Elizabeth Warren tells a story about data

I pre-ordered Garr Reynolds's second book, Presentation Zen Design, because he makes me better at what I do. It's been on my desk for a few weeks, and I pick it up from time to time and think about his "ways to think like a designer." One of those ways is "Become a master storyteller." Okay, that's on everyone's list these days. I read what Garr says, and I don't feel like it's made me any better as a storyteller. I've been wondering how I would deal with that topic.

And then, last night, I was thinking about Elizabeth Warren, and how every introduction of her starts off by saying, essentially, that she was born and raised in Oklahoma and now here she is, incredibly, against all odds, a professor at Harvard. I happen to know there are lots of ways to grow up in Oklahoma, and at bedtime on a school night I suddenly had to find out exactly what part of Oklahoma Professor Warren grew up in, and what was it like. I never even found out what town in Oklahoma, but I did end up watching a lecture she gave at Berkeley. She came with a bunch of statistics comparing family budgets as they looked in 1970 and in 2006. All on PowerPoint graphs. But here's how she talked about them:

You may be surprised to know that there's a place in the federal government where they've kept track of everything a family spends, going back over a hundred years. When I found out about that, it was like I had died and gone to heaven. So I called them up and actually talked to a real person. I asked him if we could slice and dice those figures and he asked me to tell him exactly what I wanted. So I said, give me a mom, a dad and two kids, and tell me what they spent on clothing in 1970 and in 2006. Because, you know, we have these $200 Nikes now and all these special stores in the malls. And he came back and said the difference was 30 percent. I was sure he meant 30 percent more in 2003, but he meant 30 percent less. And the next eight times I talked to him, it was with the firm belief that he was reading the numbers wrong. But no, so I said let's look at appliances, because you know we didn't have to have microwaves or cappuccino makers in 1970. Only to find out that we spent less on appliances in 2006. And so we looked at food, and not just at the grocery store, but fast food restaurants. And the numbers showed that we were spending less in 2006...

Now, those may not be her exact words. I didn't go back and look at the video this morning. I'm going on memory. And I'm also telling the story the way I would retell it at lunch today. Check it out for yourselves -- I think you will find that my version is accurate, if a little compressed. And I could tell you the rest of what she said, but that's not the point. The point is this: If her slides were in Garr Reynolds's book, or Nancy Duarte's, they would be the "before" example, not the "after." And I'm all for making them better. But despite that handicap, she kept me up last night long past my bedtime. It wasn't the slides. And it wasn't what I could learn from the slides. It was because she took me on the same journey she had been on. Oh my goodness, the government has these numbers? There's a real person I can talk to? They will slice them any way I want? The results came back and everything I thought I knew was wrong?

That's how you become a master storyteller. By telling the stories only you could tell.