Using Data to Tell a Great Story

My friend Hank sent me a link the other day that still has me thinking. It’s a presentation from the TED conference held each year in Monterey. The TED conference was originally focused on innovations in technology, entertainment and design, though its subject matter seems to have broadened over the last several years. I find that most TED presentations are pretty impressive, but the following link blew me away.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92 (Warning: note that this presentation is about 20 minutes long, but you can tell whether or not its grabbing you in the first three or four minutes)

First, let me set up the subject matter of the presentation – its focused on global aid and its impact on health and economic development (e.g., life expectancy, child survival rates, family size, per capita income). That puts it right in the sweet spot of the kinds of problems that I’m interested in – measuring big problems, and evaluating scalable solutions in the parts of the world that need it most.

With such dense subject matter, you’d expect a very dry, sleep-inducing presentation. This is the exact opposite. If you recognize beauty in the elegant display of information, you’ll be fascinated by this. Seriously, anyone involved in visual design should take a look at this. The presenter, Hans Rosling runs a not-for-profit in Sweden that focuses on the representation of complex, global health data. The software that he developed to bring that data to life is on full display here. Incidentally, this software (http://www.gapminder.org/) has been purchased by Google and is in the process of being made publicly available (for free natch). Rosling has office space at Google now too – I should try to find a way to connect with him…

Anyway, what’s so powerful about what has been done here is that Rosling has simplified the narrative around global aid. He uses animated, time-series charts to immediately show the real story behind the data. For example, in an animated chart early in the presentation, Rosling demonstrates the generally positive growth that all developing nations have experienced over the past 30+ years. But as the time period reaches the late 80’s and early 90’s, it clearly highlights the tipping point for when things began to turn negative for the countries in sub-saharan Africa. What this presentation and the software behind it allow for is easy exploration of high level hypotheses -- How does per capita wealth affect infant survival rates? Plug in the data and watch…Did China’s change to a market driven economy improve health, wealth or both? See what the data tell you…

And Rosling himself is a fun and engaging presenter. He dances around in front of the big screen like a conductor orchestrating the colored dots as they move and tell their data-story. He helps you believe that the high-level problems we are facing globally are surmountable – that the problems are more understandable than we’ve trained ourselves to think they are. It highlights the intersection of two passion areas for me; decision making and data analysis. All too often, I believe that our decision making becomes paralyzed by the overwhelming amount of data that we have on a given topic. As Mark Twain once said, “there are three types of lies – lies, damned lies and statistics”. When confronted with important choices, we feel compelled to look at the data from all angles, and when viewed from all angles the data tell you different stories. What I love about Rosling’s approach is that he cuts through the mountains of data and takes it back to its fundamental elements – the dependent variable (e.g., life expectancy or infant survival rates), the independent variable (e.g, per capita income) and and lets the story tell itself over time (roughly 30 years). Simple and beautiful.

Thank you Hank, for the link, it has definitely led to another step in the journey.