In this 15‑minute interactive workshop, the facilitator (Speaker A) introduces the concept of data storytelling as a crucial skill for technical presentations. Drawing on a Databricks framework, six steps are outlined: understand context, choose an appropriate visual, eliminate clutter, draw audience attention, think like a designer, and finally tell a story. The session then moves to hands‑on practice with three data visualizations. First, a call‑center dashboard is examined, revealing that while agents resolve ~90 % of issues, about 60 % of customers remain dissatisfied, suggesting process‑level problems. Participants (Venkat and Ankur) craft narratives around this data, highlighting distractions, interruptions, and tool deficiencies as productivity blockers. Next, a Gates Foundation chart on gender gaps is explored, showing early marriage (≈21 % of girls), unpaid household work, and a 26 % workforce earnings gap between men and women. Participants again generate stories, emphasizing school dropout, early marriage, and unequal labor burdens as root causes. Throughout, the facilitator models alternative narratives, stresses design choices (color, theme), and encourages participants to write their own stories. The session concludes with a reminder of the upcoming Day 7 focus on mindset, limiting beliefs, and visualization techniques, urging learners to keep practicing storytelling outside their comfort zones.
Chapters
Hi everyone, welcome to day 6 of StorySpark session, and today we are going to take it a bit, a notch higher. This is going to be a different session altogether, a concept which I have not talked much, but which is very, very important, especially when it comes to technical presentation, and that is called data storytelling. We all know there are a lot of data with us, but how do we tell a story? How do we make sure that what we are projecting through our data is making sense to our audience. So I am going to share screen and what we are going to do is we are going to take a few samples and I will try to give a story about for one of them and then what we will do is we will collectively go through some more examples I have collected and we will try to see how do we add a story to those. So let us start with the first one. So I got this good slide from a website named Databricks. They say that if you are doing a storytelling with data, these are some of the step— steps to follow. Number 1 is you need to understand what is the context, what is it that you want to present. Then choose an appropriate visual— what is the graph, what is the chart or bar that you want to present. You need to have that visual, appropriate visual. Then you need to eliminate clutter because sometimes we have too much of data and we want to ensure that we are only representing data which is relevant for that particular audience, for that particular story. Number 4 is you need to draw attention to where you want your audience to. Even in data, you want to make sure that you are pointing out to the right direction. Number 5 is that you need to think like a designer, where you need to think how I can make it better, how I can How I can put the right color, right theme. And the step number 6, the most important, is when you are presenting, you need to tell a story. So that's the whole storytelling with data process. The image is by a website called Databricks. Now what we are going to do is we are going to go to another example. So this one I will take and then we'll collectively go through some more examples. So this is a dashboard of the call center analysis, and if I have to put a story around that, this is one of those call center, typical call center where they, there is a lot of improvement needed while they have a number of satisfied customers, but we can see almost 60% of the customers are unsatisfied. Which means is there are lot of process that needs to be improved. The customers are not at all happy and this is changing based on department to department, but if you see in larger context, there is not much difference. Whether it's payment system, whether it's streaming, whether it's admin support, it is around 60% overall where customers are not happy and they need to do something about it. Now what is interesting is their agents' activity is pretty good except one agent. All the agents are 90% able to resolve the issue, which means that there is a bigger problem with their call center. They need to look into the process of even if their agents are performing good, their customers are not satisfied. They need to find out what is the reason. Is it a process? Documentation or something else that needs to improve. So you see, I put a picture. I didn't say this all the data, but I've tried to put a picture around that they need to work on the process. So this is an example. Now what we'll do is next we'll go to another example, and I'm gonna give you about 30 seconds to think about how can we build a story about the graph that will show on the screen, and then we'll go and try to decode that. So let's bring this one. Okay, so take a look of it, look at it for about 30 seconds, and then we'll go around the room. All right, last 5 seconds. Okay, so, Venkat, do you want to attempt to tell this data story?
Yes, um, storms are more distracted due to phone calls and other personal things. They, they couldn't, uh, manage their time. They couldn't address their customers on time. There are 20% interruptions during the calls, so it reduces the productivity. If you would like to improve the productivity, reduce the Interruptions and distractions and increase the time management.
Really good. That's awesome. Okay, Ankurji, do you want to try? Unmute yourself. Please unmute yourself. I think you are on mute.
So there is this boy Deepak working in a call center, and as he is wanting to do his work, but he's very much distracted because of his social media, and the people keep coming and talking to him, and he wants to go and talk to people. He's not able to concentrate on his work. He doesn't know what tool to use in his work. His time is getting wasted. He doesn't know how to manage his time. And more than that, he he doesn't even know what he wants to do. He's not sure of what he wants to do, and because of that, his productivity is going down and going down. I want to help this boy in some way or the other by telling him how he can reduce his distractions and interruptions and improve his tools. And to make him— I want to ask him some questions, how and why it is not allowing him to move forward in his life. Thank you so much.
Very interesting. And yeah, very good attempt by both of you. And again, the same, the data is the same, and we all can build a story and we can say another way of this could be that, no, why, what many people think that they are not being productive is because they don't have the right tools. But the reality is only 3% is that true, that you are, you are not productive because you don't have the right tool. The major challenge, the 50% of the challenge lies with too much of distraction like social media or constant interruption by colleagues. So if you want to be productive, you have to make sure that you are in a place where there are less distraction and less interruption. So some of the things could be putting your phone on silent or using headphones so that people interrupt only when they have to interrupt and not get into chitchat. This has the potential to improve your productivity by up to 50%. So that's another interpretation of the same data, right? So let's do one more round and we'll see. Uh, I want to bring— okay, so this one, I'm not sure, are you able to clearly see this? It looks like there is a lot of, uh, it's not clear, right? So let's go to another one. This is a, uh, one of the examples from Gates Foundation, Melinda and Bill Gates. So let's take 30 seconds to think about the narrative, and then we'll go around the room to tell the story. Okay, last 5 seconds. All right, so let's start with, uh, Dr. Anka this time. So how would you tell the story of the Gates Foundation?
So when I see a girl and a boy, let us say Rashmi— names have to be Anna and Gauri. They are born in poor families. They are surviving just by very difficulty up to the age of 5. They have very little education, and the family gets them married. 21% of the people are getting married at the age of 19 or even before the age of 18. Because of this early marriage, they are not able to make their career. They are not able to get the proper work in their lives, and ultimately in their life they get less opportunities. The main thing what I see here is the gender gap, especially for the girl and the boy. The girl, the girl is going even lower down the stream because she's got married, then she spends, then she has all the work to do in the house, which is completely unpaid work. And 26% of the gap is in the workforce because she's getting less money. And the boy is going up and up, not very high, but more than the little girl. And the Gowri is getting less work. She's just going and doing all the work and unpaid work. Children getting married, and the boy is going higher in his life, getting more work, more, more money, but still the opportunities are not so much. So there's a big gender gap which is shown in this diagram by showing that the boy is getting better opportunities than the girl. Over to you.
Thank you. Awesome, very nice. Um, yes, Venkat, do you want to attempt?
Yes, uh, this graph shows Gender gap, boy, due to the diverse environment, he goes ahead and learn and look to other people. But the girl, her growth is affected because of marriage and children, and in the— they spend their time in, in kitchen. So they didn't see the outside world. This is the gender gap.
Great, very good attempt, both of you. And if I have to again put a narrative with my own perspective, it would be that there's a lot of talk about gender gap in workforce, and people say there is a 26% gap between women and men. But if we have to look at that, we also have to go back and look at the data, look at the perspective of why this gap is happening. And this gap, even though both girls and boys are— even if they are born in the similar circumstances, what happens is as soon as the schooling starts, we can see there is a drop happening for the girls, where number of girls drop within 2 years of schooling while boys continue. And then around 1/5, 21% of the girls get married before the age of 18, which means that they don't have more opportunity and they have to do the marriage and corresponding responsibility. And also they get fully employed, immersed in the household work as much as they are spending 3 times on the unpaid homework where they don't get any money, they don't get any salary, but they have to do all the household works while the men continue to work on their career, continue to work on the economic upliftment. And that is why when you come to a certain age, you see there is a 26% gap. So if we have to fill that gap, we have to start from the very basics where we make sure that the girls are not dropping the school within early years, they're not getting married just before 18th year, and they're not spending too much time on household work, and they're also very career-focused. So that is how I will represent this story, uh, taking it— what is the outcome to what was the core. Now we are at the top of the 15 minutes, so I am going to share a picture, and this is for everyone who is watching our video, that attempt this.
I'm—
we are not going to do this over here, but I will put this picture for 30 seconds. Think about what could be the story and write it either in the comment, or if you're part of the Confident Storytelling Hub, put it in our WhatsApp group for others. And this is the picture. 5 more seconds, and I'm gonna leave with this. So thank you so much everyone for joining day 6 of StorySpark session. Tomorrow is going to be— we will be completing one week, which is going to be day 7. Which is where we will also be completing the basics and different types of storytelling. So after tomorrow's session, we are going to shift gears on the weekly theme of the Storython. So tomorrow is also the Storython session 2, which is where we will talk about mindset and limiting beliefs and empowering beliefs. So from Friday onwards Except the gap that I will have for travel, we will be talking about the different strategies to work on limiting belief, work on visualization, work on different tools to basically get into the right mindset. So thank you so much, have a great day, and as I say every time, until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and keep going out of your comfort zone. See you tomorrow for Day 7 of StorySpark session.
