What is the difference between sharing data and telling a compelling story?
Raiders of the Lost Ark!
You read that right…it’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Please take a moment to think about how you would describe the movie in two or three sentences to someone unfamiliar with the story.
If our goal is to simply summarize the key data observed, we could extract the following:
- Dr. Indiana Jones, a renowned archeologist, and expert in the occult.
- The U.S. Government hires him to find the Ark of the Covenant, which is believed to hold the original Ten Commandments.
- Nazis are also after the ark, and battle Dr. Jones at every turn, until he successfully obtains it and hands the Ark over to the U.S. Government.
Factually correct and covers the main points. It’s also unlikely to hold anyone’s attention and thus is highly forgettable.
There is no giant boulder, snake pits, headpiece to the staff of Ra, bare-knuckle brawl in the shadow of a moving airplane propeller, or a warehouse where “top men” forget essential things.
These story elements are woven around the data points, bringing them to life and searing them into our collective consciousness.
If you want to deliver data in a way that is both insightful and impactful…weaving it inside a good story is enormously powerful.