EPISODE 6
say it out loud

TIMESTAMPS

02:23 | Intro: practice out loud
04:44 | Practice before you get in front of your audience 
06:44 | How much time are you actually spending explaining the graph
10:24 | Saying it out loud with a slide
14:05 | Saying it out can be helpful in the planning process
17:29 | Articulate transitions between slides and topics
20:25 | Big picture
20:53 | Nancy Duarte’s big idea
23:18 | Story and saying it out loud
27:02 | Summary 
27:15 | Reader Q&A
38:51 | Updates 

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to storytelling with data, the podcast where listeners around the world learn to be better storytellers and presenters with best selling author, speaker, and workshop guru Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. We'll cover a wide range of topics that will help you effectively show and tell your data stories. So get ready to separate yourself from the mess of 3D exploding pie charts and deliver knockout presentations. And with that here's Cole.

Hi, this is Cole, you've tuned into the storytelling with data podcast! 

Close your eyes. Well unless you're driving or need to otherwise be aware of what's going on around you, then keep them open. I'd like you to imagine the following... We're looking at a graph, on the y axis is revenue, on our x axis is time ranging from 2010 on the left hand side out to our latest point of data, 2017, then looking forward to 2018 and beyond. This is a line graph and it starts out at the lower left hand side. There’s slow and steady growth, a slight upward incline. But then in 2012 there's an inflection point and the line increases at a much steeper trajectory from there. In fact, this represents revenue doubling year over year and that steep line continues up to today.

[00:01:26] Next, we forecast it out forward and the original forecast has that steep trajectory continuing. But we're at a decision point: do we keep doing what we have been and that revenue line continues upwards for maybe the next year or two, but then potentially flattens out as others overtake us? Or do we shift resources—be okay if the line is flat or even goes down this year so that we can diversify and make sure we're on a sustainable path for the future?

You can picture that graph I just described, right? Even though you didn’t have the visual to look at, which is pretty cool. 

But let’s shift and consider my role in that. If I can describe a graph effectively when you don’t even have it in front of you, think of how well that means I can do it when you are looking at the graph. In fact, I believe there are situations throughout the analytical and communication process where there is tangible benefit to practicing out loud.  

That ability of being able to talk through something helps prepare us in a number of different ways. I’ve always believed empirically that there is benefit in “saying it out loud”—we do a number of exercises in my workshops that demonstrate this. But surely someone has looked into this in a more scientific way before, right? They have. Some quick research reveals articles that describe how talking out loud improves control over a task. There's benefit from hearing oneself, especially when doing something challenging. One article I read talked about this is why you hear tennis players shouting to themselves during a match, that it's a way to better control their actions and get desired results. There are also important implications for saying it out loud on memory. When it comes to remembering, more senses are better. One study I read showed that you're better able to remember something when you say it out loud. I’ll link to some of these articles in the show notes. But today I'm not focusing on scientific studies, but rather, easy practical situations where you can benefit from saying it out loud.

[00:03:35] I'll talk briefly through a spectrum of topics today where saying it out loud helps us to practice, to refine and in many cases, come up with better solutions. We're going to start micro with a graph, and then we'll talk about a slide, then a full presentation, and then we'll go really big picture with our message. And finally, we'll talk about the benefit of saying it out loud when it comes to story.

[00:03:57] When it comes to a graph, it's not enough to be able to create a good graph. You also need to be able to communicate with it, and this is really in a live setting that I'm thinking about here. We've all had this situation where we've seen a good presenter overcome mediocre materials. Meaning my graph may not be perfect, but if I can talk through that in a way that's going to make my audience care about it, right, resonate with the data that I'm showing, that can be a good experience. Whereas I can have the most beautiful data visualization in the world and if I can't effectively talk through that with an audience, that can really easily become a painful experience. And so one way to get good at talking through graphs for when you are in front of your audience is to practice that before you get in front of your audience.  Practice talking through a graph out loud. It can be to yourself in an empty room. There's something about hearing how we say things that helps us refine our thought process and helps us be able to better communicate in general.

[00:05:09] I know this feels super awkward at first. I actually encountered this firsthand when late last year I was recording the Audible version of storytelling with data. It seems weird maybe to record an audio version of a book that is so visual, and so we're figuring out how do we make this work, and decided that I should actually just describe each of the graphs which felt really a bit awkward at first, but then you start to figure out how to do it. You come up with this path that you use when you're talking through things. And it actually, for me, when I have in front of me I'm talking through it in a way that someone else who doesn't have it in front of them can picture in their head. It forces me to create logic around that picture which again, helps with my thought process. And interestingly when we do this, especially if our materials aren't final yet or if there's still the ability to refine, you can take cues from how you talk through something to figure out where might you might iterate. If you find yourself saying, well, don't really pay attention to this part or let's really focus here, this can give you pointers on how you might actually format your graph to help make that an easier process—both get your audience there faster as well as give you visual cues that you can talk about when you are in front of your audience. We can say things like: look at the blue bar or look over on the right where we see this certain thing happening.

[00:06:44] Another interesting thing when we talk through a graph out loud is to take note of how much time you're spending explaining the graph versus talking about the data that the graph shows you. We talk about this a lot in our workshops, but any time you are showing something that is going to be less familiar to an audience, it's a less familiar graph type or different in some other way, we face a hurdle with our audience. It means that we have to keep their attention long enough to teach them how to read the graph before we can get to talking about the data and there are tradeoffs involved in this. Sometimes those tradeoffs are worthwhile, where, if we take a moment to help our audience read the graph, we actually can see something in a different way or create new insights that wouldn't have otherwise been possible. But other times we might want to think about if we choose a simpler graph type, than rather than spend time explaining how to read the graph, we can jump much more quickly to talking about the data that the graph shows us. 

By way of specific example, I often get asked about bubble charts and when should we use them, what are they good for. When this question is posed in a workshop, I'll pick up a pen and go to a white board and I start drawing a bubble chart. I draw the y-axis, right, that vertical line, then I draw the x-axis, the horizontal line, then I start drawing circles of different sizes. By the way, one concern I have with bubble charts is I never know if the circles have been sized appropriately. The correct way to size a bubble chart is through relative radii, right, by the radius of each circle, but I've seen all sorts of bad things done with diameters and other things. So the size of circle means something. So how many dimensions are we up to now? We have y-axis is one, x-position is two, the size of the circle is three. I can get some different colored pens and start shading some of these circles. I've got a fourth dimension, which is category. And now if I get really fancy and there's a temporal component, I can actually give myself a little play button and I can press the play button. And now things are moving over time which means bubbles are growing, they're shrinking, they're moving around in X and Y space. There is a ton going on. Notice also how long it took me to just describe this totally generic visual. And that's the trade off. What we want to think about is whether the time you spend describing a visual is going to get you commensurate value when it comes to being able to see something in a new way or create some new insight that wouldn't have been possible in the same way with a more familiar graph. There's no right answer here: there are tradeoffs. There will be times when it makes sense to talk through something more complicated or less familiar because of what you can get out of that, but I think anytime we find ourselves spending a lot of time talking about a graph, it’s worth thinking through: is there another way to show this data that might be more quickly accessible? That might mean rather than spend a ton of time explaining the graph we can focus more on the data and what it shows us and what discussion we should have or what action we should take based on that.

[00:10:04] As I mentioned briefly before, there are other cues we get when we talk through something out loud where we find, you know, for saying don't look at this or pay attention over here. These give us cues as to how we can better format that information to help make that part of the conversation smooth for when we're in front of our audience. 

[00:10:24] So let's shift now to talk about how we would do that in a slide. So when it comes to a slide, the same sort of things we just talked about with the graph hold true. Have you ever had someone up in front of you, they're looking at a slide they put up, something that's hugely dense and they say, don't worry about all this detail or you don't need to read these words I've just been put in front of you or don't pay attention to that pay attention to this? These are all verbal cues that we could have refined things and actually made that slide work better so that we don't have to give those sort of verbal cues. Where we're either only revealing to our audience what we want them to see at a given point in time or we're giving cues whether it's position or color or connection so that we can talk about that slide in a way that's going to feel easier, right, where I can color code to say now, let's just look at the green components in the graph or on the slide or now let's shift to the blue. And actually the way you talk about a slide out loud—and again this can be to yourself, in an empty room—gives us cues on how we might do that for an audience, as well as how we might refine to make that process work better. 

Also when we talk out loud, it's hard not to articulate the main point of the slide and that's a good thing, right? When we can get really clear and concise on what is it I want to communicate now with what I've put in front of you, and get really succinct there, then we can think about taking that main point and making it the title of our slide. Also as we figure out how we're going to talk through information on a slide, if we start in one place and then we move to the next and then we move to the next, which is naturally what ends up happening, this can help us understand how we should position different elements on the slide. Typically, without other visual cues, your audience is going to start at the top left and do the zigzagging Z’s across which means a natural sort of flow is this zigzagging Z. If we think of our slide in quadrants, it would be Quadrant 1 at the top left, then 2 at the top right, 3 at the bottom left, and 4 at the bottom right. So we can think about how we organize things on our slide. We can also think about how we use reveals—where we have one thing appear and then another appear. 

When we talk about showing data on a slide, when you're live in front of your audience this can be a really useful tactic. Where I start with a blank graph, where it's just the axes and their titles and labels—just the bones, the skeleton of the graph. The cool thing that happens when you start here is it forces your audience to sit with you through the explanation of what they're looking at. What the different data on the different axes will be, without being able to jump to the data because you haven't even shown them the data yet. You can also create some anticipation on the part of the audience that can be useful for maintaining their attention. And then you show the data and then you perhaps cycle through emphasizing one or a couple of things at a time. Your audience always knows exactly where to look as you talk through the different components. It can be useful to do this in advance—in absence of the audience—talk through your slide, talk through your graph as a way to better understand how you can now formulate your materials to be able to do that in a smooth way, when it does come to being in front of your audience. So there's a little bit on graphs, a little bit on slides, some overlap there. 

[00:14:05] When it comes to our full presentation, saying it out loud can be helpful both as part of the planning process as well as the practicing process.  So when it comes to planning, one of my big recommendations is put your slides aside and think about how would you talk through what you need to say with someone else, and actually do this out loud. Where you figure out what context to start with. Where is something awry? Where is there tension in this? Why should the person you're talking with care? Where does data come in? What data comes in? How do you talk about what do you need your audience to actually do? When you hear yourself say these things out loud—and it can be an abbreviated version, think about if you had three minutes to tell your audience what you needed to tell them, what would you say? It can be useful for getting insight into how we might then, going back to our slides, structure that presentation in a way that's going to make sense to somebody else. There's something about when we talk out loud that it forces us to connect thoughts to each other in a way that we just don't do when we are working piecemeal, right, in PowerPoint or slideware that that often ends up what's happening where we're focusing on a single slide at a time. So each slide might be really effective, but if that's a disjointed experience going from one to the next, that can be not ideal for the audience. So there's something about talking through the story at a high level out loud that if we can get succinct there, and then turn back to our materials that can sometimes highlight paths to take people through or it might highlight things that are missing that you need to connect one idea or one topic to the next. 

[00:16:06] So great way of informing order and informing the content that needs to actually be in your slide deck by talking through it out loud as part of the planning process. Now there's also a great benefit to talking through your slides out loud when it comes to practicing and refining your delivery of the content. Now we talked about this earlier, a great presenter can overcome mediocre materials. So one piece of advice I've found myself giving lately, in a time constrained environment, where you don't have a lot of time and you have a deliverable and it's something you have to present live in front of your audience, at some point you need to stop refining the materials and you'll get more benefit from focusing on you as the presenter, and getting succinct and smooth in your delivery. Anticipate how things could go wrong, where they might go off the tracks and become ready to deal with those things. For this sort of practicing, saying it out loud, I think, is critical because we often practice in our heads, right, where I might have a deck in front of me on my computer and I'm going through maybe pausing on each slide and thinking in my head what I might talk about,or the points I might make which is one way of practicing. That's good as well, but we get more benefit if we say it out loud. 

[00:17:29] I think part of the benefit we get of saying it out loud is it forces us to articulate the transitions between slides and between topics in a way that when you're going through it in your head, you can totally skip that part. And smooth transitions from one slide to the next or one idea to the next can take something from feeling really disjointed to feeling really professional and smooth in the delivery. There's benefit in doing this both when you have your slides in front of you and you're talking through them out loud as well as putting your slides aside and practicing talking through your content without the aid of your slides. 

I do this a lot when I'm going to be talking through something new. Yesterday, for example, had a workshop down in South Bay. So given traffic, you know that can be an hour hour and a half drive which is uninterrupted time for me to be able to practice, but I can't really do it with the slides in front of me, right, I should be paying at least some attention to the road. And so I'll use times like that to practice outloud where I'm having to remember what comes next. And this is helpful for a couple of reasons. One, it helps you know what's coming next so you can articulate some of those transitions in the live presentation and have that be smooth in terms of flowing from one concept to the next. Also, if you find you're talking through something without your visual aids and you skip over something and it still works, that's an indication that maybe you don't need all of the content that's there. And so again this practicing out loud is helpful for so many parts of the process. Helpful for practicing, for getting smooth, for understanding where you might want to refine or revisit, how or what you're including in your presentation, in your slide, in your graph.

[00:19:27] So that was a bit on graph, slides, and presentations. We're going to take a short break and when we come back we'll talk about how saying it out loud can also be helpful for our message and the stories we want to tell.

[00:19:42] Are you tired of sitting through business presentations that confuse you with too much data and too little information? Would your organization benefit from the lessons of storytelling with data? Did you know that in addition to the full and half-day corporate workshops that are available, storytelling with data has launched short form introductory offerings including a 60-minute webinar and a two hour in-person course on data viz basics? Your team will leave the session with a better understanding of the power of data storytelling with practical tips that can be put immediately to practice for your organization. To inquire about a session for your team or company email inquiry@storytellingwithdata.com.

[00:20:25] Welcome back. So before the break we talked about the benefit of saying it out loud when it comes to a graph or a slide or presentation. Next, I want to shift to talking about big picture. How do we benefit from saying it out loud when it comes to the overall message that we want to get across to our audience? Now one thing that we do often, concept I talk about often, in practice often is the big idea. This is a concept that Nancy Duarte talks about in her book Resonate. She says the big idea has these three components: it should articulate your point of view, it should convey what's at stake, and it should be a complete sentence.

[00:21:11] In my workshops we would pick a project and each person works through a big idea worksheet with their project in mind and forms the big idea. And so that's one part of the exercise. The perhaps more interesting part of the exercise is then everybody pairs up and shares their big idea with someone else. And we have some really great discussion after this process and a lot of the discussion is about the benefit of just having put your idea down on paper and then said it out loud. There's something about saying our message out loud and hearing ourselves saying it, that you find if you're tripping up over words or it just doesn't sound smooth, right? So I think when we hear ourselves say words it's different than when we imagine them in our head. It can help us know when we need to iterate and refine. And again this is helpful even if we're just by ourselves saying our idea, our message out loud in an empty room. Even better though, if there's someone else out there to whom you're saying these words, who can react and ask questions and it can be someone without context. It's helpful actually if it is someone without context because of the types of questions that they ask. And this dialogue that comes up out of this that forces you to articulate your thought process outloud in a way that helps us then be able to go back and better refine our message, refine our ideas.

So this process of saying it out loud is helpful for getting really clear and concise on the message that we want to convey to our audience, and you can imagine if you can't articulate your point in a sentence sort of behind the scenes, it's going to be really hard to make that point in an effective way with your audience. So this is another case where practicing refining behind the scenes out loud helps actually prepare us for being better able to communicate with our eventual audience. 

[00:23:18] Let's talk now about story and how saying it out loud can benefit us there. Now I think of story in a number of different ways. You know sometimes we tell personal stories as a way to create common ground with our audience or as a way to show analogy or example. There's the story that we might have or be telling over the course of our presentation, right? We might be following a narrative arc there and saying it out loud becomes really useful when it comes to practicing and refining these sort of areas as well. Now some people may find it surprising that I don't consider myself to be a natural storyteller. I am at heart an introvert. My natural habitat is behind my computer, in an office, by myself. And it's by practicing and refining and practicing, practicing, practicing that I have honed my own skills for being able to tell stories. And actually a story, unless you are a really gifted natural storyteller, has to be really practiced in order to sound natural which can strike us as counter-intuitive. TED talks actually are probably a good example of this, right? In the TED Talk, it looks like the person saunters out there, they have this casual 20 minute conversation, and you're left feeling like wow, that is a great communicator! When really, hours and hours and days and weeks and months of practice go into creating that natural feeling environment. And I think practice here is key and I'm a strong believer, by the way, that if I can tell stories in a way that is effective than anyone can get good at this, and the way that I do it personally is through practice, and it's by saying it out loud. So anytime I'm going to be talking through a news story whether it's a data driven story that I'm using to illustrate something or a personal story that I might be using to create common ground with my audience, it's by practicing that we get to that point where it sounds natural and effortless. And when it comes to practicing, I'm practicing wherever and whenever I can. I am practicing out loud as I drive my kids to preschool, I'm practicing in my head as I brush my teeth in the morning, I'm practicing out loud standing in my office. And by the way, standing has some interesting effects as well, where it frees you up to be able to gesture more, right, use your hands more, move around more in a way that can help you practice some of those things for when you are in front of your audience as well. But saying it out loud, again, it forces us to articulate transitions, helps you start to play with your actual voice and delivery. Where do you speed up? Where do you slow down? When might you get louder to make a point? Or when might you pause? As a way of getting somebody's attention or as a way of punctuating a point that you just made. And again going back to this idea of delivery, I think particularly in a time constrained environment, but any time we're going to be doing something important or presenting something important and this can be you know a meeting, it can be more formally standing up in front of a room, practice is what makes perfect here. And as we've talked about there are big benefits in practicing it out loud. Practicing out loud, right, consider when saying it out loud might be helpful as part of your process. 

[00:27:02] So today we've talked about it with graphs, slides, with presentations, with your message, with stories to practice, to refine, and to come up with creative solutions when you communicate with data. 

[00:27:15] Let's shift gears and turn to some listener Q&A.  We've had a ton of great questions rolling in lately. If you have questions for me, please email them to askcole@storytellingwithdata.com for potential inclusion in a future podcast. 

[00:27:31]

Rachel asks, “Thanks so much. I LOVE your work and am so glad you started a podcast! In HR, we are often asked to show rates such as percent turnover and percent diverse hires by organization, as you know. Rates can look alarmingly high or low on bar charts comparing organization results to someone that doesn’t have a good sense of each organization’s size. For example, an organization of 10 employees will show a 20% turnover rate if just 2 employees leave, and that 20% can steal focus away from the importance of the 14% turnover from 20 people that left from a 140-person organization. What are your recommendations for showing the data that is asked for while ensuring that focus is in the right areas of our visualizations?”

[00:28:17] Great question, and this for me highlights the importance of context and the frame of reference and how hugely important that is when we show data. So if we’re asked to compare, let's focus on attrition rates for example right, and we have these widely varying size of groups and thus widely varying attrition rates you don't want to just show the rate because it means we're missing that important context of the relative size of the organization. And so we want to figure out how do we weave that into the visualization as well. You can do that in a couple of ways. If you're just plotting the attrition rates, you could make sure you have the end count the size the number of people in each organization or the number of a trites that that represents and you can do that where you title the organization in the chart, right? So I might say this is the attrition rate for sales and sales has 140 people, by way of example. Another thing you can think about is if that's going to not seem in your face enough, if that 20 percent for the two employees is still going to draw attention, then we can think about well maybe we actually graph the size of the organization or the number of a trites as well. The nice thing that you get there, if we focus on a number of a trites, is you might see that 20 percent attrition rate but you can also see simultaneously, you'd want to align those things that that actually only represents 2 people. And so I'd be apt to an absence of other contacts want to show two graphs that are aligned vertically where the top graph might be my attrition rate and then the graph below that would be number of a trites. So that I'm always taking both of those pieces into account as a way to help ground the attrition rate and understand on a relative basis how to make those comparisons. So frame of reference hugely important there.  You always want to make sure you are including the appropriate frame of reference so that your audience interprets the data correctly. So I think in this case, numbers in addition to the rates are going to help achieve that.

[00:30:27] Leonid writes, “I've recently finished reading storytelling with data. Had a great time with your book, thanks. So, I decided to practice and visualize some examples from the book in Excel. Then I stumbled upon one visual where the top Y-axis labels are bold blue, the other labels are regular grey. But when I try to repeat that, Excel only allows me to edit full series of labels at once. How can I format axis labels individually, so they look like this example?”

[00:30:54] Great question, and one of the tricks that I find myself doing when it comes to brute force Excel, I'd consider this example of this, is actually labeling some things in the cells directly versus in the graph. And so in the particular example here what I've done is the category names are not actually part of the graph. Rather those are in cells in the Excel spreadsheet. And the benefit this gives me is now I can format each of those individually. So, if I want to emphasize the top three in blue, bold font because those are the horizontal bars that are going to emphasize in the graph, which is how it looks in the example that's being mentioned here, that allows me the flexibility to be able to do that. You'd have to be careful because it does mean you have to take care with how you align your graph to those cells. And if you accidentally miss size one of the cells that can create issues that have to be careful about alignment when you do some of the chart pieces in the cells rather than in the graph directly. 

[00:31:59] Related to this,I've had a number of questions about how do you create super category labels in excel, and actually the posts it's up on the blog right now has a step by step how to do this. For example, in an x axis if you have dates and you want to pull out the year separate from the month. I'll be sure to link to that in our show notes. Also, if there are other Excel tips or tricks you'd like to see, send a note to askcole@storytellingwithdata.com and we'll plan to tackle these in future blog posts as well. 

[00:32:33] Alexander writes, “What do you think about gridlines, horizontal or vertical?”

[00:32:38] So for me, gridlines add clutter. They distract from our data and it actually always is for me is a phenomenal thing when you look at a graph with grid lines and then you take those grid lines away because that act of removing the gridlines just makes our data stand out so much more. Now in a case where your audience is going to want to take their finger across and you find out what the exact value is, then rather than have a gridline you might think of just labeling the data directly. Did a post a while back entitled, “Gridlines are Gratuitous,” with specific examples I'll link to that in the show notes as well 

[00:33:20] Angela writes, “How do you feel about using images or pictures in graphs?” 

[00:33:26] This is a timely question because there is some new research out of Northwestern on isotypes that answers this directly. It was a great write up on Steve Haroz's blog, which I'll link to that in the show notes, and he partnered with Steven Franconeri. They're both out of Northwestern Visual Thinking Lab and Robert Kosara from Tableau, where they looked at the impact of using isotypes this is stacking icons to represent data. And what they found is there are actually memory benefits to using this sort of isotypes, which is counter to what a lot of people thought historically. And what they found was it's because in addition to encoding length like you would with the height of a bar, say the quantity is easier to see. They look at example depicting pets where you actually see five little shapes of dogs stacked on top of each other. And those icons help both with the counting, right? So I can remember now not only that that bar was biggest, but also that were five elements within it, as well as memorability because I'm more likely to remember that that represented dogs because the actual data was shaped as dogs. Another finding out of their study was actually that using images behind graphs is distracting. It makes the data harder to read and harder to remember. So don't use images in that way, where it's the backdrop for a graph, but there can be some benefit to the isotype sort of stacking of images. I’ll be sure to link to this study in the show notes and that one is definitely worth a read. 

[00:35:05] Lerone, and I apologize because I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, wrote, “Since you’re entertaining questions, I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask about automation of routine reporting. Everywhere I’ve been, the emphasis has been on automating as much of the monthly/quarterly reports that go to the C-Suite or Board. I understand why the automation is desired (the template is generally established and charts just need to be updated, we only report the info because we’re required by regulations, etc.), but I’m now rethinking the stories we want to tell to our senior leaders and those standardized bar/line charts aren’t telling any story at all. In your book, you suggested providing the routine reports as supplemental info that accompanies an actual storytelling presentation and I intend to try this route in the future. I have to ask though, do you have any other comments/words of advice here, because I can see myself receiving pushback?”

[00:35:56] So a couple of thoughts here. So one, I often draw this distinction between exploratory and explanatory. And for me, any sort of monthly quarterly regular reporting falls more into this exploratory phase where this is data we have to be pushing out on a regular basis. Might be required by regulators or we need to be looking at it regularly in order to understand where things are in line with our expectations? Where are they not in-line with her expectations? Where might there be some interesting stories here? My view is once we've found the interesting stories there is value in taking them out of the regular report and doing what we talk about in our workshops and when I talk about storytelling with data to make those stories clear. And now one doesn't replace the other. We don't tell stories in place of the regular reporting those regular reports serve a purpose. And also, by the way, any time you threaten to take things away from someone they tend to cling onto them more. So the one solution that I'd recommend here is you keep the existing report as it is and you even maybe continue to use it in the same way that you have been, but then you take a step above and beyond that which is you go through it you find the interesting stories you tell those in an effective way and you can bring those out upfront. They can be physically upfront where with the email that goes out saying the regular reports are updated you highlight some of these stories or it could be a short slide deck that sits on top of the regular report. And for the audience it's a way of saying you know hey folks the regular reporting is all there. We are happy to go through that with you to your heart's content, but we've done the extra value added service of already having done that for you. And here upfront telling a story are the interesting things that we need to pay attention to this time. So it's a way of adding something sort of on top of the regular reporting that helps direct attention where you really need it because the challenge with any sort of regular reporting is if there's something really interesting happening on page 87 of the regular deck, it may never see the light of day. And what you'll find is as you build credibility and as your audience starts trusting that yes you really are picking out the right, the high impact stories then you actually win them off their dependence in some cases on that regular reporting over time so that then you can start to scale back on that in cases where it makes sense. 

[00:38:39] Great questions, thanks very much to those who've submitted questions. If you have a question, you can email that to askcole@storytellingwithdata.com for potential inclusion in future podcasts. Before we wrap up, a couple of quick updates. A ton of people shared square area graphs, waffle charts as part of the April 2018 storytelling with data challenge. The recap post on those should be up on the blog in the next few days. We set have a special edition of the storytelling with data challenge in celebration of the First International Chart Day coming up on the 26th of April 2018, details will be announced soon. 

And I can say in the meantime, keep an eye out for good examples of data visualization in the media, and stay tuned to storytellingwithdata.com and Twitter for full details on that special edition of the storytelling with data challenge. The next regular edition of the challenge will be announced on May 1st and will run through May 7th and that's 2018.

 And with that, be sure to follow @storywithdata on Twitter and Instagram. Stay tuned for next time, where I’ll have a special guest and we’ll discuss the idea of “truth” in data and related topics. Thanks for listening!