-: All right, so we wanna work to become better communicators
better communicators with data.
We're gonna start off there, becoming a better communicator.
And listen, as communicators in today's world,
we face a lot of challenges.
Okay? There's a bunch of them.
But none of them is bigger than this.
As a species, humans now generate more data every two days
than was generated from the dawn of time.
all the way up until 2003.
Well into the dot com boom there, right?
So thousands of years of data being created every two days.
Now, what may surprise some of you
is this quote from Eric Schmidt,
he said this in 2010.
So it's not every two days,
it's like, I don't know, every two hours at this point.
So this isn't news, right?
Our audiences are doing a million things at once.
They're multitasking.
Most importantly, the thing I want you to really remember
and think about,
is that your audience is very impatient, right?
We spend all day scan, scan, scanning on our phones,
and we're gonna click one out of a thousand links
that we crossed paths, okay?
So this is your audience.
You have to acknowledge that.
And by the way, this is your audience
whether you're talking to the general public
or even in a professional setting.
You're speaking at a conference, presenting your science.
You know what? They're still distracted.
They're still doing a million things.
They're still impatient.
You gotta really connect with those people.
Now, there is a solution, okay?
To this general problem in communications,
which is something that I developed
that I call the "4 by 4 Model for Knowledge Content."
The basic idea of the 4 by 4 Model
is that you have essentially four layers of content,
four levels of content that you create.
And the basic idea is you need to get the right people
to the right level for them at the right time.
And the only way to do that is to step them into depth.
So the topmost level is what I call the water cooler moment.
So let's say we were all standing around the water cooler.
Maybe I started the conversation
and I was talking about the Boston Bruins
and the amazing start to the hockey season they're having
this year, 2022,
and how maybe this is their chance for another Stanley Cup.
Now, if I started talking about that at the water cooler,
how many of you would stick around and want to keep talking?
How many of you care about Boston sports, ice hockey,
anything related to that conversation?
Maybe some of you are from New York
and you would like to just bash on the Bruins
for a little while, bash on Boston sports.
That's okay too.
You're still gonna be,
wanting to be involved in the conversation.
Some of you couldn't care less about hockey, or sports,
or anything else.
You're gone.
That's the purpose of the water cooler moment.
It allows you to self-select in or out of the conversation
based on your interest in the topic.
So in the real world, a water cooler moment is
a headline, a tweet, a 30 second video, right?
It lets you decide do I care?
Now, some of you would be interested in that topic
not everybody for sure.
The few of us who are interested in that topic
will go to the next level,
will go to the cafe and have a longer conversation.
Cafe content is the 750-word blog post,
the three to five minute video.
That's slightly longer form content.
Now, let's say a few of us go to the cafe
and have that longer conversation.
Most of those people are done after the cafe content.
They've had enough, they, you know,
"One article, I'm good."
But some people want more.
Those are the ones who will go to the research library.
They'll read the hundred page PDF of hockey statistics,
right?
They'll dive deep.
So a hundred page PDF, a 60-slide slide deck,
an hour long documentary, right?
That's the longer form content.
The point is this,
you should never create a hundred page PDF,
and email it to somebody with a subject line that says,
"Read this."
'Cause you know what?
They ain't reading it, right?
No, you would have a good subject line,
a water cooler moment.
You know, "This is about that important thing
we talked about last week."
And then you would have cafe content,
the body of the email, a couple paragraphs of texts,
"Dear Joe, Hey here's that thing we talked about last week.
Make sure you check out pages 14 through 72."
Or 14 through 22, probably.
"That's really relevant to your
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," right?
So you're enticing them.
You're sort of telling them why they should care
and guiding them to that longer form content.
It's also worth mentioning,
water cooler moments are special magical things
that need to be embedded throughout your content.
A hundred page PDF of great wall of text
is not gonna be enticing to anybody.
But if you have water cooler moments throughout that,
headers, subheads, images, charts, and graphs.
Now remember Mr. Impatient,
he can scan, scan, scan through that document
and find those eight pages that are actually relevant
and interesting to him.
The fourth level is what I call the lab.
That's like the data dashboard,
the interactive data experience
where I can play with the data myself.
'Cause even the a hundred page PDF,
as rich and deep as that is still is editorialized content.
You left out 8 billion variables, right?
That are potentially out there in the universe
that I might care about.
You can't possibly include everything in there.
So if I want to look at everything,
I can play with the data directly.
You're not always creating the deepest forms of content
but when you do,
you have to guide people there by giving 'em a water cooler,
then cafe content, et cetera.
Now, the second four in the 4 by 4,
are the four things you want to do with your content
as much as you possibly can.
Again, to make it accessible, compelling,
interesting for your audience.
You wanna make it visual, you want to tell stories
you wanna make it interactive when you can,
and you wanna make it shareable.
And I want to to talk about all four of these briefly.
Again in the context of my favorite word, "Why?"
Why should we visualize things?
It's not just 'cause I say so.
It's not just because it's sort of
a popular idea these days.
It's a bit of a fad.
We visualize because humans are visual creatures.
Literally, 30 to 50% of your brain by volume
is devoted to processing visual information.
Literally half of this stuff up here
is working on visuals, okay?
The visuals come in through your eyeballs,
which make up 70% of the sensory receptors in your body.
You are a visual creature, end of discussion, okay?
Primarily.
Now, on top of that, maybe more importantly
you are a visual learner.
I don't care what you think, you may think,
"No I'm more of a tactile, you know, kinesthetic learner.
No, I'm more of an auditory."
No, you're a visual learner.
First and foremost, the picture superiority effect
a well-documented psychological effect.
If you share text with people,
they remember a tiny little bit.
If you just add some images to the same text,
that retention rate skyrockets.
We learn visually, first and foremost.
All right, now, storytelling.
Why should we tell stories?
Once again not just 'cause I say so.
There's actually a lot of really strong arguments for it.
One of the best arguments is that for 50,000,
100,000 years,
human beings have been telling each other's stories.
And it's not just that we entertain each other with stories
it's that we literally teach each other with stories.
So great example, when ancient man went out on the hunt
and they got the buffalo, and they came back to the village,
they had data, okay?
Not a spreadsheet, but they had data.
How many miles they had to run,
what the wind speed and direction was,
how many arrows they brought with them,
how many arrows they used,
how many buffalo there were.
All of that data was used
in the form of a story, a narrative
to tell the other villagers, essentially,
here's how you hunt buffalo successfully, right?
This is literally how we have evolved
to learn from each other, visually and via story.
There's a lot of science to back this up.
It's not just me saying it.
So you gotta tell stories when you can.
You also, when you can, should make things interactive.
And this isn't always possible, I get it.
But interactivity is powerful.
One of the reasons why we should make things interactive
is because we're all narcissists, okay?
We all want the world to be about us
and the things that we care about.
So talk to me about cricket, I couldn't care less.
I don't know anything about cricket.
It's just not my, in my vision, right?
Talk to me about ice hockey, I'm on board, okay?
'Cause I'm interested in it.
Talk to me about something I don't like, like politics.
Maybe I spend more time reading articles
about the the political figures I dislike
than the ones I like sometimes.
So it's not just things I like,
it's anything that I'm at all interested in
one way or the other.
Interactivity lets me do that.
I get to filter out the part of the data
that's irrelevant to me
and just focus on the parts that are of interest to me.
Okay?
The second part is this.
These are Montessori counting beads.
If you go to Montessori school, a true Montessori school,
there are very specific materials in the classroom
one of which are these.
So when I was three years old,
this is how I learned to count.
Someone handed me three beads,
the ones in the upper left hand corner there,
and said, "That's three."
And that's not that interesting 'cause you know,
I'm sure you all learned how to count that way
with like blocks, or rocks, or whatever.
Now, then they handed me the single object
in the upper right hand corner
which are 10 beads all strung together.
And they said, "That's 10." Okay?
Then they handed me the object in the foreground
on the right hand side there,
which is a hundred beads all wired together, single object.
And they said, "That's a hundred."
And I'm pretty sure that when I was three years old,
I understood on some level that 10 times 10 was a hundred.
'Cause I could see that 10 of those
strung together objects in the back
made that one flat square in the front.
Couldn't have used those words obviously.
Didn't know multiplication or whatever,
but I got it.
So we are visual learners first, yes.
But yes, kinesthetic, tactile, tangible learning
is also powerful.
And again, interactivity gives you that.
It's not a passive experience, it's an active experience.
I'm selecting the drop downs, I'm clicking the buttons.
So there is power there.
Last but not least, why is shareability?
This is just very straightforward.
This is just the "duh," right?
Like you have to, your stuff has to be shareable.
And obviously you're not always tweeting out your research
or internal communications in a company,
but you're sharing it one way or another.
You create a 12 gigabyte PowerPoint file.
Not very emailable either, right?
So stuff has to be shareable.
This is pretty straightforward.
We can move on.
Basic idea is this,
you need to think about the 4 by 4 Model
as a framework for how to take content,
this pile of stuff you've thought about,
and make it accessible and compelling to your audience.
And the best way to do that is to provide it in layers,
entice people into the right level of depth for them,
and do those four things that I mentioned
to make it really accessible, learnable, memorable
and relevant to your audience.