RHS 010 - Nancy Duarte: How to Create Persuasive Stories With Data

Ryan Hanley: Hey guys, more than 10 episodes into this new podcast, The Ryan Hanley Show, and I just want to say thank you for listening. If you're enjoying this content, make sure that you're subscribed wherever you listen to episodes so you get each new guest, each new episode of the show coming right into your earphones. And if you're enjoying the show or not, whatever you think about the work that we've done so far, I'd love for you to jump on over to iTunes, leave us a rating and a review. It helps more great listeners just like yourself find the Ryan Hanley Show and be part of this community. And I'll just say thank you one more time. Thank you.

Ryan Hanley: All right. Our guest today, epic, epic, Nancy Duarte. Nancy has been instrumental in the crafting of my own presentations that I've given throughout my career as a professional speaker. Her book Resonate, which I keep as a textbook on my desk at all times. I use it every time I work on a new segment of one of my presentations. And it is just an absolute pleasure to have her on the show, talk through not just presenting and her new book, Data Story, but also get some insights into how she leads her organization. It is special, it is unique, and it is a model that I think more organizations should follow. I give you the amazing Nancy Duarte.

Ryan Hanley: To kind of get into things, I'd like to start with an article that I found that you wrote on LinkedIn. But what I found interesting about it was some of your takes on leadership. And this is actually where I want to start with you, just having your own company for a while and being fairly successful in that endeavor. I was interested in your take on entrepreneurship. I have been both staff level all the way up to executive leadership and the various companies that I've been a part of. And I've come across so many different takes on this particular topic. And I've found I feel like we're spreading to two schools of thought: one is an incredibly hierarchical, authoritarian, dictatorial relationship—it's "I'm the person, I know what to do, listen to me, do it." I don't love that in any regard. And then I've also come across the antithesis to that, which is this "let's go super flat. Everyone's got an opinion. Everyone has a place." And I also have not found incredible success in that model either. And where I've started to land is this idea of a hierarchical structure with a strong focus on this idea that you wrote about of entrepreneurship, of allowing people to find their own path or the ability to reach out into things in addition to maybe what their day-to-day role is. And I just read this article, it hit my brain, and I was like, I really want to get her take on this idea so we can start there.

Nancy Duarte: Yeah. Want me to just blather here? Yeah, go ahead. This is a blather, this is a pro blather show. So you know what we're trying to do, we have a set of values that actually spells the word BLISS. It wasn't on purpose. One of my writers was like, that's the acronym for BLISS. And it's belong, lead, innovate, and serve. And so not everybody feels like they can innovate, but I'm giving everyone permission to innovate here. So one of my dreams, because my name is on the building and my name is on the books, I think people think I'm the central figure of this story. And it's harder to change that when your name is on all of these things. And so one of the directives we have right now is Dwartians publish. Like Dwartians need to invent and they need to publish. And the reason that I'm doing that is I want the long history of this brand to be, "Wow, really smart people work there and you can build a body of work if you go to work there." Because I think everyone has something inside of them that's worth sharing and spreading. And that's what we're trying to do is get people to write books or write articles or be inventors and pioneer new things. So we have one whole entire service that we do right now, our speaker coaching. We didn't do that just five years ago. My team decided we need to be in that business. They started to offer it to the top CEOs in the world, which we already worked with, and they invented this whole service and it's millions a year now. So it's like, I wasn't always good at this. I didn't necessarily know how to listen clearly to these ideas because I was the hub and I felt like, "Wow, that's more work than I can take on to make your idea become real." Like I used to think I had to be the one to build out the strategy, to take it over the finish line. But I found if they have the passion, just let them take it, build it, bring it to market, like nurture it all the way through the process. And I never used to be that kind of a leader. I used to think that when people came with ideas, it would feel like a burden. Like their idea was put on my shoulders and it would be more things on my plate to do. But now I realize that it gets done with more passion and better than if I was to be the one driving it.

Ryan Hanley: What was that transition point for you mentally as a leader? Because I think that feels like a fairly progressive idea that not many leaders are, maybe, I don't want to say unwilling, maybe they've never even contemplated the idea of allowing their people to build a body of work. That feels like a fairly foreign idea, yet it, to me, it like immediately resonates. So I would love to get your take on this idea.

Nancy Duarte: A couple of things happened too. I had, actually, it was my son-in-law, super bright, super smart. He had two software ideas early on and I was just like, "Whoa, that sounds like a lot of work. I'm not a software CEO." Yeah, he had the idea for Dropbox and the code and we were using it already like eight years before Dropbox was even anyone's idea. And if I had really recognized the opportunity and really cultivated it and even just hired the staff to turn that into an actual product. He dumped it out in the public domain instead. And everybody like grabbed it up. And there's even some hints of it. It's possibly some of the source code for really big tools like that. And then I had a lot of sorrow in feeling like, "Oh my God, was it that I didn't listen? Was it that it would have been dependent on me?" Because my son-in-law is one of the most bright and thoughtful communicators. And he was begging me, "No, this is a really big idea." And I think I had to start to get an executive team I trust where I wasn't, where I could actually hear and understand and be able to invest in. What happened for me as far as like letting other people now come and create a body of work is I don't I don't want the Duarte name in the future like "Who's Gartner? Who's Deloitte? Who's McKinsey?" Those are big brands, and we don't necessarily know the people behind them. And I woke up about, I guess it was a couple years ago, and I was just like, "You know, I don't want my name on a big services firm. I want my name, the Duarte name, to be on a lasting kind of packaged bodies of work with training material that transform lives." And kind of going through this sense of the kind of legacy that I felt like the name I wanted associated with. I asked my kids too. I was like, "What if you woke up in 20 years and Duarte, like the name just as somebody else's, would you?" And there was some big scandal, like somebody at this company called Duarte did something really stupid and it affected the SEC and it affected someone's stock prices. Would you feel like your name was run through the mud?" And they were like, "Yeah, I would." Even though we're not even involved in the business, that would hurt. And I thought, "You know, how do I protect from that? How do I make it so this brand has meaning where people can come and do human flourishing and create bodies of work?" So that's what we've turned to and we, the next iteration of us is really beautiful. It's in process. I have all the plans in place, but we haven't announced anything yet. So listeners are hearing it before the team does, but it's, I'm super excited about it.

Ryan Hanley: So you said a word in there that bounces around my head constantly. And I don't know if it's because I have two younger sons. One is soon to be six, the other soon to be four. And especially the older one has started to ask questions and show interest and really, I don't want to say become a person because that happens earlier. But like, you know, he is his own guy, but he also is watching me intensely. Every move, every word. If I use a word that he doesn't understand, he's like, "Dad, why did you use that word? What does that word mean?" Wow. And it's awesome. It's also incredibly frustrating because I have to like dig into my dictionary and my mind constantly. I'm like, "I don't really know why I use that word." And then like the other thing he doesn't understand is context. So like we have this big argument around the word "stupid." So I like, "You can't call a person stupid, but if I'm saying my own idea is stupid, there's an acceptability there and there's context and nuance I'm trying to convey." And he just, he's struggling with that. We're working on that. But that's all to say that something about this and just, I don't know where my career is in general. I really started to think about the word legacy and what does that actually mean? And how much time, effort should we put into the idea of legacy?

Nancy Duarte: Yeah, it's funny. We've been at this business for 31 years, and that's a long time. Probably older than a lot of your listeners. And it's not until, for me, I was on a podcast about seven years ago and they were like, "Well, how do you define success?" And I was like, "God, I'd never even thought about that because they were like, 'Oh, you're done. Like you are successful.'" And I thought, "You know, you're not successful until you've had a season of giving back to me. Like that's when you know you're successful when you're like, 'Whoa, I've compiled all these skills. I've compiled all this know-how and knowledge and now I need to somehow get that out.'" This is a phase, I think, of my legacy, my dream. My target audience is entrepreneurs. I love them. So my husband and I are actually going to do a channel about marriage, life, family. How are you an entrepreneur? And really kind of nail it. My kids turned out. My marriage is just unbelievably stunning. So that actually is what I'm hoping becomes more of my legacy where I can actually help people, not just with their speaking gigs, but can help them with their marriage, their life, their family. But, you know, do people want to hear about marriage from the presentation lady, right? That's where I'm struggling a bit. But legacy to me is what you leave behind. And sometimes I worry about how everything is digital now. Everything's a digital artifact. And when I was a little kid, I had a terrible, it was a hard upbringing, but I would go in the basement and I would escape into my Uncle Richard's box. He had this box of artifacts. Like he built and managed a very famous hotel in Portland. He had letters from Helen Keller. You know, it's just this, I just thought, "Oh my God, I've never, this is a life I never would have known about if I hadn't had access to Uncle Richard's box, great Uncle Richard." And I would escape into these artifacts. And I thought, "You know, where are the artifacts today?" So I keep a box. Like about every three years, I have a banker box full of artifacts that if one day my children or my children's children's children's children want to know that today I was on a podcast with you, right? I have all my notes. I have artifacts of physical artifacts from my life. That's also part of a legacy that can live on after I'm gone, which will happen one day.

Ryan Hanley: So there's a lot in there that I want to unpack. One, I agree with you on the physical artifact idea. I actually was listening to Ryan Holiday, who is a mentor from afar. I love his work. I'm actually plowing through Stillness as I speak. Like, if it wasn't for iPhone notifications, I may have been late because I was reading the book and then it went and I was like, "Oh crap, I gotta go get ready." But that's why it's good. I'm actually such a geek. I bought the autographed version, like the one with the stamp or whatever. So you said something—you said a bunch of things in there. And the first one that I wanted to unpack was, "Do they want to hear from the presentation lady?" And the idea—I you know when it's funny. I've listened to you do other podcasts. I've read your work. And what's interesting is that's the first time I've ever heard the resistance in your voice. And that to me, I shouldn't say surprising because I know we all deal with it at wherever we are in our career. But I think that more than ever, people want to hear from different individuals in all different walks of life, specifically someone who has lived the type of life that you have, because so many many of the stories today are not, "I was able to raise a child who is productive in the world," or "I was able to keep marriage together." That's happy and productive and healthy. And I almost feel like even though, um, you know, my life tends to be more small business and less entrepreneurial because I'm on the East coast and I'm not in New York City. I feel like there is a swing back to and like Ryan Holiday's work is a big part of it and many others—Tim Ferriss, James Altucher, you know, all these guys. There's a bunch of people that just this pendulum is swinging back to the idea of happiness and what that really means and not like the fluffy happiness but like actually being okay inside, um, and contentment maybe. It's The contentment. Yeah. The book I'm talking about is Stillness, right? Like that idea. And I think for you to share that journey as much as you were willing to is something that I actually think people would be hungry for. That's my perspective.

Nancy Duarte: Ah, well, that's cool. Yeah. We, um, right now my business is a lot of B2B. And so I don't have as like a following like you would have more medium and small businesses. And so we're excited to do it. We're actually setting up a small set here, um, this week to try to start to see if we can just have conversations, my husband and I, and see how it goes. We'll see. I'll let you know.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll look forward to seeing when you start to produce it. So let's, I want to talk about, you have a new book coming out. You've written, this is book number six, if I'm correct, five or six. And all of them done incredibly well. And before we actually went live with the show, I shared with you that Resonate is a textbook for me. I have certain books in my life, and I've talked about this on the show previous, that become textbooks. They stay near my desk at all times. I reference them. They're beaten the crap out of them. They look like I've run them over with my car. They're dog-eared. They're written in and marked up. And I'm completely cool with that, right? And that book, for those who haven't read it, helped me create many of the stories and structure that I tell in the presentations that I give for anyone who's ever listened. Your newest book that's come out, Data Story, this is actually an area that I think I had struggled. So when I heard that this book was coming out and that I'd have the opportunity to talk to you, I was very excited because this is an area that I know I've struggled both internally, right? Like in sharing numbers, sharing data, crafting a story around it. And it's like a skill that I would say I've learned through a lot of hard beats. And then also when you're conveying that maybe in a more classical sense to an audience, sharing data and how do you make it interesting and exciting? And so maybe just let's start with why is it so hard to add data to stories that make it meaningful? Like why is that something that I feel like we just intrinsically struggle with?

Nancy Duarte: Yeah, I think that's an interesting question because some people, 67% of jobs today are impacted by data. So there's the people who are like, "I didn't sign up to go to work to even deal with data," right? And there's this hesitation to be like, "Why do I have to spend a minute? Sometimes I say I'd rather peel my fingernails back than work in Excel," right? So there's the people who have to embrace data because it is inevitable. And then there's the people who spend their whole life in the data and they don't know how to communicate. So there's communicators that don't understand data and data geeks who don't understand how to communicate. And this is written for both types of audiences. And there is so much data that people don't know what to do with it. So when you dig into the data, you either find a problem or you find an opportunity. Once you dig in the data and you find that, then you have a communication problem. You have to tell others what was in the data and what do we need to do about it. So I loved writing this book. Each one of my books, I feel like I get some sort of master's degree or something in the process. Yeah, this was a really fun one. And it's resonating pretty deeply with those that work in data.

Ryan Hanley: So we get a bunch of numbers, right? And I think where I struggled early in my career with the idea of expressing data is, say I'm on the staff level and my nose is in the Excel spreadsheet all day long. I know it up and down. I know every formula, every chart. And I come out, and I guess what my problem would always be is I just wanted to barf this. I have every, I have it all. Here it goes. Like, let me just get it like all out on the table. And the very first thing that would happen is whoever I was talking to, it's like they would throw their hands up and say, "You know, you gotta, I'm, this is way too much for me. I can't take this fire hose in." So I guess, you know, how do we start to piece that apart and find the pieces that maybe from someone whose nose is in the spreadsheet, you know, I just want to tell you everything I know versus what the person who maybe is going to make the decision or the committee or whatever the body is that you actually are presenting to, you know, how do we filter what is necessary from what isn't?

Nancy Duarte: I think because it takes so much work to go into the data and find things. Sometimes we have a hard time letting go of things we found that we think are special but have nothing to do with getting us where we want to go. So one of the things we propose is that you learn how to filter up the parts that are needed for the decision making. And then you can have a massive appendix, but call it an appendix. Like don't stick all your deep thinking and closely and tangentially related charts. Don't put that in the front. Just make a big, you can have 300 page appendix. You can make it look like you're as smart as a cookie to those above you, but you don't need to put that in the main narrative. And I think people forget. And some it called the thud factor. Sometimes it comes from the big consultancy when they would print out their PowerPoint deck it be 200 pages thick. It like a big old ream of paper. You walk in you thud drop it right on it. And it like, "Oh wow, I paid for million worth of research. That ream of paper looks like about $2 million worth of research." And that's not what you have to do for decision making around data. It doesn't have to be that dense. Now, early in your career, you may have to have a really thick appendix of all the thinking you did. But as you move up and up and up and you become more of a trusted advisor, you don't have to include all of that because they know you went to the right data sets, you synthesized it the right way, and now you're communicating and they trust you because you have a long history of being able to make decisions from data. So that kind of is a good filtering device.

Nancy Duarte: Then what's interesting is this body of work, I built the whole thing. And then I thought, you know, I always use Steve Jobs and his work as a sounding board. So when I was done with the whole book, I have transcribed everything that Steve Jobs said publicly and I have the transcripts of it. So I did a find on every time he talked about data and I thought, "Oh, this will validate." Because what I used to do is I would analyze what he said and I'd be like, "Oh, that's data. I'm going to skip it." Oh, I would look, look, look, look at the meaningful part. And then I'd be like, "Oh, that's data. I'll skip it." And so I used to just skip over how he framed data. And when I went back through it and figured out that he did so many things I covered in the book. He attached the data to something relatable. He gasped in awe. He marveled at his own data. There's so many things he did that I touched in the book. He explained the data over time. So he created suspense and surprise when he was communicating data. So it was really cool to go back and see that it was there the whole time. I just had never seen the pattern in how he spoke about data.

Ryan Hanley: Why doesn't the data speak for itself? Why do we have to integrate it into a story? You know, what's funny is, you know, data purists will say that. The data does speak for itself in the sense that you can go and find the facts and even visualize the facts into a chart. And then you can look at it and say, "Oh, this means that." What's interesting that's happening now in tools like Tableau and other common tools is they're starting to have artificial intelligence. So you can now, Tableau can come and say, "Oh, based on the data you just put in, it looks like Jimmy Bob in sales quarter three over quarter three, his sales have significantly dropped." Now, it can analyze it like that and the data can, quote, speak for itself. But what do you do about Jimmy Bob? What is the action you take from that data? That's where you need a communicator. The data won't tell you the action to take. It'll just present you the findings. So in the moment where you have to take action and you have to go and have that conversation with Jimmy Bob, or you have to decide how should Jimmy Bob behave differently in the future so he doesn't drop quarter to quarter, Tableau won't tell you that. Like these artificial intelligence won't. So I believe artificial intelligence will be able to observe data and synthesize data and tee up observations. But only a human will be able to take the right action every time. Because sometimes the right decision is to make a decision counterintuitive to the data. And AI, no matter how much you train it, it won't make a counterintuitive decision for you. And it also won't use intuition. And that's a big part of what you find in the data, what you need to communicate. You have to have a strong intuitive sense because there will always be a gap between what the data can tell you and the action you need to take. And you have to fill that gap with a little bit of intuition. Yeah. Opportunity is so often in the non-obvious that you can't rely on that kind of stuff. Exactly.

Ryan Hanley: So if I'm, so this makes sense to me, if I'm staff level pitching up or, you know, whatever, talk to me a little bit about, so I have had fellow executives in the past whose perspective was, "I don't need you to understand. I need you to do what I tell you." Talk to me a little bit about when we're pitching down. So when the leader has the data and we're, and we're selling down in, is there a different way of delivering it? Is it more, do we have to, do we have to go even higher to the audience or do we have to then dig into the weeds a little more because we're talking to the people who actually handle this? Like where do you, that's a great question. You know, I had a book called Illuminate that I wrote and it was for leaders specifically to understand the emotional fuel that we call them their travelers, right? So there's the torchbearer and the traveler. So we came up with a model so that leaders would understand the right kind of emotional fuel. So first of all, as a leader, when you're going to communicate, you have to have a way to empathetically understand what's the emotional fuel your audience needs and how do they receive information? Where are we at in this journey and what role does data play. So when you're doing broad communication as a leader, you call it communicating down, we could call it communicating to all employees, or let's say you're communicating to all shareholders, that's a huge, or you're on an earnings call or where it's really broad. There is ways to state data so it sticks. And so there's section four of this new book is all about how a leader needs to communicate so the data can be recalled, so that it's relatable, so that people can retell it. And so just so it sticks. And there's a lot of that, some things I was touching on, like revealing the data over time so that it creates suspense and surprise. There's connecting it to something that's relatable. Instead of stating the number, is there a number you can attach it to so that people can remember the scale? We talk about millions and billions like this is a normal thing today. And even trillions, only politicians hurl the word trillion around, because that's how much debt we have. But yeah, I think the way that they communicate is very important to peel it more like an onion instead of just broadcasting and blasting it. If you peel it like an onion, data can actually have a sense of an emotional appeal, which is important to do when you're trying to get people to transform because of a number.

Ryan Hanley: Um, how important is or maybe that's a wrong way of asking question but um I maybe talk to me a little bit about the packaging so that it is easily you used you mentioned a couple like making it relatable um but like I feel you know one of the things especially when I'm presenting to a board um which thankfully I no longer have to deal with but um you know uh when I was when I was speaking or presenting findings to the board, I found it very necessary to, to deliver the data in a way that they could tell other people because what board members love doing from at least in the companies that I've worked for, they love telling each other how much they know about the company. And if they have a data point that they can hold on to and, um, you know, like, is it, I guess I I'm, I'm butchering the question, but the idea is like packaging that number in a way that they can just share it. It's easy to use that over and over. Is there specific methods to that besides being relatable?

Nancy Duarte: Yeah, there's, being relatable means like, you know, we tie it to something that is more tangible. I think in the case of your exact scenario where you're trying to communicate it to a board, the best way to do that is to use a slide doc. It's to use a denser visual document that's skimmable so that they can understand it because they have to get their head around the bigger narrative. And then the data usually supports a broader narrative that you're trying to do. So in this particular case, I think that there's a model in the book about communicating up and what it is that executives care about. And there's three things. So if you're going to present data to them, it needs to hit the nerve of one of these three things. And that's money, market, or exposure. So if it ties to one of those things that leaders are measured by and the success of a company is measured by, it'll resonate with them in a way that they'll feel like, well, yeah, this needed my attention, of course, because it has to do with money, market exposure. So under money, we're trying to drive revenue and profit up and trying to drive costs down. In market, we're trying to grow in market share, move market share up and time to market down. And under exposure, we're trying to drive up retention, which is anything from clients and employees to partners and shareholders, and we're trying to drive risk down. So if you are preparing something for a board member and you're wanting to associate data with it, you need to make sure it's in one of these categories. You shouldn't be really sharing that much data outside of this set of things they care about. And if there's too much of things that aren't going to resonate at them at a core, they won't understand why you even needed to put the data in front of them because these are the things they're measured by. And if you're not supporting their measurement and not them, but the company too, then it feels like superfluous data. So connecting it to a thing an executive cares about and then something that an executive is measured by would be really smart. And in my analysis, actually, we have the privilege of working with the highest performing brands in the world. And I grabbed 2000 data slides from seven brands. And I looked at the parts of speech and the chart that they chose to use. And the most important part of a part of speech in this case was the verb. What is the action that they're asking people to do because of the data? And there's two types of verbs, which kind of goes to your question. One's a performance verb, and that's things like you could do KPIs of, and others are process verbs, and those are things that support this performance, right, or all the processes I'm going to do so we reach this level of performance. And those are also things that you could be really conscious of as you're communicating up is, am I using a process verb or am I actually using a performance verb? Because executives tend to be measured on the performance verbs and not the process verbs. Yeah. They're less concerned with how the soup is made and more people are eating the soup. Exactly. Exactly. So just one last spin that I want to put on this a little bit just like I said earlier my world tends to be more midsize and small business professionals some of which entrepreneurial but you know just I assuming a lot of them are maybe listening to this and saying to themselves how do I take this because this is great internally. And how do I take some of these ideas and start to spin them in say marketing or in communications to my current clients? Is this a completely transferable idea? Are there nuances to it when you're communicating with say, if you're, like I said, marketing, advertising, or retaining current clients?

Nancy Duarte: Yeah. So the bulk of the book and the premise of the whole thing is that you've dug in the data. Say you're a marketer, you dug into the data and you found a finding. How do you shape that in a way that other people will understand it? And you do use a three-act structure in here and it's in service of making a recommendation. So you have all this marketing data and maybe you're like, "Hey, I want to, the data is telling me I need to spend more on pay-per-click because it's a result." So it teaches you how to frame that up so your budget gets approved. Now, once your budget's approved or once you have this idea and the boss, the big boss is like, "You're such a great marketer. I love everything you do. I'm going to go have you talk about this great big case study that you just did because you're freaking brilliant." Like that changes the nature of your audience and it changes the nature of the data and how you'd communicate it. So that's where there's this moment where you're explaining the data, which is day to day in the marketing job, in the sales job, the data is driving all your decisions. But there's this moment in time where it's like, "Oh my God, this initiative you found in the data is so huge. I need you to speak at the all hands meeting." That's a completely different thing. And that's what the section four in the book is about is how do you now stand and deliver in a way that people can attach to the data and take action from it. So it's a different kind of an energy and both are true for something like marketing or for sales or for ops, internal ops, all of those roles. There's a high probability that if you start to become a strategic advisor, that you will have to start to drive change inside your organization. And that requires you become a broad leader with really good presentation skills. You've seen what that's done like to your own career, right? Where you can actually command a stage and command a room. You actually start to be followed even before the company might recognize you as a leader. If anything, it feels to me like building these types of narratives off of data can help someone who's early in their speaking career because there's less, you can, you can be more structured in how you deliver them. Um, when you're taking a more ethereal idea and trying to pull it into a narrative, not that that's not very powerful as well, but oftentimes if you're not, if you're not very, if you're not experienced or maybe slightly, uh, or if you're new to the speaking or being in front of an audience that sometimes that can be a little tougher than if you know what you have to say in the numbers. And this feels like a really sound way of maybe getting in front of audience. Now that we have access to so much data, I think there's more pressure to say, "Well, is that just an ethereal idea or is it grounded in data?" Right. Even, I mean, we're a medium-sized business. I have 120 staff and about 40 contractors. And even in my own exec meetings now, I used to be able to say, "Gosh, you