6.8 Exercise

Exercise 6.8: identify the tension As we've discussed. tension is a key component of story. Together. we practiced identifying the tension and a corresponding resolving action in Exercise 6.3. Here's an opportunity for you to do some additional practice on your own. Read each of the following scenarios [some may be familiar from their use elsewhere). For each, first identify the tension. Next, identify an action the audience can take to resolve the tension you've identified, SCENARIO 1: You are the Chief Financial Officer for a national retailer Your team of financial analystsjust completed a review of Q1 and have identified that the company is likely to end the fiscal year with a loss of 545 million if operating expenses and sales follow the latest projections. Because of a recent economic downturn; an increase in sales is unlikely. Therefore, you believe the projected loss can only be mitigated by controlling operating expenses and that management should implement an expense control policy ("expense control in ative ABC") immediately. You will be reporting the Q1 quarterly results at an upcoming Board of Directors meeting and are planning your communicationia summary of financial results in a PPT deckithat you will present to the board with your recommendation. SCENARIO 2: Imagine you work for a regional medical group. You and several colleagues havejust wrapped up an evaluation of Suppliers A. E; C, and D for the XYZ Products category. The data shows that historical usage has varied a lot by medical facility. with some using primarily Supplier E and others using primarily Supplier D [and only limited historical use of Suppliers A and C]. Vou've also found that satisfaction is highest across the board for Supplier B. You've analyzed all of the data and realized there are significant cost savings in going With a single or dual supplier contract. However, either of these will mean changes for some medical centers relative to their historical supplier mix. You are preparing to present to the steering committee, where a majority vote will determine the decision. SCENARIO 3: Craveberry yogurt is the new product that the food manufacturing company you are employed by is preparing to launch. The product team on which you work decided to do one more round oftaste testing to get a final gauge of consumer sentiment You've analyzed the results of the taste test and believe there are a couple of changes that should be mademinor things. but they could have major impact when it comes to consumer reception in the marketplace. You have a meeting with the Head of Product, who will need to decide whether to delay launch to allow time to make these changes, or to go to market With Craveberry as it is. Let's step away from data and graphs for the next few exercises and dive deeper into elements of story. Tension is a criticaland often overlookedcomponent when we communicate with data When i teach the lesson on story in my workshops. i often get quite dramatic in my delivery, particularly in the discussion about tension This is to emphaSize the paint, but shouldn't be taken as ifwe have to create drama for our stories to be effective It's not about making up tensioniifthere weren't tenSion present. we'd have nothing to communicate about in the first place. Rather, it's about figuring out what tension exists and how we can illuminate it for our audience When we do this well; we get their attention and are in a better position to motivate them to act. Thinking back to some of the lessons we practiced in Lhaptei 'i getting to know our audience and what matters to them cannot be emphasized enough. it's easy to focus on what matters to us. but that's not a good way to influence. Rather. we need to step outside of ourselves and think about what tension exists for our audience. This relates back to one of the components of the Big idea that we discussed: what is at stake? When we've effectively identified the tension in a situation then the action we want our audience to take becomes how they can resolve the tension in the data story [we'll talk about this idea further in a number of the forthcoming exercises in this chapter)