two okay this tells you how old he is cuz he's uh 10 now so eight years ago so he's two and he's got this book I've got this picture of him reading uh and the book He's reading is called Larry gets lost in Seattle it's by John skws he's written a whole series about a little boy Pete and his dog Larry and so I tell the story of Larry getting lost in Seattle I use some of the illustrations from John's book and i' reached out to him when I wanted to do this to make sure he was okay with it get his permission and so I used it in giving Keynotes several times and then I reached out again when I was writing the yellow book storytelling with you because I wanted to draw on some of the um presentations and and show again some of these images and how they influen the style of the presentation uh it was in the slide design part and so he says yes great and then I reached out to him a couple years ago to say I've been thinking about writing a children's book uh you know if I do this is this anything you'd be interested in partnering on and at that point in time he said ah you know I know I just started a new thing no time right now and turns out I wasn't ready to do it yet because that was when I you know started writing and went in all these weird directions and then I'd shove it for a while and write it another book instead uh but then when I came back to it in Ernst and had the manuscript I reached out to John again and said hey what about timing now it's been a couple years and he said yeah you hit me at the perfect time I'd love to do it and so I gave him my manuscript which again it had Daphne it had some characters it had all the graphs and the first thing so and John had he's an amazing illustrator and has a lot of experience like he worked for Hannah Barbara and uh and and right has a lot of experience uh doing character design so the first thing that he did was design Daphne and uh I remember my husband saying this as I was waiting to see the initial like oh what's she going to look like and my husband Randy said to me what if John comes back with something that's totally different from your Daphne I was like well that's not going to happen and he's just going to take my Daphne and make her better and so then I uh almost couldn't even uh show Randy when I got the email that had the the were two versions of Daphne uh because they were both completely different from my Daphne one was like petite and purple and the other one was big and green and uh I was just kind of like huh but then John and I got together and we talked through the three Daphne now and talked about what fit for the character and what didn't and out of that conversation the ultimate death uh emerged and she's perfect uh we I mean she makes me smile every time I see her and we're doing really fun things like I've got one here of like making stuffed animal Daphne and that and so so Daphne came about and then John took my manuscript and the rest for me was like magic because he he went through and the first thing he did was roughs and so they were just no color black and white sketches and he does all of it on his iPad and so sketches of all of the scenes he's the one who he laid out the book in terms of which parts of the story would be on which page um which is an interesting way to do it I when he does his own books those pieces happen together which makes a lot of sense and I think were I to write uh if I write another children's book I would be I would have that going in as well of of what's going to fit on each page uh and the initial thing he came back with I made very few comments H and then once he added color uh I printed everything and I had it all laid out on my floor and there one of the things that I love is there are so many thoughtful details when you get the book you'll see just there's a lot of different paper textural like graph paper or lined paper uh just embedded in either backgrounds or elements of things like tree uh which is a really fun touch but there's also this neat progression of color where you get Daphne leaving the cave and it's in one uh color and then you know it's very Green in the jungle uh and very purple in space but actually in space with the pages laid out and this is something I never would have even seen I don't think had we just been you know had I just been flipping through the pages but seeing them laid out on the floor and you see the progression of color really clearly there was one space that just didn't have enough purple and so it became more purple so there there was a lot of back and forth of just everything we tested out because I also worked with a designer then so John did the illustrations I wrote the words and then all of that needed to be put together which you would think oh that seems simple no there's a big art to that as well because you have to you have to pick fonts and size and placement and and you know designing the jacket or the cover and so there's a lot that goes into it so uh Matt was my designer and he's worked with me on every book since the the blue one let's practice uh out of California flight design and he's fantastic and so he did the layout and we we everything was pretty straightforward until we got to the glossery uh because the glossery initially was like a lot of words and one picture I was like that's not going to work it needs to be really fun and easy to navigate and hopefully draw kids in and a block attack isn't going to do that and so we did a lot of iterating to come up with the design there yeah it really shows you what a labor of love it is as a book and it's awesome to see so maybe you know we talked about uh DNE draws data and data story data storytelling for kids but maybe let's shift a bit of focus and uh go back to data storytelling for adults which is where your work has been uh truly uh impactful in the space you know for those who might be new to the concept I'd love to learn you know what is Cole's theory of data storytelling like what are the foundational elements that every data Storyteller should have when when we're teaching this in a shorter form session so maybe this will be a good way to do it you know a half day or a full day workshop the concepts that we are generally teaching have to do with just a few foundational areas and it's none of it's rocket science but a lot of these Concepts that seem obvious after you say them aren't obvious until somebody says them to you uh so simple things like we shouldn't start by generating content by making slides or making graphs we should start by thinking about our audience understanding who are they what do they care about where do where do our needs overlap with theirs uh you know what's the tension in the situation for them and how can we use that to build upon when we think ahead to story so we spent a lot of time on the things that don't have a lot to do necessar neily with the data but more about communicating in general who's your audience what is your message how can you say that concisely so that you are so aware and clear on it that it becomes easier to then put together content that's going to support it uh I am a big fan of sticky notes uh small sticky notes for plotting out uh any sort of communication once you've done the analysis and you have something you're going to communicate to say okay who's your audience what's the message and now what pieces of content are going to support that uh and not inadvertently work against you right it's very much like the jagged Mountain that we talked about earlier where there's a big desire on you know if you've done the analysis or you've done some sort of in-depth study there's an understandable desire to want to take everything you've done and communicate that but that would be taking that Jagged Mountain that we talked about earlier and trying to get your audience to sit with you through every up and down that you faced and a lot of that's not going to matter to them at the end of the day it matters to you it was hard work it took time you needed to go through it probably to get to your result but for any audience it's going to be a subset of that or it might be higher level in some cases and so that's really where the storytelling comes in is understanding which pieces which ups and downs are going to be the ones that you need to communicate to your audience given what they need and who they are and uh what you want them to do and so we spent a lot of time just getting people to understand that and giving tools to plot that uh again lowtech paper pen Post-it kind of tools uh we also spend time on just the basics of graphs and the graphs that are used most commonly in a business setting and it's it's the few I mean it doesn't spand much beyond what we talked about with Daphne honestly it's bars and lines that you should probably be using most of the time so understanding when do you choose the different ones what are the pros and cons uh of each uh and then when it comes to visualizing data for purposes of communicating we spend time talking about decluttering and getting rid of the elements that don't need to be there and then focusing attention on what remains uh so that your audience can't help but see what you want them to see and the most powerful thing there is to use color sparingly so if you make everything gray and just put color where you want people to look first uh and then if you add words to that to tell them why you want them to look there then that becomes a graph that is effective that you can now weave into that overarching story that you've planned so I think it's part story it's part data and graphs it's part design and it's mostly just it all boils down to being thoughtful about how you're communicating to other people because I think too often we communicate with ourselves in mind and assume that other people are going to see what we see that other people have the same preferences as we do and so just a little bit of time thinking about the people on the receiving end of what you're going to communicate and then doing these things with them in mind just helps communication happen better everywhere so quite a few things to unpack there but one thing I want to focus on first is traing compiling visualizations but I couldn't agree more here on you know using colors bearingly making sure you focus the attention of the audience and something I often think about is that you know people's attention is uh becoming a rarer and rarer commodity as time goes on there's so much stimulus in today's world we're so connected I think you know uh an average workday you get so many notifications that it's easy to miss so many details and a lot of the graphs and tables that we see so maybe I'd love to if you can expand a bit more on the relationship between attention and how we perceive visualizations and then a bit go into a bit more depth of okay how do we actually create a data visualization that sticks and is compelling so when it comes to attention there've been different studies on this but ballpark wise you put something in front of someone you've got like on the order of three to eight seconds during which that person is going to decide whether they're going to continue to look at what you've put in front of them or turn their attention onto something else right move on to the next thing so if you've focused attention such that the first place people look is what you want them to see you're able to capitalize on that even if they don't spend more time and that's where the pairing of color and words or contrast and words becomes really powerful because if you think of a graph or a slide and you draw attention via contrast color again is the most powerful tool for that or one of the easiest to where you want them to look and then you title the slide or put an annotation right there that says why you want them to look there now you've given them some information and then when you talk about stickiness or if you're wanting to hold their attention longer then you have to make that information relevant to them why should they care uh so if you can think of anytime you show a graph you need to answer the question for your audience of so what what does this mean for me why should I care why should I spend more than a cursory glance at this and if you can do that if you can pique their interest by this thing that is you unusual and important for some reason then you can get them to stick with it and remember it and like actually read the details and certainly when you are there in person live with them there are ways that you can use yourself as the communicator and your voice and your body and you embed things into a story in different ways uh but when you're just relying on the thing that you create to do that then color and words and using those intentionally and thoughtfully are going to be the lowest hanging fruit and again coming back to audience what are they going to care about how do you how do you make them care about the thing you want them to care about and where do those things meet yeah there's an additional component here which is a narrative right being able to build a story and also present that story in front of a room of Executives colleagues Etc now putting here written reports on the side right so I think a big probably a big idea or a big uh Big Challenge data practitioners or analysts or data scientists have right is you know I'm not necessarily A A presenter on stage right I not I'm not like the most excellent at public speaking how do you get better at public speaking how do you get better at presenting Data Insights to a broad group of folks yeah it's a myth right there is no such thing there very few like naturally fantastic speakers most of the speakers you see who are good have put in an incredible amount of practice and I think for me the story that people tell themselves right I'm not I'm not a public speaker is the same as the story we talked about earlier I'm not a numbers person like no put those outside anybody can do both of these things and do them well uh I I am an introvert I my comfortable place is behind my computer in a room by myself right that's my happy place however I learned pretty early on that if I stayed there I wasn't going to be able to do the things that I wanted to do or impact the kind of change that I wanted to and for me personally it was just my I think early just passion around visualizing data and wanting to teach others how to do this that carried me through some probably really awful presentations uh because at least the passion was contagious and then over time was able to hone the speaking skills to catch up um but I think that is actually a really important thing is you need to find the thing that interests you about what you're talking about what you need to communicate because if you aren't interested if you don't sound interested and you need to find the Nugget of interesting thing to genuinely sound interested there is no way you can get other people interested uh so I think figuring out why it's interesting to you because then that in and of itself can be helpful in both I think propelling somebody who might have some nerves but then also in uh connecting with an audience practice is also really important and I am a big fan of practicing aloud and this this should be by yourself right because what you don't want and especially in a case where it's something important you don't want the important words coming out of your mouth to be for the first time when you're doing it for real like again if there are any nerves involved that's not going to be a good scenario for you or for anybody else in that room so uh huge proponent of practicing aloud and when I'm practicing aloud I tend to do it in and and I do this before any important thing that I'm going to do when I have a topic and I'm going to talk and I know what it's going to be ahead of time which is uh I practice aloud with my materials I practice allow without my materials uh and I feel like there's a third I'm missing it right now anyway those are the most important because practicing aloud with your materials and I think alloud is important because it forces you verbalize the transition between things versus if you're in your head flipping through graphs or slides it's easy to focus on what you're going to say in a given Place uh but not necessarily the connections and actually smooth transitions from one thing to the next can help an overall communication presentation or um something that you're delivering to others feel really polished uh without your materials can be useful because it forces you to forces your brain to do a lot of work forces you to remember what comes next as you're talking and without the cue of your slides or your graphs and if you can do it then it'll make it much easier you will be you'll have to use less of your brain when you are there in the moment which then leaves that open for some other things leaves you open to be able to observe the posture of people in the room which can give you cues on whether what you're saying is landing or not or how you might adjust uh so practicing aloud and and also practicing aloud you may find that you talk through things in a different way that actually works better and so can lead to uh improvements in your uh supporting materials as well and that really is the way to think about any communication you're going in with when you're the one presenting is you don't want slides or graphs to compete with you they should be a helpful assistant they they can remind you of the next thing that you want to say they shouldn't say the next thing you want to say uh and often a little bit of Animation uh in small ways right things appearing or disappearing or becoming transparent can be helpful guides for how you speak uh and then one more thing I'll say on this topic is just especially for anyone who's nervous going in and if it's something important I think I'm I'm never a fan of memorizing but I am a fan of committing certain things to memory so if in your opening you know there are these three key points you want to hit then practice that aloud in different ways right allow yourself to figure out what are those different Pathways I can use to connect the three things and get there verbally so that you have multiple different paths to draw on when you're there in the moment just means you won't be stuck searching for a word or trying to figure out how to get to the next thing because you've already committed that to memory and often it's just getting through that first like 30 seconds even that if that goes well then you are fine being in the moment and that the nerves subside and can help with the rest of it I've always felt that the scariest part of a presentation is the five minutes before the presentation then when it starts it just clicks and it you know even if it goes good or bad right like at least you're in the moment and then yeah you're in it and then it's like being on a roller coaster a lot of the uh and a lot of ways well if you can reframe right because the the nervous energy that I think most people have before or they do something important uh think of that as something that's going to fuel you you just need to harness it and not let it overtake you yeah do you find that there are activities that are like non-w work rated that can help in becoming a better speaker one thing that has helped me for example when I was a college student I took theater classes for example that really helped in like at least dispelling the nerves around being on stage in front of people right because I would do it I think three times a week almost that's fantastic and then you get used to not only do your nerves subside but then you get used to projecting your voice and moving your body and all of the or you become aware of how you're doing that and watching others perform you see what works and what doesn't and so yeah there's a lot of that that I think we we all can do even just watching other people or putting ourselves in positions that might feel a little uncomfortable but where it's productive discomfort you ask about what what other things non work I know so on the theater B Simon on my team uh always talks about the Improv as being really useful I I've never done any anything on stage before uh this but um I think one thing you can do is just talk to other people and use every opportunity to be observant in how that goes how that exchange is how do you sound what are you doing when people are leaning in and smiling and interested and this doesn't have to be anything about work this can be when you're talking to your friends or you know a family member and notice notice how you can take the best parts of that and tap into that when you're talking about work things as well and I think when it comes to work just uh talking with your work about about your work with colleagues can be a useful thing right you can see when people tune out and then use that to say all right what happened there did I go into more detail that they didn't care about was I being too monotone in my how I was doing things did I need something visual or something else there to break things up where you can take these cues and actually really use them to hone and uh roll into how you practice speaking maybe you know as we wrap up here it's dat AI literacy month tons of organizations are looking at you know watching this listening listening to this thinking about okay how do I integrate data storytelling into my organizational culture right you've advised a lot of organizations on how to approach this how do you build a strong culture of data storytelling within your team within your Workforce what are the first steps I think support for it uh certainly is one thing and and that can be uh Bottoms Up or or tops down where if you have if there's a leader at your organization who cares and who understands the value of you know not just throwing data on a slide but really taking time to weave that into a story U because it does it takes time it takes a different skill set than just turning out graphs so if you have a leader who values that um figure out how how that can spread right who might they influence uh and and how can you use that I think there also is a great Bottoms Up approach and honestly as I think back through my different roles working in different analytic capacities it was usually this or or some combination of the to which is pick things that are going to work well as data stories uh and that would be you know it's something where you you need somebody to take a specific action and you are going to recommend that and it may not even be specific it might be you need to discuss this thing or you need to weigh these options like some action that you need an audience to take at the end of it is is the scenario that generally lends itself best to this versus any sort of like purely for information s sort of communication uh and if you can take the time to do some of the things we've talked about right think about your audience get clear on your message plan your content in a low Tech way make sure your graphs make it clear via contrast and words where to look and what to see H what you find happen is when that works it just everybody sees it and then what you start to get is other people coming to you to say how did you do that or can you give me feedback on this or I saw that worked really well and don't get discouraged if it doesn't work beautifully the first time it's a skill that you've got to develop so you can use every time as learning and then decide what you might tweak or try differently the next time or try it in a lowrisk space right your weekly team update or something like that where you can say hey I just want to try something new today and get your reaction uh you know I'm going to spend five minutes and go through this in story structure and let me know what you think where you can you can bring your team into this as well uh and then I think in the right if if the culture is right you can develop excitement through that uh if the culture is wrong and these are skills that you really want to be using uh then you have to decide are there ways for you to do that successfully in your current environment or do you need a different environment not every organization or culture uh is ready for it I think and if you try to go too far beyond the norm that's not usually a recipe for success and then maybe as we close out Cole how do you see the data storytelling skills evolving over the next few years especially when you have a big elf in the room such as J of AI that can you know help out assist or maybe hurt a data stories so I'd love to kind of see how you uh at least learn how you see the the the evolving nature of the skill set as well as how it intersects with with the emerging tools here yeah I think for this I'll come back to Daphne and the ability to ask good questions because that becomes a really important skill as we think about doing things with AI and as we think about not just taking the first thing it spits out but really honing how it is you know quote unquote thinking and doing things of the ability to ask questions the ability to be skeptical and dig in uh and frame things so that you fully understand when using it what you're getting out of it and what that means and what assumptions are going in so that you can understand when it makes sense to do that and and when it might not so again if we can start teaching that ability sooner I think these skills will naturally evolve so that we can be using these new technologies in smart ways so teach your kids first and Daphne can teach everybody she's cute for all ages 100% I couldn't agree more everyone do get the book Daphne draws data it's an amazing children's book very very useful and I think this is a great place to end today's episode Cole thank you so much for coming on data friend thank you Adel this is fun\n"