Data stories for decisions in an emergency

Reaching people where they are

What is a data story? I mean a real data story, not a cheap jumble of charts crammed with data and more data. No, real data stories delivered as if lives depended on it. The first episode of Donald Farmer’s “Curiosity” series, released in 2020, lays out useful specs.

One of the two guests, Gisli Olafsson, chief technology officer at One Acre Fund, talks about how many “amazing dashboards” fail to support decision makers.

…Very often we, we create a description that…you look at it and you go that's great for reading up on the nightly news. But as the [emergency-]response organization, what is it that I can make decisions based upon? And often we lack that.

The second guest, Neil Gomes, system senior vp for digital and human experience at CommonSpirit Health, goes further in an anecdote that shows the value of humanizing data. Emergency room staff, he recalls about a past role, had noticed how emergency response was forced to slow as staff waited for data. If they had the data, they could have done the task in front of them right away. So staff sent a ticket to IT asking to set up a new database connection for a new front end. But then the request sat for two weeks without action among someone’s other tickets — until one Friday afternoon.

Just as I was getting ready to leave, I walked into that [IT] person's office and I told him the story of what we were trying to do and how it would affect people's lives if we [could do] that. And that evening it was done.

Before that, to him, it was just a data point. It was just something that he needed to act on. He doesn't wake up every day saying I'm going to really mess up healthcare in the morning. He doesn't. He does his job and makes sure it works. But until we humanized that data point for him, it meant nothing.

I think we've got to do that, which is why also in crises like this, sometimes there's an automatic humanization of [the data] because it could affect you, your parents here … But it's not always the case. Like climate change. It doesn't get humanized. We don't see it affecting us like COVID-19 or something like that.

So I think we need to be better at humanizing that, and maybe even have that in some of our data displays. [Ask the person who's building a visualization,] how would you like to humanize this?

Telling a data story is about humanizing data. You can’t assume, as Donald points out, that people will engage with the data just because they’re engaged in the business. You have to reach them where they are in their own terms.

Visits to “Curiosity” is one of the best investments of time anyone in the data industry can make. I visit often, and I hear something interesting every time. Click here to view the first episode, “Analytics in a Crisis.⁠”