Why the data worked as a story

- So let's see how that data became a story. First of all, it was structured like a real story. All the background of my project and the early data I found, that was the context, the beginning of the story. The challenge came when I found the strange relationship between sales and profits that changed in 1983, and I obviously wanted to know why. The conflict was all the work I did to solve that mystery. It was thinking up hypotheses and testing them out and finding that they didn't seem to work, then there was thinking up another solution and finding out it didn't work either. The resolution was the discovery of the right answer. And then I transitioned out of this story to the lessons, which were the conclusions of the analysis, and finally the to strategy recommendations, at the end, just like it should be for storytelling, instead of at the beginning like in a typical presentation. Okay, second, notice this twist. When I got to the conflict, instead of just telling them about my…