Three Reasons Why Storytelling is Important in Business

Allen Hillery
4 min readApr 25, 2019
Photo Credit: Suzy Hazelwood (Pexels.com)

The students in my Storytelling with Data course were recently given an assignment to create a storyboard to discuss their analytical proposal with a marketing team. Most of the class struggled with this assignment. They didn’t know where to start in terms of explaining their approach without using regression analysis or other statistical jargon. Some scoffed at the emotional, touchy feely aspect of storytelling. I coached a group who were trying to solve for Citi-Bike’s distribution problem to personalize it. I suggested they introduce a commuter named Dan into their story and explain that he finds it hard to get a bike to ride to work from Long Island City to Midtown due to a lack of bikes at his neighborhood station. Once the story line is introduced, proceed to explain how the solution will benefit commuters like Dan. As I began to coach the students in this manner, it began to sway some of their stances on selling their proposals and convincing an audience as manipulative. I reminded them that you want to strike the right balance between telling a story and presenting the data.

Crafting a story around data may seem like an unnecessary, time consuming effort. The insights or data may seem sufficient to stand on their own as long as they’re reported in a clear manner. The analytical insights alone may influence the right decisions and their audience to act. This point of view is based on the flawed assumption that business decisions are based solely on logic and reason. Here are three reasons why storytelling is important in business:

1. Business decisions are not based solely on logic.

Most executives believe that analysis drive business thinking. Yet in a time when corporate survival often requires disruptive change, leadership involves inspiring people to act in unfamiliar and often unwelcome ways. Mind numbing cascades of numbers or daze-inducing PowerPoints won’t inspire people to act in unfamiliar ways. When you tell a story with your data, you create a shared human experience.

2. Numbers are not memorable.

Statistics may not be memorable but stories are. Messages delivered as stories can be up to 22X more memorable than just facts. Customer data in itself is pretty…

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Allen Hillery

Creating transcendent stories that share the importance of data narratives and how they impact our world. Twitter: @aldatavizguy