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do you ever need to turn to multiple people or different systems to get data hi I'm Cole from storytelling with data and in today's mini Workshop that is the challenge that we're going to address as well as how to overcome it I should mention that we are broadcasting for the very first time from our new Production Studio at storytelling with data headquarters in Milwaukee wisc and it's been a bit of time since we've done an open to everyone live event like this so we weren't really sure what to expect the team and I were thrilled

to see all of the excitement building around this and I will say as we've been waiting to get started I've been having so much fun monitoring the comments and seeing all of the places around the world that we have people tuning in from today we had more than 10,000 people register for this event and I just love the fact that so many people want to learn with us because we very much enjoy learning with you I thought to do something fun that we would start out by recognizing the 10,000th registration and that was Johnny Weathersby

who's joining us today from I assume Sunny San Diego California hi Johnny uh we'll be following up with you to have you select some fun storytelling with data swag from our shop I'm also going to stick in the mail for you signed copies of all three of our books speaking of books I know folks are excited for the many more that we've promised to give away a 100 in fact stay tuned we'll uh share the winners of those a little bit later in the hour for those tuning in live you have the opportunity to participate

throughout the session today you'll do that by sharing your ideas in the chat window I encourage you to put any questions you have there as well the team is monitoring that and we have some dedicated time for questions a little bit later in our hour as well with that let's jump in imagine that I am the HR business partner for my company's sales organization I've been invited to to an upcoming leadership offsite and asked to give an update on the sales manager population from a people perspective I decide to focus on the aspects that are

relevant to headcount hiring promotions transfers and attrition now I am not the data person in this particular scenario so I turn to the people who are and it turns out it's different people because the data lives in different systems and so I know that I'm eventually going to need to pull this all together into something that looks cohesive so to try to make that a little bit easier I provide a template to my colleagues this dictates things like fonts and colors I even thought the size of the graph would be important so I put a

placeholder in for that take a moment and look at what my colleague shared headcount hires and promotions internal transfers into and out of sales manager positions and finally sales manager exits from the company I think this is a good juncture to invite some interaction as we think about how we could pull these graphs together I'm going to prime those tuning in live to get your chat ready and I want to know what you think about this what is your reaction to this slide if you had to describe how it makes you feel in a single

word what word would you use let me know via chat this is a common approach by the way we have four graphs so let's simply put them together on a single slide sometimes we're even constrained to this when somebody tells us put it all on one slide give me a comprehensive view this unfortunately often leads to some suboptimal design decisions and a communication that might be dense with data but doesn't actually satisfy anyone now I can see out of the corner of my eye the chat window is going crazy busy confusing lots of clutter boring

overwhelmed the these are not the sorts of reactions that we want to be prompting in our audience so I'm going to suggest that there is a better way to communicate this data disperate data is a common challenge but just because we start there does not mean we are destined to end with disperate data today I'd like to invite you to accompany me on a journey we're going to take that dis data and start by turning it into some good graphs we will take a couple straightforward steps to transition those good graphs into something great and

then we are going to take a Great Leap Forward and turn those great graphs into a stellar story let's get started with good graphs two tips here first is to cut the Clutter second is to make the details consistent let's start off with a conversation on clutter I'll bring back one of those graphs I flashed in front of you a moment ago and ask you to help me decide what clutter we can eliminate from this graph and now I think of clutter simply as elements that are present in our Visual Communications that don't need to

be when you imagine that every single element we put on a graph or a slide it creates density it brings a burden cognitively to our audience want to make sure all of those elements earn their place uh again I see chat going crazy with things that people want to eliminate from this graph grid lines labels the vertical axis uh shorten the names on the xaxis I think that is a fantastic idea uh the chart border yeah a lot of people commenting on grid lines also see a question posed from Martin what matters question mark we'll

get there bear with us but first let's do some decluttering let's start with the easy ones I'll take away the graph border and the grid lines it's always amazing to me how much those two steps alone do in terms of making my data stand out more next I'm going to clean up my xaxis labels and diagonal labels they maybe aren't the end of the world but they also aren't great they look sloppy they create this Jagged line at the bottom of our graph but worse than that Studies have shown diagonal text is about 50% slower

to read than horizontal text so as I see a lot of people bringing up in the comments we can simply shorten those to the abbreviation also create some nice clean structure along the bottom of our graph next this is maybe more of a pet peeve than anything but it just gets under my skin when the white Space Between the Bars is bigger than the bars themselves can feel sort of visually jarring so I'm going to thicken up those bars and actually one opportunity this affords me is if I want to keep those data labels bear

with me for a moment because I will get rid of them uh but I can pull them into the ends of the bars this is a really cool trick because this reduces the perceived density of what I'm showing without actually reducing any of the information but as many people are commenting we don't need both our y AIS and every single data point labeled so I can choose one or the other of those and typically when you're making that decision what you want to think about is how important are the specific numerical values if they're critical

then you can leave them there and omit the axis if on the other hand you'd rather people focus on the general shape of the data or comparisons across different data sets then often times you don't want to clutter the graph with that and can instead preserve the axis that's what I'm going to do in this case as some additional cleanup I'm going to orient my titles at upper leftmost this creates some nice visual framing for my graph also it means that people hit how to read the data before they get to the graph which is

a nice thing when it comes to reading this I can do some things to make that slightly easier make my y AIS title a little shorter and piffer also going to add some Bolding to my title so it's a little more scannable I'm going to make just one more change at this juncture which is to lighten things up by turning this data over time into a line graph let's take a look at where we started now each of these changes on its own totally minor but when you layer them together these individual small changes that

are easy to make happen have great impact let's go back to that original View and ask for you to help me spot some inconsistencies what inconsistencies do you see where are things different where they could be the same those tuning in live can let me know via the chat window this is another aspect that can make our graphs unnecessarily harder to interpret it also displays a lack of attention to detail taking a few minutes to make anything that can be consistent across similar views the same makes things easier for our audience see what your highlighting

in chat the xaxis colors I see coming up a lot of time capitalization yes it's different uh in a number of places there where it doesn't need to be uh yeah lots of great ideas coming up here font size and case uh y AIS name the legend and different spots yes all of these things and again each individual one minor but together they create a less than spectacular feeling when it comes to how our audience interprets our work which is not what we want let just look at a few of these I'll highlight them sequentially

there a lot of inconsistencies so every single graph title is approached differently even though they all use use my predefined font there different sizes there's a different case structure approach even the words that people chose across the different titles uh varies we can do a lot to simplify that because when things could be the same but aren't it causes our audience to question why that is which is not where we want them spending their brain power we want them spending their brain power to understand what we want them to see and understand and what to

do with that so we can bring some consistency to our graph titles while we do that let's bring some consistency to our Y axis titles as well as many people have suggested all of these are some component of the sales manager population so we can make those titles similar or the same across the various graphs months of the year though they run consistently from January to December across the graphs they're approached in a slightly different way across both of them so you can just bring a consistency there as well as in the legend placement so

where the legend is present it is in a different spot on every single graph when it comes to Legend placement I'm a fan of labeling data directly when you can when you need a legend though think about also orienting that at the upper left uh potentially under the graph title against your audience hits how to interpret the data before they get to the specifics going back to the original Oh colors uh lots of colors are used here they're the ones I prescribed uh but they're not used very thoughtfully we'll address that so going back to

the original and taking these two steps together we can move from cluttered inconsistent visually disperate data to clean and consistent good graphs however we do not want to stop here when we only take away people can feel like we've stripped things out and not added back value in its place and it turns out there are two simple steps we can take to those good graphs to make them great we can focus attention sparingly and use words wisely L let take a look at how we can achieve that let's look at one of these stripped down

decluttered versions of a graph and talk about how we could focus attention on one of these lines now I've started out by intentionally pushing everything to the background making it gray this gives us the ability to achieve visual contrast and sparing visual contrast is going to be how we signal to our audience where we want them to look see what's coming in Via chat I see a number of people talking about talking about color as a way to differentiate we absolutely can color used sparingly is one of our most powerful tools for directing attention but

there are other things we can do to create contrast as well let's assume for example that we want to direct our audience's attention specifically to the highers line this is the one that starts off the highest it has clear Peaks and valleys over the course of time and it also ends the highest what besides color could we do to that line see Johan says intensity uh line types comes up we could think about making where we want people to look a dashed or dotted line see a couple of other votes for that line thick ah

from Johnny Weathersby our lucky 10,000th registration thanks Johnny see a number of people suggesting that we make that line red uh Neo suggests words or phrases those are definitely going to come into play there are a lot of ways that we can show our audience where we want them to look through sparing contrast let take a look look at some of those color is probably the most obvious one one thing I will mention with color is it's Unique as a design aspect in its ability to impart tone or feeling on the things that we put

in color so notice here that blue feels positive friendly nice whereas if I simply take that same line and I make it red now it feels like danger or aggressive something bad might be happening so we want to consider how we can use color and the tone that it can impart to reinforce what we want to get across and to make consistent things consistent visually through the similar use of color we'll see that play out in a moment in terms of other ways to direct attention to that higher line as a number of people noted

we can make it thick make the other lines thinner or a combination of those things intensity is something else we can play with we can make the higher line darker than all the rest now before I flip to the next one which is position we can't move the line around if we have other graph types sometimes that's possible to Resort how we're showing the data but here the line is where it is because of the data it's plotting but we can ensure that it doesn't cross behind other data Series so if you direct your attention

to October and the space around it we see another one of those lines crossing in front of it so we can just bring the higher line visually forward so that we don't have that issue dotted lines stand out very much when other things are not dotted I'm a big fan of dotted lines to express uncertainty it's a goal a Target uh an estimate of some point we could remove all of the other data I'm sure that came up somewhere in chat but I didn't see it spe specifically this is always something we want to ask

ourselves by the way do we need all of the data that we're showing when you consider eliminating data however be thoughtful of what context that you lose when you do so and make sure that that's an appropriate tradeoff on the flip side of this we could show just the other data series and then have the highers line appear and that simple animation of it not being being present and then becoming so Garners attention a live presentation that can be a really useful thing to do I saw comments for data markers and data labels yes if

we put them everywhere we might end up with a cluttered mess but we can actually incite our audience to make specific comparisons when we are sparing and considerate about which data labels we include for example if I highlight just these Peaks we can start to say words about this graph we might say something like hires tend to happen most in the first month of each quarter those words are important if that's what we want our audience to know we should put them on the page or on the graph there was actually one prominent study recently

that showed when you title your graph like this with the primary takeaway people are more likely to remember that takeaway the priming Power of Words is really really useful and when we pair that with the sparing visual contrast then we've done some really nice things for our audience which is we've made it clear where to look and through our words we've made it clear what to see so you can imagine how we might do this for each of the other graphs rather than do that however I want to show you how we can take things

a big step forward through story uh but before we get there I want to share a few additional ways that everyone can learn with storytelling with data we have just launched our 2024 public Workshop schedule today you're seeing a sampling of strategies that enable us to communicate effectively with data you can learn even more in these sessions and we have a variety of them to meet your individual needs uh from the short Punchy storytelling with slides focused on planning presentations and designing Stellar slides we have our storytelling with data classic Workshop that dives deeper into

content similar to what we're covering here uh making a Ive graphs weaving them into action inspiring stories uh but goes quite a bit more in depth given the longer time we also have a one-day master class that combines all of that great learning plus more on how you can deliver a stellar presentation those are in person and we have sessions planned in April in London and in September in Seattle and then finally for those who want to learn even more in in a longer uh format we have our 8 week online course and there are

cohorts of that starting in January and again in the fall I will mention for those tuning in Live or watching this video later you can use the code good to Great uh that's g o o d t o g r e a t at registration for any of these sessions for 10% off you'll find all of the details at story withd dat.com sorksh Ops I'll also mention we are going to be rolling out an official scholarship program for all of our 2024 sessions so stay tuned for that in the meantime folks can register with that

good to Great code for 10% off also want to highlight our custom sessions if you want to organize or suggest learning for your team or organization we offer private and custom versions of various sessions ranging from shorter inspiring keynote presentations and skill-building webinars to longer form workshops where we collect examples from your team ahead of time and use those to illustrate and practice the lessons covered more info about these offerings can be found at storytelling withth data.com custom- workshops I'll also mention that for organizations who want to learn with us but are facing constraints we

also have a special program called reach this is application based so you can apply to bring lower cost sessions to your team you find information on that at storytelling with dat.com sreach all right I'm almost done with the advertisement part of our session I promise just want to draw your attention to all of the other resources that we make available and like this mini Workshop today a great deal of the content that we produce is free and open to every everyone from videos our blog articles podcast episodes we also offer ways to practice and exchange

feedback in our online storytelling with data Community that's also where we start to get in some ways you can support us as well through premium subscription there or as I mentioned by booking a workshop for yourself or your organization uh reading our books actually on that front I'll mention that we have a couple of fun projects underway that are taking shape in this space including something that those out there who both work with data and have children in their lives will appreciate stay tuned for more on that front I should also mention when it comes

to books we are giving away a hundred copies of my newest book storytelling with you plan create and deliver a stellar presentation and we'll go to the slide slide where you can see who those lucky 100 recipients are I'll pause here for a moment uh congratulations to everyone who will have a book coming to them after the session here today we'll say for everyone else you can get storytelling with you or pick up any of our books at your favorite retailer before I get back to our content I want to just give a quick reminder

that we have time set aside today for viewer questions so for those tuning in live please share your questions on any topic related to our content today or really anything related to making effective graphs and giving powerful presentations would be welcome you can share those in the comment or chat window first let's finish this up with a stellar story and to make Stellar stories we want to do two things first weave multiple graphs together and secondly drive people to do something specific with the data that we share enticing them to act let's take a look

at what this can look like I'm Cole and I'm here today with a sales manager update and I want to encourage us to rethink how we hire sales managers in the oran organization just to set the stage I'm going to be looking at our sales manager population and the aspects that contribute to headcount over time look at this for the last calendar year aggregated together so just directing your attention down to the bottom that xaxis I'm going to start with the beginning of year headcount then I will add in the additions to headcount hires promotions

transfers into to sales manager position and then we'll take away the deductions to headcount transfers out of sales manager positions and exits from that population this is going to basically be like a visual math problem where eventually it will yield the end of your headcount we started the year with 317 sales managers the biggest addition by far was through hiring uh hiring actually accounted for 2third of the growth to this population over the course of the past year we did also have promotions and transfers in these count accounted together for that remaining third of increase

to our sales manager population we also had some deductions transfers out and I'll just bring attention to the fact that we had more transfers out than we had promotions and transfers in Combined we also had a great deal of exits over the course course of the past year you'll note that we had more exits than we hired so taking all of this together means we're actually slightly down year-over-year on headcount from where we began while at the same time the overall sales organization has grown meaning we have an increased need for sales managers and now

you might simply think well that means we should hire more but I'm going to suggest a different approach first I want to share some additional detail on how these metrics play out over the course of the year because I think this can help guide our forward-looking strategy so let's focus focus first on the additions to headcount going to go to a different structure here we're still looking at the number of managers on the Y AIS but now we have months over the course of the Year from January to December on our xais 67% we're hires

uh in other words every two out of every three new sales managers came into the organization from the outside this past year I'll just highlight the fact that we have the greatest number of hires starting the first month of each quarter that's largely due how we set our targets and sales incentives you'll note that there are relatively fewer hires when it comes to the first month of the quarter in OCT October and that is due to our annual promotion cycle that takes place then so let's jump next to looking at that Trend we had 407

promoted over the course of the last year to sales manager 38 of those happened during our single annual promotion cycle now I'll just mention when it comes to Promotions couple great things about them is we already know that folks getting promoted into sales managers are a culture fit with the organization in general and with the sales organization in particular but perhaps even more important than that those promoted from within tend to stay in role and at the organization longer than external hires on the flip side of promotions and some of the challenges there with the

single annual cycle we hear complaints every year from the existing leadership team it's just all consuming in that time period and also anyone who's just shy of being ready to promote has to wait an entire additional year before they become eligible again and we actually lose many people during that time period before we move to transfers out and exits take a look at transfers in so similar to hires we tend to see more of those in the first month of each quarter similar to Promotions we get the benefit of cult Ultra fit and again longer

time in roll and at the company than we see with external hires now you might be able to anticipate where I'm going to be going with this which is if we take some of that energy that we've historically spent on hiring and use it instead to increase our promotions and transfers I think it could be a win across several fronts before we talk more about that let's take a look at the deductions from a headcount those come in the form of transfers out of the organization and exits so again let's look at those over the

course of time so I'm back to that view with uh sales managers on our y AIS and months of the year on our xaxis we had 111 transfers out I'm going to go ahead and layer on exits as well because these follow a similar Trend over the course of the year January is when many of The Hires from from the prior year become eligible to transfer and as we can see many of them do also digging into exits in January and February we can see that many of these first pursued internal transfer but were unsuccessful

and again many of these were more recent hires meaning maybe they see it as a foot in the door but aren't thinking about sticking around we also see a spike in both transfers and exits in November anyone know why that might be that's right these are people who maybe thought they were ready for a promotion but didn't get it and so we see exits coming through there just back to the big picture and taking all of this into account it may be time to consider altering our people strategy when it comes to Sales Management if

you consider the effort it takes to bring in this many hires we think that shifting some of that energy towards increasing promotions and transfers into the organization will help us reduce those red bars of sales managers transferring out and leaving the organization just to take that and put it into words on a slide I'm recommending that we increase our efforts to hire from within the or organization that can take a number of different forms we could FASTT trck internal transfers into sales manager positions making that a fast and easy process I highly recommend that we

add a second promotion cycle in April both to spread out the burden on the current team as well as give people line of sight to that next potential promotion we could also consider introducing an approval process for off cycle promotions and I'm sure that you have ideas as well let's discuss and determine where we go from here that was a great experience and in fact after going through all of that it is possible to get the key pieces into a single slide summary I wouldn't present this but it can be used as a follow-up to

remind people what was covered or for those who missed the update you may find it difficult to recognize now that this is where we started we improved things quite a bit as I mentioned just because we began with disperate data did not mean we were destined to end there we started by turning it into good graphs by cutting the Clutter and making the details consistent we made those good graphs great by focusing attention sparingly and using words wisely and then we took a giant leap forward into a stellar story weaving multiple graphs together and driving

people to act so the next time you find yourself facing disperate data reflect on the lessons we've covered here use them to make great graphs and move Beyond just showing data make those great graphs a pivotal point in an overarching story it's time next to turn our attention to questions if you haven't already I invite those watching live to please ask your questions in the chat window Randy has been here behind the scenes so far making sure things run smoothly Randy do you have any viewer questions for me sure thing so uh first we had

a question way back that I made note of when you were talking about the different books and that question was from Panda who asked what's the difference among the three different books fantastic question so I'll start with the original that's the white book storytelling with data if you're working with data on a day-to-day basis and need guidance for how you can turn that into effective graphs in terms of what type of graph to use more examples on how you might declutter and focus and weave things together into a story this is a great place to

start uh basically goes deeper into a lot of things that we talked about today and with many more examples you'll find even more examples in let's practice so this book is structured chapter and lesson wise along the same lessons as the original book but it is entirely exercise-based and So within each chapter there are three sets of exercises first there's practice with coal where I put forth a scenario that you're meant to think through and maybe approach on your own but then I also show you how I would approach it it's a way of getting

insight into many more examples and Corner cases and all the issues that come up when we're grappling with graphing and communicating data there's another section of exercises called practice on on your own which are canned sort of examples but without any prescribed Solutions these are great for University instructors teaching from the books uh we have I think over 500 or 600 now identified of instructors around the world teaching for our book from our books so you can use those for additional homework or group projects also great for the individual who just wants to learn more

or for a manager of a team who might want to encourage that and then the final exercise section within each is practice at work where it takes the concepts and really breaks them down into guidance about how you might take something you're facing in your job and apply the lessons this is great for somebody who wants a handson way to learn and then I will say the one I'm most excited about at this moment in time is the newest storytelling with you which goes beyond the other two books and really gets into the important role

that the individual plays when communicating whether it's data or anything because you can make a great graph but if you can't talk about that graph or that data in a way that engages and gets people to want to listen and act the beautiful graph or slide is going to fail so I often get asked what should I do next after I read the first book or take a workshop and you know I want to I want to make even better graphs but I would say don't worry about better graphs graph good graphs great graphs that's

good enough the next way to really Advance yourself is to invest in yourself and how you present yourself how you present your data how you talk how you engage and so the new book really walks through that um as well as the Practical bits of creating and planning uh so takes you through getting clear on your message understanding your audience planning out your content in a loow Tech way then goes through the technical aspects of bringing that low Tech planning into your tools going through things like setting up a template in PowerPoint to make things

easy and consistent there's an entire chapter on graphs uh also chapters on words and images as well and then the final section really dives into developing yourself so I would say if you're debating which do I get start with this one all right and there was a question of which format are those books in and actually they're all in electronic format and then storytelling with data the white book and the yellow book are both available on Audible read by the author which is which is always exciting all right we had another question uh uh many

people are asking what tools do we use to make our graphs and Cy Cy also asks how do you animate your charts in those tools great questions everything that we've seen today was done directly in PowerPoint and I will say the majority of what the team and I do is PowerPoint or a combination of Excel and PowerPoint mainly because these tools are pervasive love the fact that anyone can pick them up and make a graph right there's no barrier to entry challenge is just that nobody really teaches us how to do this so the kinds

of lessons that we focus on across all of our work are those that are tool agnostic that can be achieved in any tool so when it comes to tools I'm a fan of picking one or a couple and getting to know them well so that they don't become limiting when it comes to employing some of the things that we've talked about today when it comes to the individual questions of how did you do that in PowerPoint so for what we saw here it's a lot of the same graph on different slides just formatted differently which

creates That animated feel as I flip through them a great resource for you to turn to on that is the storytelling with data YouTube channel uh because we have a ton of tutorials and more coming uh and a lot of shorts as well that will show you what menu uh settings to go through when it comes to some of those formatting changes and how we actually go through and animate in these sorts of settings so definitely recommend checking out resources is there we will also follow up with everyone who registered for the session today and

make sure that we include all of the resources that we talk about here all right in a related question Diana asks what do you do when your audience requests that you continue to show them tables for everything the audience who loves tables is often feeling like their question of so what isn't answered and when that is the case it feels like getting more data can be the answer and so one thing I would recommend trying though because if you simply say you know what tables aren't the right answer I'm going to give you a graph

instead people will not like that because they tend to be change resistant so instead of taking anything away think about adding where you can say audience I still have your tables we can go through those but I've done something different today that I think is going to help us have a better conversation or see something new or in a different light and I've gone ahead and put some of that data in a graph and here's what we can see and here's why this is interesting or important and how it's relevant for you and what you'll

find is over time as you start to develop both your own confidence and your audiences that you are highlighting the important things for them it will wean them off of this desire for the tables because again oftentimes people wanting tables it's thinking that more data is going to answer the question which means that their questions aren't getting answered currently so if you can get more context and understand what they need how they're making decisions what inputs would be useful that will help you curate from that tabular data a story like what we saw today also

just look for instances where you are likely to be successful uh so maybe starting a new new project you might try this instead of going against the grain of something that has already been living in a table just a few thoughts all right Brad asks is data storytelling the same as data visualization no it's not uh nomenclature is an interesting thing because words get thrown around and come to mean different things over time for me data visualization is simply taking data taking numbers and turning them into pictures we can visualize data for many different purposes

we can do it in a business setting where we're after efficacy and the speed of transfer of information uh we can also do data visualization that is more artistic or interesting from an aesthetic point of view uh neither those are wrong or right they're just data visualization for different purposes data storytelling is not just the data that's where you are bringing in components of story uh so when we teach about storytelling in our work we're really getting into it what's the plot uh where is their tension in terms of what matters to the audience that

either isn't being satisfied in some way or something that could go wrong how do we build that tension over the course of our data story reaching a peak of climax and then having a falling action and a resolution so really bringing structures of story into how we communicate because when we do that well we can use it really powerfully to engage and get people to stick with us and get them to care which is incredibly powerful but I will say data storytelling is one of those Buzz phrases that gets thrown around when people maybe just

mean put some words on a graph uh that's a step towards it but there's so much more we can do couple of folks have asked how do use branded or familiar colors in a graph and what do you do when you're restricted in which colors you can you can use or as as Liz says um what about you know when your audience wants to use red yellow and green and pushes back at the changes to more accessible colors and I will add something that Sophia added which is and what about us color blind folks what

do you do about them yes color as we've seen is an incredibly powerful tool in our designer toolkit particularly when we use it sparingly um so when there are brand and colors that you can fold into how you're communicating with data I recommend doing that can bring a nice cohesive look and feel to things just recognize because you have a ton of different brand colors does not mean you need to put all of them in your graph so picking one or a couple distinct prominent brand colors and using gray elsewhere can often work for that

when it comes to the stoplight question of the audience who wants the red yellow green we do do get into some color blind issues there which might be one argument that would be useful for your audience is about 10% of Western population experiences some form of color blindness which most typically is difficulty in distinguishing between shades of red and shades of green I'd argue also that mostly when we use those color palettes we're not interested in all of it we're interested just in what's going well or just in what isn't going well so you could

even think of highlighting those things sequentially uh instead of all at once so the challenge is wherein everything is different nothing stands out and so that can be fine if you're using it to explore the data but once you've already done that you have something specific you want to communicate and somewhere specific you want people to pay attention to then we want to use our color more sparingly in order to drive that I think we have time for one final question all right this last question is from the user handle a non SS sounds very

mysterious but the question is a great one it says what is the best way to convince leadership that we need to incorporate storytelling in our Comm Communications could we say it was uh a better way to provoke thought or better position uh position us to make meaningful decisions and recommendations what are your thoughts on that this is a fantastic question and yes all of those things uh you know it's hard to point to Roi when it comes investing in these skills but I think the way that we see them play out is when it's done

and you're finding that people are having better discussions they're making smarter decisions because they're no longer asking questions about the data or asking for more data or trying to understand the graph they're able to quickly get to how does this new information I now have matter for the business matter for the important conversations and decisions that we're having and making and so the more you can build situations like that and point to their success so I would say try out the things that we've talked today and that you'll read about in the books and see

on YouTube and elsewhere try out the ones that you think are going to be the most useful in your work and try them out in instances where you are likely to be successful uh where the risks aren't crazy big and people will be accepting because then you can start to build momentum H because the best thing is when people start coming to you because of your fantastic work I've seen what you do when you're communicating with data can you teach my team to do that or can you do that for me as well and that's

how you get really great Grassroots momentum with this stuff so it won't be successful every time don't get discouraged keep trying look for places where things are successful and build on that so we're out of time we took the whole hour and I love it I love the excitement I love being able to see chat flow through out of the corner of my eyes so I just want to say a big thank you to everybody tuning in today uh this recording will be available it will live in YouTube so you'll be able to rewatch and

point colleagues to it also just mention if you enjoyed this session please let us know in the comments uh because I think if you do we may very well do more of them and with that again thank you for tuning in today I wish you great graphs and Stellar presentations