Part 2 – Manage Stories, Not Data

Last week my friend, Brad Kolar, identified some mistakes leaders make regarding data and the stories they tell. He explained the mistake of “choosing the wrong story to tell.” This week he has explanations of two other mistakes.

• Not fully understanding the story
• Losing focus on the story

Not fully understanding the story

Sometimes leaders know the story they want to manage but do not fully understand it.

This often results from not defining up front, the questions and criteria being used to make sense of the story. As a result, they can sometimes fall into one of three traps that lead to an incomplete story:

• Availability/familiarity bias – placing more weight on recent, well understood, or glaring information and forgetting to consider the rest of the picture
• Confirmation bias – stopping short in the analysis once they find a few data points that support their pre-conceived beliefs
• Oversight – simply forgetting to include relevant information or data in their analysis

I use a technique called the decision-breakdown tree to ensure that I completely understand my story. The tree takes a broad decision (e.g., “Should we launch this new product?”, “Is our department performing well?”) and breaks it into a set of criteria and questions. I use data to answer the questions at the bottom of the tree. Then, based on those answers, I determine whether the criteria have been met. Finally, based on the results of the criteria, I make the decision. They key to a good decision-breakdown tree is that every box (decision, criteria, and questions) should be stated as a “yes” or “no” question.

Here’s an example

Before looking at data to make a decision, it is critical to define the questions and criteria that you will use to make that decision. It is even more important to ensure that all the people involved in making the decision agree on those questions and criteria. If not, one person might think they are telling a complete story, but others may not since some of their questions might not be answered.

Losing focus on the story – an example

The final problem that I often see happens during the presentation or discussion. It is when someone (or everyone) starts drilling deep into the data and loses sight of the original story. This happens quite a bit.

I once gave a presentation about employee engagement. I had a simple recommendation slide:

We need to revise our employee engagement strategy

• Engagement has fallen for three years in a row
• Our engagement initiatives have poor take up and ratings
• Our leaders score poorly on questions related to people management

I was about to continue but was interrupted by one of the executives. He said, “Wait, where is the data?” I responded that I just told him what the data said (my three bullets). He pushed back, “No, I want to see the data”. So, for the first bullet, I showed a line chart of employee engagement. As expected, it has a downward trending line for the prior three years.

The leader started asking questions about the graph. His first question was about a small spike that occurred 9 years prior. They second was about a small dip that occurred 6 years prior.

He did the same thing on the graphs supporting the other two bullets.

With those questions, we lost focus of the story.

The story that we were supposed to be discussing was whether our engagement strategy needed to be replaced. The story that we were discussing was about things that happened 6 and 9 years ago. Those two data points had no bearing on whether our current strategy was failing and needed to be changed.

Has this happened to you? Which side were you on – the one telling the story or the one derailing the story? Very often as leaders we derail the story. We drill down on data that has no relevance to the conclusion or decision at hand. Or we allow our teams to present slide after slide of detailed data instead of simple conclusions, recommendations, and actions.

Here is a quick tip. If you are showing any type of representation of data (chart, table, graph, visualization), you are shifting the focus from the story to the data.

Losing focus on the story slows down and can hurt decision-making.

Conclusion

As a leader, it is your job to ensure that

• You are managing the right story
• You have a complete understanding of that story
• Everyone is staying focused on the story

It is easy to get lost in the data or to let the data drive the story. Your job is to prevent that from happening. Data are an important part of the story. But they are not the story.

Brad Kolar is an executive consultant, speaker, and communication coach with Avail Advisors. Avail helps leaders simplify their problems, decision, data, and communication. Contact Brad at brad.kolar@availadvisors.com.