Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Storytelling with Data CEO Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic Discusses all things Data
456 Plays2 years ago
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic tells stories with data. She is SWD CEO and author of the brand new book storytelling with you: plan, create, and deliver a stellar presentation and best-selling books storytelling with data: let’s practice! and storytelling with data: a data visualization guide for business professionals, which has been translated into a dozen languages, used as a textbook by more than 100 universities and serves as the course book for tens of thousands of SWD workshop participants. For more than a decade, Cole and her team have delivered interactive learning sessions sought after by data-minded individuals, companies, and philanthropic organizations all over the world. They also help people create graphs that make sense and weave them into compelling stories through the popular SWD community, blog, podcast and videos.
Episode Notes
Storytelling with Data
Storytelling with You
Books
Storytelling with You: Plan, Create, and Deliver a Stellar Presentation
Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice!
Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
Better Presentations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks
Related Episodes
Episode #24: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
Episode #141: Tapestry Roundup with Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. On this week's episode of the program, I am joined by Cole Naflick of Storytelling with Data. Cole has a new book out that is launching today, Tuesday, September 27th, out into
Book Launch and Presentation Focus
00:00:31
Speaker
the world. It is called Storytelling with You. It is about doing a better job of presenting data, presenting information. She takes you through the entire
00:00:39
Speaker
process of generating ideas and coming up with the argument, storyboarding, all the things that you're going to need to know to create more effective presentations, to have better meetings, to have better arguments.
Personal Connection and Low-Tech Methods
00:00:54
Speaker
And so Cole and I go way back. We have a great conversation. We talk about the different parts of the book. We talk about the importance of working low-tech.
00:01:02
Speaker
Cole's a big proponent of post-it notes. So we talk about that. We talk about the mixed meeting. What do you do about that mixed audience? And then we dive into a few other things, including whether or not it's good to be different when it comes to giving your presentations. So I hope you'll enjoy this week's episode of the podcast. And I hope you'll check out Cole's new book, Storytelling with You. And you'll check out her various websites, including, of course, Storytelling with Data. So on this week's episode of the show,
00:01:30
Speaker
Cole Natflick joins me and here is our conversation. Hey Cole, good morning, morning, morning, both of our times. I think we're doing- Yeah, it is morning here, but it may not be for those listening in.
Pandemic Impact on Work and Book Timing
00:01:46
Speaker
Late at night listeners enjoying their podcast listening as they get ready for bed or eat their ice cream or whatever. Great to see you again. It's been a while.
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's been too long. It's been like maybe like two and a half years or so, something like that, right? I wonder what happened. And in the meantime, you have a new book out. I do. I'm hosting this podcast episode today.
00:02:15
Speaker
On publication day. So for those listening on September 27, 2022, what a day. The book John's talking about, I'll hold it up because you're on video. I don't know if anyone else is. Storytelling with you, plan, create, and deliver a stellar presentation. And I think timing is really good for this one, which wasn't always the case because this one really, if we think back to the other books, Storytelling with Data that really focus on
00:02:44
Speaker
How do you make a graph that makes sense and then weave that into a story? I think one of the things that's become increasingly apparent to me over time as we've been focused so much on graphs is just the role that the individual plays in that communication process.
Beyond Graphs: Communication Skills
00:02:59
Speaker
And so this book really dives into that. How do you communicate effectively, irrespective of whether it's graphs or anything?
00:03:07
Speaker
From the low-tech planning to creating materials that are going to support you to turning attention on yourself and developing the way you speak in front of others to help make them want to listen. As I say, timing is good because I started writing this book way back in 2018.
00:03:27
Speaker
And then got excited about it for a bit. I wrote the introduction and sketched out the table of contents then and then shelved it and did let's practice instead. And I was just ready to dust it off. And then global pandemic hits and I was like, people may never actually talk to each other in person again, which makes this fully irrelevant. But then when the pendulum started shifting back.
00:03:46
Speaker
It's like, well, no, people are going to talk to each other and to a large extent we've all forgotten how. So yeah, good. I mean, I forgot how to wear a belt. That's for sure. I do not miss wearing belts or, you know, ties, certainly.
00:04:02
Speaker
So help us understand even
From Graphs to Broader Presentation Skills
00:04:05
Speaker
a little bit more. So the progression of your books has been storytelling with data. And that was what, 20, 2015, yeah, 2015. And then the workbook came out 2019. Yeah. Let's practice was 2019. Yep. So did you see
00:04:22
Speaker
aside from everything you just mentioned, were you getting calls for a need for another book that focused more on the presentation side of things? Like, where did you see that? Like that? It's not quite, it's a little bit of a pivot, but we're not. It is. Yeah, it's, it's, it's grounded in the same things that we teach and think about when it comes to how you look at data and particularly when you're communicating it with others, but really you can apply. I was realizing, I think teaching
00:04:47
Speaker
more people and in different spaces. And as you talk about a subject and as you learn about and practice a subject, I think the boundaries of that naturally expand. And so one of the ways over time that that was expanding for me and has been expanding for the team is you might be able to make a great graph. We can see all these examples of people making great graphs that still don't end up serving the intended purpose and not through any fault of the visual design or
00:05:16
Speaker
but because of how that's communicated. And so when we think about basic tenants of communication, which is always what we focused on with the data piece, but applies to almost all of our daily interactions,
Audience-Centric Communication
00:05:31
Speaker
right? It's your audience is the foundation for so much. How do you think critically about who they are and communicate first and foremost for them, not you. And through that, get your needs met and really this,
00:05:44
Speaker
pivoting to thinking about how we communicate generally and being thoughtful about the people on the receiving end of that. So you figure if we have something that's important enough to talk to someone else about, we should care enough to take the time to do that well.
00:06:01
Speaker
And just translating that into the real practical, when you can do that well, people are more inclined to listen. They are more inclined to engage and discuss and hopefully act. And I think that's really part of the driving force behind it was seeing great work.
00:06:18
Speaker
that wasn't having the impact that it could have if some of those pieces had been approached differently. Right. To say we should clarify for everybody that it's not just a book on presenting graphs and data and charts, sort of more of the whole, all of the things that people would present, right? All the texts and all the photographs and the process by doing that.
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah, and the idea is if you have a critical business meeting or an important presentation of some sort, the book basically lays out a process that you can follow to plan your materials, create those materials, and then prepare yourself to deliver.
00:07:00
Speaker
But it doesn't mean you have to have an important presentation on the horizon to find utility here. The more important the thing is, the more time you should spend doing all of this stuff and then we should always be optimizing given time and other constraints.
00:07:16
Speaker
But I think for me, it's similar to how I approached the first book, Storytelling with Data, where that was, I'd been teaching about graphs for a long time, had a lot of examples and just wanted to speed that process up for others, right? Where others don't have to go through all of the trial and error because people before them have done that. And here's what that looks like. And here's how you can approach it.
00:07:37
Speaker
And for me, this book is similar. You know, having gone in front of thousands of audiences over the past decade, the things that I've learned when it comes to presence in a room and, you know, down to nuances like how where you stand makes a difference or how you use your body and your voice makes a huge impact.
00:08:01
Speaker
A common myth is that people exist who are just excellent storytellers, excellent presenters. We've all seen people like that before, where you think to yourself, wow, that was amazing. I was moved by what they said. I couldn't pay attention to anything else. I think those skills existing in the wild are rare. In most cases, you get that experience because that person
00:08:30
Speaker
practice and prepared and did all of these things behind the scenes. And so one myth I wanted to spell is just this idea that, well, that person's a good speaker. I'm not, I'm not naturally a people. I'm not a naturally good communicator because I turn that around to think like I, me, Cole was not a naturally strong communicator. Right. I think back to my first few times in front of audiences and it was like a shaking leaf and, you know, just
00:08:56
Speaker
trying to get through it. But then over time, because I became so passionate about the topic, that becomes contagious. And so I ended up putting myself out there in ways that were different over time and started seeing very different results as a result of that. And so using each time that you're in front of people to
00:09:20
Speaker
learn something new about how that interaction goes and how you present yourself or how you present your materials and rolling that then into the next time. So for me that whole trial and error process over time of being the astute observer of my audiences so that I can understand when did something just work really well and how do I lean further into that or people just kind of stiffened.
00:09:44
Speaker
frowns on their faces. Are they mad? Are they confused? Should I stop and ask questions about this to understand or did I just do something that I have to make sure I don't do that again? And so the book tries to speed up that process and really just help readers think about things in a critical way so that they're optimizing all of the different puzzle pieces each time they present an important setting, you know, whether it's a weekly team
ROI: Presentations vs. Data Visualizations
00:10:11
Speaker
meeting or, you know, they're getting up on a stage.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yeah. One of the things that I have found is that people
00:10:18
Speaker
see the return on investment in presentations differently than with data visualizations. And I think it's because you put out a graph that gets picked up by the New York Times or you get a lot of hits on your blog or you get a bunch of retweets on Twitter and it's that really good single image and it gets picked up. Presentations, it's often harder to see that tangible ROI, right? Because you get up in front of the audience
00:10:46
Speaker
The other things you described were not ROI either. Something being popular. I'll just say it's different than the lens that I would put on that, data visualization or presentation. Because for me, the successful one, what you need to see is the right sort of discussion is happening or a good decision was made. It's not how popular was it or were people talking about the graph after the meeting. If they're talking about the graph after the meeting, you've got problems because the graph's not the point of any of it.
00:11:16
Speaker
It's the message, the understanding, the.
00:11:20
Speaker
acting differently or in a more informed way because of what you now know, whether that was achieved through a graph or other means. So for me, the efficacy of presentations is just the how to characterize it, like the quality of conversations at an organization is getting better. Right. And I guess sometimes it's impossible to measure, right? Sometimes it's impossible to know. I mean, it's one thing when you're when you're presenting or having meanings inside your organization.
00:11:48
Speaker
It's another thing when, say, you go to a conference and you give a talk, and maybe there's some Q&A afterwards, but then maybe you go on to the next session. You go on to the next concurrent session. And it's hard to know whether your presentation changed minds or helped people do better. And that's just generally just getting that feedback after your presentations. Well, and so one thing you can do is just be intentional about
00:12:17
Speaker
getting that feedback because there's always some to be had if you look hard enough. And so one of the first things you have to decide is if you want it, right, you're going to act on it because getting a feedback in absence of wanting to listen to it. The only feedback you want is that was perfect. Don't ask for feedback. But the more you can do in any scenario to
00:12:41
Speaker
create that feedback loop if it doesn't exist naturally. And so at a conference that could mean, you know, instead of dashing out to catch your flight, you stick around and chat with people and see what those interactions are like, right? What is the body posture of the other people? What sort of words are they using?
00:12:56
Speaker
And the body posture piece you can see while you're presenting as well, so you can get some of that feedback. But yeah, to the point, does it stick, right? Did I change minds? That's a little harder to get, but that we should seek out so that we can understand those sorts of things. And I think one thing that I recommend, I talk about this in the book, is when you're working on
00:13:19
Speaker
improving how you present, which I think everyone can do, right? I use every time I'm in front of other people to try to refine something and learn and improve, that you can be pretty observant about yourself and how you're doing. So if you go into a presentation and maybe something that you want to work on is filler words. You have a common filler word that you want to get rid of.
00:13:42
Speaker
So one, you can be aware of that going in, remind yourself of it. And when you do that, it'll be top of mind. You will know then when you say it, right? Because you've got it in your head. You can plant someone in that audience to listen for it. And I use filler words just as an example because it's a really discreet thing that's easy to measure.
00:14:03
Speaker
So you can do things to understand how that went. And then I think the process of reflecting, and it's one of the places where keeping some sort of ongoing document or journal just to say, what am I working on this time? And then reflecting back, how did that go? Because it's hard for individuals to see progress in their presentation skills directly.
00:14:25
Speaker
And so by having this, you know, then it allows you to flip back and be like, oh, wow, back three months ago, I was working on these things. Like now that's not even on my mind because I've continued to push past.
00:14:35
Speaker
You know, it's funny the way you describe some of these things. We were talking before we started recording, you know, catching up on families and whatnot. And I was telling you my son is working on his baseball skills. And we were at the cages last night with him and some friends. And, you know, I was saying, you know, you guys, if you want to make the next level, you have to work at it. You know, every day you got to get out there and hit off the tee for an hour. And, you know, the one kid that I'm working with last night, he's like, oh, I can feel that, you know, my hands are dropping. And I'm like, okay, so for the next, you know,
00:15:03
Speaker
20 pitches in the cage, just focus on the hands, not dropping. Just focus on that one thing, because you're going to do it 500 times. So just focus on that one thing now and then focus on the next thing next. Well, and then that becomes muscle memory. So now the next time you get to draw on that piece and focus on something new, right? So your game continues to get better. Yeah. I mean, how many talks do you give where you just could like do it almost without thinking?
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, there definitely are some and there's utility in having that brain power free. And because for me, that was when I started being able to be really observant in how can I use this room? How do I use the space? Yeah. Understanding how me doing different things impacted an audience simply by observing their responses. Have you found that after two plus years of doing what I'm guessing is countless
00:15:57
Speaker
presentations on Zoom or whatever, that that has helped or hindered how you now, as we get back to the real world, how has that helped or hindered how you present live?
00:16:08
Speaker
You know, one thing that I think, and we've
Virtual vs. Live Presentation Skills
00:16:11
Speaker
always been fans of recording ourselves. It's one of the ways that we learn at Storytelling with Data when we have new hires come in recording yourself and watching it back is a big part of that learning process, which is painful always, but really eye-opening in useful ways. But I think Zoom made that process even easier
00:16:30
Speaker
for us. And so we certainly have been watching ourselves more than ever before. And even we'll have two data storytellers teaching a workshop together. So they're not only experiencing their own part of that presentation, but they're seeing their co-presenters
00:16:46
Speaker
And so it makes it easy to be able to give feedback afterwards in ways that's useful. So I think there's been some useful things for sure. And then just the reach, obviously, where we can be talking to people in a completely different part of the world, having not needed to travel and spend the time and the cost to do that. Although I would happily travel to do more in person at this moment in time. I think we've gone too far in the other direction. But that's another topic for another day.
00:17:15
Speaker
Yeah, the space you get is more constrained as a speaker in virtual land.
Engaging Virtual Presentations
00:17:22
Speaker
I figure you've been flattened. You've been reduced in both size and dimension. And so I think of myself as an introvert, you have to put out a lot more to get less back because your audience has been reduced to two dimensions and reduced in size as well.
00:17:39
Speaker
But it does help you focus, back to your baseball example, just focus on where your hands are. When you're in flat land and you don't even know if people can see you, you might be a tiny thing in the corner of their window, now I can really focus on how I use my voice. And you can be really intentional about doing things that will help get people's attention or maintain it.
00:18:04
Speaker
That's even an argument for maybe having camera off some time to be able to do that. And actually, when you record yourself, and I talk about this in the book, but I recommend you watch it back a few times. You watch back once just to get over yourself and the fact that you sound different and look different than you thought you did, that everybody has that reaction. So watch it once just to get through that. Watch it again. And when I say record yourself, it doesn't have to be a whole presentation. A slide or two or talking for a couple minutes is enough to pick up on things that you
00:18:33
Speaker
do well and things you might want to adjust. But so watch it once to get over yourself. Watch it a second time where you've turned down the volume and you're just watching yourself. How does that look? Are you like all over the place? When I watch myself, I noticed that I just, I move.
00:18:49
Speaker
It's still too much. And it's good to move. Motion is attention grabbing, but I move my head around a little too much, I think, when I'm sitting. But that's fine. And then you watch it a third time with the video minimized or out of your line of sight where you just listen to yourself. It's amazing what you can pick up and curb immediately when you put some attention to it. Yeah. I find that the energy is much harder on Zoom, especially when folks don't have their cameras on.
00:19:18
Speaker
It's impossible, yeah, without cameras. I have this idea that Zoom, you should be able to load up a thing that sits on top of Zoom, which is just a bunch of people nodding and smiling at you. Smiling a little, yeah. Everyone wants one, so we give you a high five. Yeah, exactly, every once in a while. The energy is harder.
00:19:39
Speaker
Well, and so then that's where you can kind of trick yourself or you can do things to make that not be the case. And so actually I know with our workshops, it ends up being when you can't see other people, our presenters are presenting to each other, right? At least get that visual cue because you're right. All it takes is having a person or two in your line of sight that you can tell are paying attention and nodding and smiling.
00:20:01
Speaker
And so in complete absence of that, what I'll do is just imagine that that's the case, right? That I am just giving the best presentations ever and people are nodding and they're loving it, right? I don't have any visual cues to tell me otherwise, so I might as well play into that. Yeah.
00:20:17
Speaker
Um, you mentioned earlier, um, you use the phrase low tech and I wanted to ask you about that because you early on in the book, you talk about using some low tech techniques.
Planning with Low-Tech Methods
00:20:28
Speaker
You talk about post-it notes and some other things. And I just wanted to get you to talk a little bit about that and why, and you, you've spent a lot of time in storytelling with data focusing on the low tech post-it notes sketching. Um, and I wanted to get you just to talk a little bit about why you think that low tech approach is so important for folks.
00:20:46
Speaker
Absolutely. So in the new book, there are three sections, plan, create, and deliver. So the entire plan section, it's the yellow section in the book, is focused on all of these sorts of low tech activities that you mentioned. There's a chapter on audience, one on getting really clear and concise on your message, on storyboarding, compiling the pieces that are going to support that, and then forming those into a story. And the value of low tech is the fact that it's slow.
00:21:16
Speaker
and it forces us to pause and be reflective and think about things like, okay, if that's my audience, well first, who are they? Can I narrow that group further? What are their shared interests?
00:21:31
Speaker
how can I communicate in a way that's going to be effective for that group? And then what are the pieces I can put together, right? You've mentioned Post-it notes, which are one of my favorite tools of all time because they're small, they lend themselves to be easily rearranged, have a bit of stick so you can kind of explore different ideas without committing to them, different narrative flows or ways of organizing your materials.
00:21:55
Speaker
And so for me, the benefit of low tech is it forces you to pause. You have to physically put pen to paper and think about each mark as a result of that. There's good thought that goes into how we approach communicating when we do that.
00:22:12
Speaker
The counter to that is I don't spend any time planning. I go straight to PowerPoint or Keynote, right? Insert your favorite slide ware there. And I just start making slides. And I'm not making slides for my audience. I'm making slides for me. I'm making slides for my data. I'm making slides for my project.
00:22:29
Speaker
Whereas when you start low tech, you automatically have to think about your audience and what you're creating and why you're creating it. And that, even if you don't do every bit of it, any amount of time you spend there is going to make the product better because you're able to iterate in fast ways and explore different ideas. Maybe you even talk through some of these ideas with someone else. And so then you get this plan of attack.
00:22:56
Speaker
that you've vetted in different ways to then bring it into your tools and start building the materials that will support you in light of that specific reason that you're communicating and who's on the other end of it and all that goodness. Do you take the same approach for every talk that you give?
00:23:14
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, one should always optimize given how critical something is and the different constraints that are faced. If I'm doing something important, then yes, I do all of this every time. And I try to not do things that I think are not important, which means I'm doing more of this more of the time than I'm not.
00:23:37
Speaker
writing the book, for example. So for me, that's an important thing, right? It's not getting up in front of people and talking, but you do need to think about very similar things when it comes to, well, why are you doing this in the first place? Who is your audience? What's your message? How are you going to put the pieces together?
00:23:51
Speaker
And so, yeah, I do exactly this process when I write. And it's one of those things that can feel awkward and slow the first couple of times, but everything pretty much is like that. And it just takes going through it a couple of times to really experience the benefits of planning in that way, and then be able to
00:24:14
Speaker
utilize that and make a better experience for everybody, for you, for your colleagues, for anyone you're talking to or giving the material to at the end of it, better because of that planning that went into it.
00:24:28
Speaker
And so I think this stuff applies to communication in general, almost irrespective of medium or level of importance. If we all did this, we would all have better conversations. Yeah, right. And you mentioned colleagues. I mean, I often wonder about, especially sort of younger and more junior folks talking to their bosses or their managers and not preparing for those meetings. It seems like we've taken the word presentation
00:24:56
Speaker
And in some ways distorted it, that it means standing in front of some big audience on a stage with slides behind you, as opposed to thinking about almost every meeting is a presentation in some, you know, it's a spectrum more than a. I wouldn't say almost that every meeting is a presentation, right? How formal it is or what it looks like will vary. But every time you open your mouth, you are communicating and presenting something, some idea, some concept, some
00:25:25
Speaker
some feeling to someone else. And the more thought we can put into that to make that not a fantastic experience for us, but a fantastic experience first and foremost for the others to
Communicating with Diverse Audiences
00:25:37
Speaker
whom we're communicating, the better communication everyone's going to have.
00:25:42
Speaker
I want to ask you about the mixed audience. So you mentioned this upfront in the book, and I think it's one of the questions I get a lot. And I think it's a hard answer, right? So how do you think about you're going to go give a talk? Maybe you don't know necessarily, you know, who's in the audience. And so how do you approach that sort of big mixed audience?
00:26:02
Speaker
Yeah, mixed audiences are hard, but that's kind of nice, right? Because if all of this stuff are really easy, it would look the same every time and that would be no fun. So I think of a mixed audience as being comprised of people who have sufficiently different needs and interests that are going to be hard to hit simultaneously.
00:26:21
Speaker
And so one of the things you can start by doing when you're facing a mixed audience, you've already thought through like, do I have to communicate to everyone at once? Sometimes we don't, and then there can be value breaking them apart. But assuming that the answer is yes, you have to communicate to everyone all at once, right? This could be
00:26:36
Speaker
conference presentation as you mentioned or it might be you're presenting to a steering committee made up of colleagues from different parts of an organization or in the book I go through a case study that we revisit every chapter and the scenario there is I'm a consultant I'm presenting to my client group who is this mixed
00:26:54
Speaker
a group of people. And so one thing you can start by doing is thinking through where is their common ground? Where, you know, even though this group is diverse, what could unite them? Because that can become a point from which you can communicate. So I'll just go to the example that I use in the book, right? I mentioned it as this mixed group of my
00:27:18
Speaker
client people from different parts of the client organization. The finance person is going to care about something different than marketing, than all the rest. One thing I know unites them is
00:27:33
Speaker
that the perception of the brand remains high. And so, OK, if I know that, then I can get into things like we can spend time on the financials because I can ground that in real. Not everyone may care about what the balance sheet looks like. Are we making money? Are we running things in a sustainable way? Like all of this stuff then feeds into brand. And if I can explicitly then make those connections, now I've made something that may have come across as irrelevant for part of my group. I've made it relevant.
00:28:00
Speaker
And you can think of the different forms that that would take. So that would be one way, right? Find common ground, use that as a way to communicate or to how you frame things. Another can be look for where there are differences and how you can share those in ways that might be productive. So for example, when I was at Google, we would do this massive employee survey every year.
00:28:22
Speaker
And when we were going through the process of getting people to understand results and how to interpret those, there was some parts of the organization where for a given leader, we wouldn't just show their scores altogether. We'd show their scores plus their peers so that they'd have a basis of comparison.
00:28:43
Speaker
and we'd be able to then have a conversation among those broader groups where everyone could see the overall, everyone could see their group and now how they compared across these different dimensions to others. So even though the numbers were different, we saw how they all fed together and I could actually learn from some of those differences. There are some groups, by the way, where we absolutely could not do that because the competitive nature between peers was not
00:29:05
Speaker
healthy. And so it comes back to audience, right? But those are a couple of strategies for making it work when you need to communicate to a mixed audience. And there are more that I share in the book. There's a whole section on that challenge and ideas for approaching it. Okay. So someone goes and grabs your book, they go through it. Do you think they are going to then go to their local, whatever their school's PTA meeting, and they're just going to like,
00:29:34
Speaker
cringe the whole time? Like, what's in there? Do you mean watching other presentations? Yeah. Well, I mean, isn't that always the case, right? You learn how to make a nice looking graph, and then every other graph you ever see is hard on your eyes? Yeah. The hope is that sharing the sort of stuff broadly is that we all get better. And I think leading by example. And so if you're in an organization, all of the meetings are
00:30:02
Speaker
You don't want to be sitting there, right? It's hard to sit through. Be the one that's different. Put some of these strategies into place and focus on changing the way you communicate. And yeah, if communication, if the examples you get in your day to day of communication are not great, look for other examples and try to refine yourself in ways that others will pick up on and hopefully want to do too.
00:30:28
Speaker
Okay, I was gonna let you go, but then you said something. So I want to ask you a more question. So okay, so but last question, last question. So so you just mentioned, try to be different. And I have heard from lots of different people, I even had someone said to me once as early on in my career, do I really want to be the person who stands out? Now, this was referencing like an academic conference, you know, and there's, there are some hierarchies in maybe more so an academia right where junior folks, there's a
00:30:58
Speaker
There's sort of the double-edged sword there, right? But what would you say to someone who says, do I really want to be that someone who stands out? Because maybe my manager's going to think, you know, this person has, you know, they've gone too far. They've, you know, they've any sort of thing you could imagine that you'd be criticized against. All right. Well, if your manager says that, then there are other issues.
00:31:23
Speaker
No, I think it's a good point though and the phrase that you pick up on right because there's a sound bite of you know Be different isn't necessarily and particularly for those young in career So it's a first and foremost be an observer because you have to know when it makes sense to
00:31:42
Speaker
do things the way they've always been done because they've always been done that way. And there's some historical reason for that, right? Always assume, particularly going into a new role, always assume that people around you are smart and have made the decisions that have been made historically for good reason. This would be something I remember at Google coming in, new hires that would start questioning things before building up the context of why it was that way.
00:32:08
Speaker
Because oftentimes there is specific organizational context that makes it all make sense. And so you can actually shoot yourself in the foot by going too hard there. So starting by playing the role of the observer. But then understanding, what can you learn in the environment you're in? Where are people doing things that you aspire to? How do you break that apart in ways that you can use to refine your own skills? But then also, where are there areas that you shouldn't propagate further?
00:32:38
Speaker
And so if you're having a lot of ineffective meetings, like, yeah, I would want to be the one that's different there who has effective meetings.
Standing Out in Presentations
00:32:46
Speaker
But this isn't be different for the sake of being different. This is be thoughtful about where you put your time and energy and do that in smart ways that will serve you well and that will also hopefully serve the organization well.
00:32:58
Speaker
Yeah. Terrific. Cool. Congrats on the new book. I'm very excited to see it out today. And yeah, and good luck with everything. Great to see you again. Thank you. And I'll just have people go to storytelling with you.com where you can see all the places to order it. You can download sample content and if you read it and love it, I will appreciate your stellar review. Thanks. Cool. Great to see you. Thanks for having me, John.
00:33:23
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you'll check out Cole's work. I hope you check out the new book. And if you'd like to support the podcast, please rate or review it on your favorite podcast provider, or support it financially by going to PayPal, by Patreon, or signing up for our Winnow app, where I communicate every week via text message, different data visualization, tips, tricks, and strategies. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:33:54
Speaker
The whole team helps bring you the Policy Vis podcast. Intro and outro music is provided by the NRIs, a band based here in Northern Virginia. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Satsuki-Ramirez, and each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:34:17
Speaker
The Policy Vis podcast is ad-free and supported by listeners, but if you would like to help support the show financially, please visit our Winnow app, PayPal page, or Patreon page, all linked and available at policyvis.com.