Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:00.32)
If you're business owner struggling to get your team to act on the data you're providing, then our guest, Mike Cisneros is going to give you a simple win you can implement today. Mike Cisneros is an award winning data storyteller and visualization specialist who teaches organizations and individuals how to communicate more effectively with their data. He is the co-author of the bestselling book, Storytelling with Data Before and After.
practical makeovers for powerful data stories. Mike, a big welcome to the show. So excited to have you here.
Mike Cisneros (00:35.723)
Thanks Adam, it's a pleasure to be here.
Adam O'Leary (00:37.782)
Absolutely. And you said that the best analyst is worst worthless if no one understands this. So what's the biggest mistake business owners make when presenting data and how can they move from being a data analysis cog to a strategic partner?
Mike Cisneros (00:55.435)
Yeah, this is something that I think a lot of people who have been analysts in larger shops have experienced, because a lot of places have that analysis shop where they have a need, they sort of throw it over the transom to somebody else, and then it gets thrown back. And in those organizations, that's where you start to feel like you're a cog and you're not really involved in the process. But the way that they get out of it in those organizations is that the analysts tend to ask questions, not to critique the requests, not to red team it.
or challenge whatever the person is asking for, but just to gain a deeper understanding of what the request actually is. What's the problem we're trying to solve? What are we here to help you achieve? It shows that in doing so, it shows that they're focused on the same things as the requester, that they're not just looking at data for data's sake, or they don't see this as a discrete dashboard building task or a data cleaning puzzle or whatever.
Data is always going to be the raw material and the analysis is always the discovery, but we all need to show to one another that we understand that this is all in service of solving a problem, which will then hopefully drive action, help make people's lives better. And that understanding that building bridges between the two organizations is a way to stop feeling like a cog in the machine. So for business owners who are looking for partnerships or for looking for clients, you take this similar approach and you think, well, what
problems am I solving for this potential client or for this potential partner? How can I make their lives easier? Now, it's kind of natural that if we build something, if we are the entrepreneur, we build something, a product, a company, we identify it, we are going to think it's great. And we are very proud of it. And we want people to understand how valuable it is and how valuable it can be. But your audience doesn't care. They are not.
that invested in it. You need to demonstrate as the owner or as the person who's representing this company that you have to understand that you've done that legwork so that you understand what they need. You understand their client's situation and in doing so you express an interest in them because look, everybody's favorite topic is themselves. The business equivalent of this is get the client talking about their company. Show that you want them to talk about their company, their market, their product.
Mike Cisneros (03:20.798)
And when you ask those kind of thoughtful questions, you demonstrate interest, then you tie your capabilities into that. So your client isn't receiving it as like, here's another sales pitch, but rather in, I was just talking about this problem. I was thinking about this problem I had. Here's somebody with a potential solution sitting right here in front of them.
Adam O'Leary (03:39.86)
fantastic. And I know many people get caught in the trap of creating a data visualization that makes sense to them, kind of like what you're talking about here, but not to the audience, especially if they're talking to a client or a potential partner of some sort. So what would you say is a simple win that a business owner could implement right now that could make their charts or graphs easier to understand and more impactful for the person that's on the other side?
Mike Cisneros (04:08.338)
Yeah, it's funny. I'm kind of laughing because we've built my colleagues and I have built entire workshops and courses and books and you name it on this very topic. But I can tell you there's one thing, I guess really two things that are going to have the biggest impact on what you mentioned on comprehension and on driving impact. And that is use less color and use more words. Color is a really powerful tool for focusing attention. And a lot of times in our visuals,
We use too much color. use it for decoration. We use it just because it's in our logo. We use it to differentiate amongst different data series. But when you fade out most of the color and you use it instead to focus people's attention on, here's the one thing we want you to notice, or here's the main idea I want you to remember, it drives attention no matter what else is on the graph or what else is in your slide so that people will see, here's this one thing I'm supposed to see right away.
and words in combination with that is how you make your message clear. It is really hard to tell a story. It's really hard to communicate an insight or make something that is going to get someone's attention without having the words around it. Otherwise, it's a puzzle and you're not trying to make people work hard to understand what you're saying. Use words to put your insight or your ask explicitly on the page.
Put it right next to the slide. Say what you want them to see in the slide and then show it in that slide or in the graph. Use the same color in your text as you use in your graph so that people can tie those two things together and say, these words say I should be looking for an increase in Q4. Oh, here I can find that color. Here's it showing the increase in Q4. Got it. This makes perfect sense to me. You can use either one of these. These are gonna be big changes, like the big bang for your buck.
if you start to use color and words differently, but when you use them together, that is a dramatic difference.
Adam O'Leary (06:08.13)
This is super funny. I'm actually so glad I had you on because I just made a chart for one of my pitches that I have and there's multiple colors on it. And I just immediately just visualized myself just changing everything to black and then just adding one of the bars is green and being like, this is you. It's such a good idea.
Mike Cisneros (06:26.014)
Well, and here's here's another aspect. If you're going to be pitching somebody, whether it's live or whether it's virtually, you can use step by step and use the same graph and you show one color to make one point and then you show another color to make another point and you just fade out the graph so that everything else is gray. But then there's that one color so you can talk to it. You can keep your presentation more dynamic, especially if it's virtual, because people have no patience for things staying static for long periods of time virtually.
Keeping that movement, that dynamism to your presentation allows not only to maintain attention, but make sure that your audience is looking at and thinking of the point you are making at that time, if every step of the way.
Adam O'Leary (07:09.09)
And I know you used a powerful example before of how the same data set can tell different stories based on how it's presented. So for a business owner looking to turn their numbers into a compelling story, what's the first thing that they should be doing?
Mike Cisneros (07:24.304)
Yeah, I think when you talk about turning the data into a story, because it's natural whenever you analyze data that you're going to find a bunch of stuff. And I usually think of it in three categories of the obvious outliers and then trivia and then insights. mean, everybody's going to see the outliers. So whatever, that's not really news. Trivia is stuff that you find you're like, interesting, but there's no value to it.
And then there's the insights, which are the things that you're going to want to talk to somebody about because you think this has business potential or it's something we need to address. So when you go into your analysis, you don't know what of these things you're going to find and in what proportions. So you don't have a story in mind, but the investigation that you do into the data will tell you elements that could then coalesce into a story or into a number of stories. So you've done your analysis and you can think, I found all this stuff.
There's probably a number of different audiences, a number of different stories I want to tell. Which one do you think is important to tell right now and to whom? And then once you know that, that's when I would suggest starting in the lowest tech manner you possibly can to organize your thoughts. So whiteboard, sticky notes. I know there are apps for all these things, but I also say you feel more connected to your ideas when you're writing them down.
And when you can physically reorganize, at least I do, I'm 52. I like old school things. like keeping things analog and tactile, especially early on, but that way you don't form any attachment to the things that you've created in your slide board or whatever. So write down all of your insights, write down the trivia if you want to, write down any context that you think would be important to include in a story like this, and then rearrange them, erase them, or recycle them, add to them.
Do whatever it is that you need to do to start putting these things together in something that feels like a story. And I don't really have to explain to you, Adam, or really anybody listening what a story looks and feels like because you have all told stories before, like to a neighbor. Like think about being at a cookout and you're talking about like, I don't know, like some boneheaded thing that you did when you were a kid, like you and your cousins went and did something crazy.
Mike Cisneros (09:35.883)
You know how to tell a story. Like if you're telling somebody about this, you know how to establish the scene. You talk about the people involved. You reveal the details that were important, that they're gonna matter, but not too many details, because you don't want people to get bored. You don't want them to get lost in the weeds. You know how to keep talking through the story. You're building tension because you can see how your audience is like leaning in and starting to enjoy it or getting nervous for you, even though you're standing right there. So they know you already made it through this story.
And then you know how not to spoil the big reveal at the end so that it's this big climactic moment. Just take that knowledge of how to tell a story and think about, well, in business, how am I going to organize my thoughts? How would I organize my sticky notes to have that, to start with, you know, establishing that context, revealing the details of the things I found in my analysis along the way. And maybe you're building tension for your audience because they don't know where you're going with this, but it feels like new information to them.
And then you have a big reveal. This is the big conclusion. That's a coherent and compelling narrative that you can build no matter what you found in your data, as long as you there's something that you know you need to tell to somebody specific.
Adam O'Leary (10:45.518)
I love how you just compared it to talking about when you're telling a story of your childhood and then how not to like spoil the big reveal at the end. thought that was fascinating and it kind of leads me in and it makes me think, what would you say would be the biggest secret to getting people to act on your data?
Mike Cisneros (10:50.059)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Cisneros (11:02.838)
Couple of things here, I would say you wanna keep your message simple. You should be able to say the main point of your presentation or your message in essentially one sentence. Because imagine somebody comes up after that presentation and ask the person you were talking to like, hey, what was that meeting just about? They should be able to say in one sentence what it was about and it should be basically what you wanted them to remember about what you just said. So keeping that message simple and then keeping the presentation focused on your audience.
We tend to report data in a way that feels comfortable to us, the analysts, like, here's the problem I faced, or here's the problem we faced. Here's what we looked at. Here's what we found. But that doesn't consider our audience's needs or fears or desires or situation at all. So naturally they're not going to engage because the presentation for whatever reason doesn't feel like it's about them. So much of what is going to drive decisions
doesn't live in a database. It's what political pressures somebody is under, you know, or it's what their budget is. It's what their goals are for the quarter. It's as dumb as, this person doesn't like when slides have transitions in them. So if they see that, like they just tune out and they don't listen. Thinking about all of these aspects of your audience, what they need, what they care about, what they like, what they don't like, and then building a presentation that's going to work with what they need or what they react to.
explicitly recommending a next step at the end of it, this is how you're going to drive people to take action, to make it less about information and more about where do we go now.
Adam O'Leary (12:43.182)
I like how you were talking about when you said, don't say here's what we found. What would you actually recommend for a business owner to say instead of that, where it sounds more about the clients or the prospect on the other side?
Mike Cisneros (12:57.398)
Well, it's framing it in the sense of, we understand that this is the challenge that you have been facing. We investigated to make sure that this was actually the case. Here's some of the things that the investigation turns out. I you can say that we found X, Y, and Z as long as it is presented in a way that considers who your audience is and what it is that they are going to care about.
It's more about how you might structure the presentation rather than the way you would verbalize what your findings are. But when you discuss what you found, there's a silent missing part at the end of it, which is, well, you found that, but so what? So what do we do about this? Is this an opportunity we can take advantage of? Is this a challenge we have to overcome? Was this expected? It's taking the data, which itself isn't the star.
Even the analysis itself isn't the star. It's taking all of that and figuring out, well, now that we have this information, now that we have this new knowledge, this creates a bit of a gap between the direction we've been heading and what we know now based on this new investigation. And that gap between action and knowledge is actually tension for your audience. And they want to resolve that tension. So making sure that you are presenting not just the things that create tension,
for your audience, but then saying, so here's what we did after that. We investigated some potential directions forward. Let's talk about which one of these you might want to proceed with. It's the old, come to me with problems, come to me with solutions adage, where you need to talk to the people in the meeting about what you found, but that's not the end of it. It's not here, we found some problems. Over to you. It's here. This is what our investigation revealed. And so we did a little bit more investigation into.
what we might want to do about it afterwards. And now let's discuss the pros and cons of these. And it's often making a recommendation with the idea that that might not be the end all be all of the conversation because as we discussed earlier, there are other factors that you probably aren't going to know about that are legitimate but real aspects of the decision making process for your audience.
Adam O'Leary (15:12.75)
I love this and I'm totally stealing what you said when you said we understand that your challenge is this and here's what we dug up. I'm stealing that 100%. That's a really, really good line. Super, super good. And I know one big frustration that a lot of, I guess you could say, especially in the service-based industry, what happens is that there's usually multiple data points. For example, like say a Facebook advertiser or YouTube advertiser where there's all of these different data points and
I know for a fact that they get so caught up because there's all this data, but at the end of the day, they need to be able to make it very simple for maybe somebody who doesn't understand Facebook ads or whatever it might be to be able to understand. So how could a business owner take multiple data points and be able to kind of have that wow moment at the end that come together while still being able to explain correctly?
Mike Cisneros (15:55.968)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Cisneros (16:09.747)
That's an excellent question, which is when we're talking about data, too often we get wrapped up in the idea if we just had more data, we would know what the answer to this question is. Or if we could just harmonize this data in a way that we could see it all at once, we would have all of the answers to all of our questions. Really, there's no such thing as perfect data. There's no such thing as fully up to date data. There's no such thing as complete data. Everything that we gather is
to point us in a direction more effectively than we would if we didn't have this information. So it's all, what decisions can we make now that we are better informed than we were before we had this data? this is right or wrong. We're not unlocking the mystery of, it's not a video game. You got the right answer because you got the right data and you presented it in the right way. This is helping us to make better decisions.
And yes, you are going to have different components. Like you said, you might have advertised data from a lot of different platforms. So you can take these in sequence. It's based on what we find on this platform. We would go in this direction or we have, if you want to make it numeric, we have X percent confidence that this is the direction to go. If we wanted to look at this other data, it's the signal is less strong, but it's still directionally pointing us in the same way. So based on what we found,
all of this. data is not always numeric. It's not always quantitative. Sometimes it's qualitative as well. And sometimes it is just pulling together like, look, we showed you as we went through this pillar and this pillar and this pillar, they all seem to be pointing in the correct direction. So the safest option in our estimation would be to go based on what we found in those different investigations. But
It's not necessarily the case where you have to harmonize everything, where we have to quantify everything. We have to build an index. Although you can, if you think your audience is more, is going to respond better to, we created this sort of balanced index single number, this single point of truth based on all of this information we got. But all of that is still an abstraction from reality. mean, all data is an abstraction of reality. If you want to get philosophical about it, I don't know how deep we want to get into.
Mike Cisneros (18:32.133)
the philosophy of quantitative information at this point but that's where the presentation or the communication that you're delivering it is using that data it's using quantitative data but we are still talking about a human being suggesting to another human being this is the decision we should take in order to benefit other people whether those are other people in the organization in the world in general or ideally both
It doesn't have to mean that we have synchronized everything down into one specific harmonized data set or one key number.
Adam O'Leary (19:11.18)
Mike, this has been fantastic. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Mike Cisneros (19:15.883)
Well, I work at a company called Storytelling with Data. So you can find us at storytellingwithdata.com. We talk in depth and train people about how to communicate more effectively with data. You mentioned earlier in this session that my colleagues and I, Cole Nusbaum-Renafelik and Alex Belas, just wrote storytelling with data before and after. So that is a good way to put a lot of these tactics that we talk about for communicating more effectively with data.
into practice in real world scenarios because we have worked with lots and lots and lots of clients over the course of years. I have lost count of how many there are, but we teach in this book in a makeover style. We start with a before image, which in many cases looks pretty good, but we talk about how we would strengthen this communication or how we helped our clients strengthen this visual given a range of opportunities or constraints or goals in a given situation.
Now me personally, you can find on LinkedIn or Instagram on my own website. It's all using the handle Mike Vis Narrows, which is Mike V I Z N E R O S at one point in time. It was the height of cool to include viz in your online handle. If you did data visualization professionally and so 15 years later, here we are.
Adam O'Leary (20:34.968)
you're still cool to me. Thank you so much for jumping on it was such a pleasure to have you here.
Mike Cisneros (20:36.607)
Yeah.
Mike Cisneros (20:41.877)
Thanks very much. was a pleasure to be here.
Adam O'Leary (20:44.11)
Awesome, signing off for now. Have a wonderful rest of your day and looking forward to seeing you on the next episode of Simple Wins.
