stop trying to eliminate bias from your data story

Yesterday, a participant in one of our workshops asked a question that I’ve been thinking about ever since. She works with researchers and statisticians, and the idea of telling a story with data can make some of them uncomfortable. Doesn’t telling a story mean choosing a perspective? And doesn’t choosing a perspective introduce bias? Wouldn’t it be more objective to simply show the data and let people draw their own conclusions?

I understand the instinct. I suspect the word story is actually part of the problem. It can sound like we’re asking people to embellish the facts, manufacture drama, or cherry-pick evidence to support a predetermined conclusion. That isn’t what I mean when I encourage people to tell stories with data.

But I also think “story doesn’t work for me” can become an easy excuse. It lets us focus on all the reasons storytelling can’t work in our particular situation instead of thinking openly about how it could. Storytelling with data isn’t a rigid formula. It needs to flex—to the audience, the setting, the type of work, and what the evidence can reasonably support. The story a researcher tells may look quite different from the story a salesperson tells, and it should. The challenge is figuring out what storytelling means in your situation, not dismissing it because one version doesn’t fit.

That brings me back to bias. Let’s distinguish between bias and perspective. We should absolutely work to minimize biases that distort our research or analysis. But that’s different from pretending we can eliminate perspective from the process altogether.

Long before you decide how to communicate your findings, you’ve made choices. What did you decide to study? What did you measure? How did you measure it? Which questions did you ask? What data did you collect? What did you analyze? Which comparisons did you make? Even the decision to put a particular graph in front of someone—and not the dozens of other graphs you could have made—is a choice.

There is no magical moment when we can simply “show the data” without having influenced what someone sees. The alternative to story isn’t objectivity.

I don’t think having a perspective is a bad thing—quite the contrary.

You know the data better than your audience does

If you’ve done the research or analysis, you’ve likely spent considerably more time with the data than the people you’re communicating it to. You’ve explored it. You’ve asked questions of it. You’ve seen what surprised you and what didn’t. You’ve investigated anomalies. You know its limitations. You understand the context surrounding it.

Why would you discard all of that knowledge at the moment you communicate?

I’ve argued for years that our audience shouldn’t have to guess what we’re trying to tell them. Back in 2014, I wrote about the importance of leading with story: if you’ve done the analysis, you’re in a unique position to interpret the data and help others understand what it means. A few years later, in a post titled so what?, I made a similar argument about our responsibility as communicators to make the point clear rather than leaving our audience to figure it out themselves.

I believe that even more strongly today. When you don’t offer your perspective, you don’t eliminate interpretation—you outsource it. Your audience will make sense of the data somehow. They may arrive at the same conclusion you did, but they may also miss something important. They may misunderstand what they’re seeing. Someone could even selectively use your data to advance a conclusion the evidence doesn’t support.

“Just showing the data” doesn’t protect it from bias, misinterpretation, or nefarious use. In some cases, your silence may make those things more likely.

If “story” feels uncomfortable, start with perspective

Perhaps the idea of telling a story still makes you uneasy. Fine. Start with something smaller: What perspective can you bring?

Given everything you know about the data, what do you see? What deserves attention? What might someone reasonably conclude? What decisions or conversations could this information inform?

There doesn’t have to be a single definitive answer. This is one of the places where we can flex what we mean by story. In exploratory or research settings, perhaps you surface several perspectives: Here’s one way to interpret what we found. Here’s another possibility. Here are the questions I think these findings raise. You can give people a useful starting point without pretending the data supports a certainty that it doesn’t.

Bringing perspective also doesn’t mean overstating what the data can tell us. Quite the opposite. Part of your responsibility is to communicate uncertainty, limitations, caveats, and plausible alternative explanations. You don’t want your work to have more impact than the evidence warrants.

But fear of having too much impact isn’t a good reason to aim for none.

Don’t use rigor as a reason to be passive

I think this is ultimately where the discomfort with story can lead us astray. “My role is simply to inform” sounds admirably objective. Sometimes, though, it can also be a way of avoiding the harder work of deciding what the information means and helping someone else make sense of it.

You can be rigorous and have a point of view. You can tell a story and acknowledge uncertainty. You can direct attention and show people the evidence they need to challenge your interpretation. These aren’t contradictions. They’re part of communicating responsibly.

So if your immediate reaction is storytelling doesn’t work in my situation, resist it. Ask a different question: What could storytelling look like in my situation? Maybe it’s a strong recommendation. Maybe it’s a clearly articulated finding. Maybe it’s several possible interpretations and the evidence supporting each. Maybe it’s simply directing your audience toward what you believe deserves their attention and explaining why.

Flex the concept to fit the situation. Bring your knowledge, context, and perspective to the data. Then give your audience what they need to question it, challenge it, build on it, or act on it.

You won’t eliminate perspective by refusing to tell a story. You’ll simply leave the story to someone else.