Effective Data Storytelling

Foreword

Today, data has become one of the most valuable business assets. The companies that are best able to turn their data into insights, and their insights into knowledge, will outsmart and outperform their competition. In this data-driven world, storytelling is a vital enabler that will help organizations succeed.

We now live in a world with more data than ever before. Our data volumes are measured in zettabytes, which is an unimaginably vast quantity. One zettabyte is a number with 21 zeros at the end and contains one billion terabytes (one terabyte being the capacity of a state-of-the-art home computer). It is predicted that by 2025, we will have more than 175 zettabytes of data in the world, an exponential growth from the around 10 zettabytes we have in the world today. But all of that data is worthless unless businesses are able to gain insights from the data that allows them to act, make better decisions, and initiate change.

In order to make the most of the unprecedented opportunities presented by data, businesses and the individuals within them need the right skills—they need to be data literate. From my work helping companies all over the globe make better use of data, I know that the ability to tell a story from data is a core pillar of data literacy.

Storytelling has been ingrained in the human way of life for hundreds of thousands of years. Throughout history, humans have used stories as an essential tool to capture people’s attention, engage them, ignite their ...