In this episode of the PolicyViz Podcast, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic joins me to discuss the evolution of her work in data storytelling—from corporate workshops to her newest venture into children’s literature. We explore how the pandemic transformed training formats, the collaborative nature of her team, and the creative process behind her latest book, Daphne Draws Data. Cole reflects on the importance of introducing kids to the visual language of data early in life and shares how simple storytelling principles can empower learners of any age.
Resources
Check out Cole’s website and her new book, Daphne Draws Data!
Guest Bio
Cole has always had a penchant for turning data into pictures and into stories. She is CEO of storytelling with data, the author of best-selling books storytelling with data: a data visualization guide for business professionals, storytelling with data: let’s practice!, storytelling with you: plan, create, and deliver a stellar presentation, and the new children’s book Daphne Draws Data: A storytelling with data adventure. For more than a decade, Cole and her team have delivered interactive learning sessions sought after by data-minded individuals, companies, and philanthropic organizations all over the world. They also help people create graphs that make sense and weave them into compelling stories through the popular SWD community, blog, podcast, and videos.
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Transcript
00:01.60
Jon
Well, hello, Cole.
00:03.27
Cole Knaflic
Hi John.
00:04.39
Jon
It’s been too long.
00:06.23
Cole Knaflic
Way too long.
00:07.38
Jon
I feel like prior to the pandemic, we probably saw each other like in person like a couple times a year at least.
00:13.53
Cole Knaflic
It seems like it, yeah.
00:14.67
Jon
Right?
00:14.92
Cole Knaflic
and then And then everything kind of fell off the edge of the, yeah.
00:15.31
Jon
Yeah. i mean just Just like everything took a like a sharp left turn.
00:21.46
Cole Knaflic
Yeah.
00:21.94
Jon
And now kids are much older. And um at least I have a few more ah lines around my eyes. I’m not sure you do.
00:27.66
Cole Knaflic
Oh.
00:28.03
Jon
You look like look like the same one i when I saw you a few years ago.
00:28.42
Cole Knaflic
Yeah, yeah. hello Oh, so nice.
00:34.36
Jon
So how are things? how’s how’s ah how’s How’s business? Let’s start with business. How how are things there?
00:39.39
Cole Knaflic
Yeah, business is great. we are you know We’ve got a small but mighty team of people who are having a ton of fun teaching workshops to clients all around the world.
00:49.90
Cole Knaflic
So we spend a lot of time doing that and just creating content, right?
00:50.40
Jon
Great.
00:53.30
Cole Knaflic
So content across our but blog and podcast and YouTube channel and books, which we’ll talk more about.
00:53.82
Jon
Yeah.
00:59.83
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. So have, um, ha so, so how do the workshops work for your folks? Do they, is it, is it one sort of common curriculum that they’re all teaching and how do they like, do they, do they sort of vary it based on their own skills and interest in teaching styles?
01:19.87
Cole Knaflic
Well, this was one thing that was interesting because as the team was growing, one of our concerns is that you know the paths bifurcate at some point.
01:27.93
Jon
Mm-hmm.
01:28.34
Cole Knaflic
And what starts out as the same workshop ends up being vastly different because everybody develops their own ways of framing things and examples and such.
01:38.82
Cole Knaflic
ah Turns out, though, that global pandemic and everything being pushed virtually and us always having two people on a virtual workshop,
01:47.92
Jon
Yeah.
01:50.08
Cole Knaflic
mainly at the beginning for technical issues, but then over time we found that the variety of voices helps hold people’s attention and the great effect that it’s had is everybody’s presenting together with each other and so rather than
01:52.56
Jon
Yeah.
02:06.22
Cole Knaflic
things develop into you know whats what was once the same content that now is vastly different, everything’s kind of grown together.
02:13.71
Jon
yeah
02:13.86
Cole Knaflic
And so we hear each other present and you know pick up good framing from one person and apply in another place. And so it’s been a really nice organic way of everybody elevating each other and us continuing to refine and improve the content that we teach.
02:20.57
Jon
Yeah.
02:27.66
Jon
Yeah.
02:31.95
Cole Knaflic
and So when it comes to the actual workshops, we have a two hour, a four hour half day, which is the most popular, and then a full day.
02:32.13
Jon
Yeah.
02:40.93
Jon
yeah
02:41.19
Cole Knaflic
And they typically cover the same lessons. So the two hour one will always cover the same lessons. But what we do is we solicit examples from the client group ahead of time and use that to understand how folks are visualizing and communicating with data currently.
02:52.01
Jon
Mm-hmm.
02:56.63
Cole Knaflic
what challenges they’re facing, and use that to customize where we might spend more time or less time and also use their examples as the basis for hands-on exercises so that we can show not only do these things work in general, ah but you can actually apply them to your and your colleagues’ work.
03:09.35
Jon
Right.
03:16.77
Cole Knaflic
which is where I think the real magic happens because when it’s applied to some other example, it’s easy to say, oh, that works there.
03:20.18
Jon
Mm-hmm.
03:24.66
Cole Knaflic
It doesn’t work for our stuff.
03:25.45
Jon
Yeah.
03:26.34
Cole Knaflic
But when you see simple changes and how impactful they can be in terms of taking something that might have been complicated or confusing and making it clear and realistic,
03:26.74
Jon
Yeah.
03:38.41
Cole Knaflic
resonate, that that really drives the lessons home.
03:39.47
Jon
Yeah.
03:42.36
Cole Knaflic
And it’s a ton of fun for us because it means we are daily encountering new examples and thinking about how to teach and how to illustrate our teachings through different examples, which is fun for us too.
03:42.37
Jon
Mm-hmm.
03:56.15
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. Cause you get some time to actually like dig into something new, right. And make something.
04:00.33
Cole Knaflic
Yes.
04:00.74
Jon
Yeah.
04:01.07
Cole Knaflic
Yeah.
04:01.66
Jon
Are, are, are most of the workshops now, are they still virtual? Are they more in person?
04:07.33
Cole Knaflic
It’s a mix. So we pre-pandemic, we were entirely in person.
04:08.48
Jon
a mix. Yeah.
04:11.61
Cole Knaflic
That shifted to entirely virtual.
04:11.76
Jon
Right.
04:14.17
Cole Knaflic
And now we’ve got a healthy mix. And I definitely credit the pandemic with creating virtual for us because I don’t know that that’s a space I would have explored otherwise because there’s such magic that happens when you’re in person.
04:16.94
Jon
Okay.
04:21.20
Jon
Yeah.
04:25.01
Jon
Right.
04:27.95
Jon
yeah
04:28.16
Cole Knaflic
But there’s some really interesting things that happen virtually as well. You know you can have the two voices as we talked about. It can actually, and this caught me by surprise and kind of continues to, but the virtual learning environment can be strangely intimate when the instructor is looking straight at the camera because it feels to every participant as if they’re being addressed directly.
04:48.92
Cole Knaflic
um We’ve noticed and gotten feedback that the virtual setting can also be great for groups of introverts or even mixed groups where the introverts have other ways to interact besides speaking out.
04:49.11
Jon
yep
05:00.49
Cole Knaflic
They can interact in chat or signal things in other ways.
05:00.95
Jon
yeah yeah.
05:04.23
Cole Knaflic
it’s actually been really neat. And then so now we have a mix where we’re doing probably roughly half and half virtual sessions versus traveling to a client and teaching in person.
05:15.07
Jon
yeah. Yeah, the the the chat is interesting, right? Because I have found that you can ask questions and you can kind of almost do like a casual poll, right?
05:25.37
Jon
And you can sort of see all the answers sort of flow through and you can sort of, especially if it’s just a binary yes, no, you can sort of see the results. Whereas like in person, you’re asking people to raise their hands. You’re still sort of eyeballing it.
05:36.08
Jon
But like, I just feel like in the chat, everybody sees all the yeses pop up and maybe they don’t look around the room when they’re in person.
05:36.65
Cole Knaflic
yeah
05:44.29
Cole Knaflic
Well as well as you figure you have you have people who might be more inclined to participate in chat or be truthful and honest in chat where they might not participate live.
05:51.95
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
05:53.82
Cole Knaflic
So you get ah you you get a different read from groups I think than you do live which is interesting.
05:56.28
Jon
Yeah. I just, for me, the the hardest part is when people don’t turn their cameras on and you’re like, like it’s like, yeah, to yourself for hours.
06:03.34
Cole Knaflic
Yeah, it’s rough. You feel like you’re talking in a vacuum.
06:07.75
Jon
And it’s just that, that, that part is rough. And don’t.
06:10.98
Cole Knaflic
Well, and that for us is another reason to have two people on because then even if, you know, and we always encourage people to turn on cameras, but you can only control so much because it’s amazing.
06:18.23
Jon
Yeah. Right. Right.
06:20.67
Cole Knaflic
It only takes very little like queuing, but if you can see somebody like smiling and nodding along, it just can provide so much energy and reinforcement.
06:26.57
Jon
Yeah.
06:28.92
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
06:30.44
Cole Knaflic
And so when we’ve got two people on something, we know at least, you know, there’s the other person.
06:34.30
Jon
There’s one person.
06:35.21
Cole Knaflic
Yeah. um Which, yeah.
06:38.61
Jon
i had ah I had a moment early in the pandemic where I was like, I should make like a Brady Bunch style video of people just smiling and nodding that I could just play on top of the side of that Zoom.
06:47.67
Cole Knaflic
Play.
06:50.31
Jon
So like at least had someone, like a person look at rather than these black boxes, which are just, yeah, just kind of the worst.
06:56.79
Cole Knaflic
Yeah.
06:57.11
Jon
um Okay, so so that’s great. the the ah The classes are going good. The blog’s been great. um You’ve got one new book out, very different than your other books.
07:06.56
Cole Knaflic
Yeah.
07:08.76
Jon
And then another book coming, which is very similar to your other books.
07:10.59
Cole Knaflic
Yeah.
07:12.91
Jon
so let’s a little bit okay all right So let’s talk about the one that’s out, very different.
07:12.93
Cole Knaflic
Some more different. Yeah, we can talk about that.
07:17.83
Jon
Okay.
07:18.25
Cole Knaflic
Yes.
07:19.76
Jon
All about, and i can I can see her up on the bookcase there behind you. So so Daphne the dinosaur.
07:23.78
Cole Knaflic
yeah
07:27.19
Jon
oh Oh, there you go. little plush for the YouTubers.
07:30.88
Cole Knaflic
Daphne is not a dinosaur, but a dragon who no
07:30.88
Jon
little plush.
07:33.61
Jon
Oh, dragon. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, right?
07:35.39
Cole Knaflic
i shit they look so like ah dragon who loves to draw data. So yeah, very different audience than our typical business audience. But one of the things that was interesting to me is in writing for kids,
07:49.35
Cole Knaflic
It’s the same lessons that we teach adults, just presented maybe in a more colorful, ah illustrative fashion.
07:51.24
Jon
Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah.
07:55.73
Jon
Yeah.
07:57.68
Cole Knaflic
But really for me, it was you know after teaching adults for so long and so commonly hearing the feedback of, ah, why didn’t I learn this sooner?
08:08.13
Cole Knaflic
And then having my own growing kids and seeing children you know their innate curiosity and love of drawing that it seemed to me for a long time that we could be teaching the visual language of graphs and numbers much earlier than we typically do.
08:14.75
Jon
Mm hmm.
08:26.43
Cole Knaflic
and you know There’s some graphs that I’d seen come home from my kids, but they were things like the weather in January in Wisconsin. like
08:33.64
Jon
Yeah.
08:33.66
Cole Knaflic
You don’t need to graph that. We experienced that. right It’s cold and it’s gray and that’s not awesome.
08:36.97
Jon
Right.
08:40.70
Cole Knaflic
And so really turning it into something that kids can see as a superpower because it’s answering a question that they didn’t know the answer to for that or it’s something about them and their habits that they could learn something from.
08:48.78
Jon
Mm-hmm.
08:55.52
Cole Knaflic
And so the idea, i knew I wanted to do a children’s book for, or I wanted to do a children’s book for a number of years before I knew what it was going to be. and then had had a notebook that I took everywhere with me and would jot down notes and was trying to figure out what it was going to look like and who the characters would be and went down ah number of paths that didn’t play out until I landed on the dragon.
09:17.60
Jon
Mm-hmm.
09:19.89
Cole Knaflic
And once that happened, it all kind of came together.
09:19.99
Jon
Mm.
09:23.91
Cole Knaflic
And the premise of the book is Daphne is, she’s dragon, she has a strange talent for drawing data. And so she gets made fun of by her brother for that not being dragon-y enough, and she goes on an adventure, trying to find a place where she fits in.
09:40.99
Cole Knaflic
and so She goes to different places.
09:41.34
Jon
yeah
09:42.27
Cole Knaflic
She goes to the jungle and underwater and to outer space. and In each location, she makes some new friends and helps them solve a problem that they’re facing by gathering and drawing data.
09:56.13
Cole Knaflic
so The story itself is
09:56.30
Jon
yeah yeah
09:58.50
Cole Knaflic
very light in terms of there’s no technical jargon. She’s drawing and ah it’s super fun to read it out loud to kids because I’ll put the illustrations up on the big screen and before she tells her, know before Daphne tells her answer, ah I’ll let the kids do it.
10:08.52
Jon
e
10:16.37
Cole Knaflic
And you know it’s amazing.
10:16.80
Jon
Yeah. Right.
10:17.21
Cole Knaflic
They shout out the answer because they can just see it when it’s drawn intuitively.
10:20.82
Jon
right
10:22.55
Cole Knaflic
And then we do lots of fun interactive things together graphing data. But after the story ends, there is a graph glossary that gets into the more technical aspects of the four graphs that Daphne draws on her head adventures.
10:37.34
Cole Knaflic
Line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, and scatter plots. And also has some ideas for activities that kids can do when it comes to gathering and drawing their own data.
10:48.16
Cole Knaflic
then we’ve been putting together all of the ancillary resources for that. So at DaphneDrawsData.com, there are activities for kids, support for parents, resources for educators.
11:01.51
Cole Knaflic
We recently rolled out a data detectives program where we are seeking volunteers from around the world, so adults who care about this stuff who might be interested in helping us bring it to more kids.
11:15.76
Cole Knaflic
So if you have a school in your area where you want to go and do one of these sessions and read the book and facilitate an activity, we’ll give you all of the materials to do that.
11:24.84
Jon
Yeah.
11:26.55
Cole Knaflic
ah In some cases, even donating books where we can. um So really just trying to… get the information out there because the superpower that kids can develop, right, because talked about before, they’ve got, you know, they love asking questions and for the most part kids love drawing and so if we can help them learn how to ask smart questions that they can then gather and draw data to answer, we can do some really cool things with that.
11:45.48
Jon
e
11:53.75
Jon
yeah
11:54.06
Cole Knaflic
And I think I love it as a creative person way to get into math and numbers. It’s not this strictly things are right or things are wrong. right You can approach things in different ways and creativity is welcome. It just offers another avenue into math and logical thinking that for me and what I’ve seen my kids go through feels like it’s missing in classical education.
12:17.81
Jon
Yeah. ah Yeah. I have this conversation with my kids who are a little older than yours about like, why do we need to learn calculus? Like I’m never going to use calculus. It’s like, yeah, there’s some truth to that.
12:28.39
Jon
Unless you’re going to be an economist or an engineer, you know, probably not going to use calculus, but you, they should teach you stats, but okay. That’s a whole other conversation about.
12:35.18
Cole Knaflic
Well, but even on the calculus, it’s because for me, you looking back, and granted, I majored in math, so take that for from what it will, but you know as as far as, so lots of calculus, lots of you know computer programming, and what I take out of that, you know yeah, I did do some programming along the way in my career.
12:43.14
Jon
Yeah.
12:46.07
Jon
Yeah.
12:53.43
Cole Knaflic
But what I took more from any of that than the actual skills of being able to you know do differential equations or program something in C++, plus plus which i’t even I think is completely debunk now, ah it’s the way of breaking down a problem.
13:01.97
Jon
Yeah.
13:06.62
Jon
Yeah.
13:09.96
Cole Knaflic
putting it back together in a logical fashion, solving it.
13:10.67
Jon
yeah
13:14.97
Cole Knaflic
ah When things don’t work out, knowing how to break it apart to figure out where it went wrong and try again, it’s the logical thinking that goes along with it. And I think that’s the piece that just…
13:27.61
Cole Knaflic
it gets, when it gets introduced, it gets introduced so much later and in such an abstract way that I feel like we could feel like we could be more tangible with that or more concrete with that earlier on, that those building blocks could be there from the get-go and we could be making those connections explicit to kids of how this is going to help them so that it doesn’t seem abstract or as abstract.
13:31.63
Jon
Yeah.
13:48.44
Jon
yeah
13:53.38
Jon
Yeah. I mean, there is an interesting movement in the K-12 world on data science for education that I think does focus more on the hands-on.
14:04.48
Jon
um There’s an interesting practice in high schools in, I believe it’s Alabama, maybe it’s Arkansas, but like approaching math in a different way that it’s not about how do you multiply you know, for example, 90 times, you know, 12, but how many different ways can you solve that question?
14:23.69
Jon
Right.
14:23.76
Cole Knaflic
Yeah.
14:23.93
Jon
Like, right. And so there, there’s just a very interesting, and there’s some very interesting movements in the data science world. I think the, the, there’s a code app tool from, um, the Concord coalition that is,
14:37.90
Jon
introducing kids to graphs and coding in kind of a different way. But I don’t disagree with you that like calculus and other forms of math help you think or structure your your thought process in maybe a linear sequential way. But I think like at the end of the day, if we want people to be good data stewards, data consumers every day,
15:02.04
Jon
they should know what probability means. They should know what a variance means in standard deviation. I’m not sure an integral has the same day-to-day application as, you know, I’m not i’m not the K-12 educator, so I don’t pretend, but like a parent, so I still have strong views on it.
15:09.11
Cole Knaflic
Yeah, that’s fair. Yes. yes
15:17.85
Jon
But anyway, okay, I want to get back to the book. So what I wanted to ask you, And I remember you talking about this and writing a few blog posts in the process of of writing this. So um I wanted to ask you about the process of of writing this book and talking to parents. i mean, you’re obviously a parent, but talking to parents and talking to teachers, like how is the process of writing a kid’s book for you different than writing your your other the other ah storytelling with data books that are you know for adults and professionals?
15:44.49
Jon
Yeah.
15:45.64
Cole Knaflic
One thing, um this is maybe not directly in response. Well, your question makes me think of this, so I’ll bring it up and then feel free to redirect me after this. But one thing I learned through the editing process and by soliciting feedback, you know, one is you have to say things in many fewer words than you want to you consider.
16:03.84
Jon
Yeah.
16:04.75
Cole Knaflic
At the point where I wrote Daphne Draws Data, the book prior to that, Storytelling With You, was like, approaching 80,000 words.
16:11.09
Jon
Oh, wow.
16:11.49
Cole Knaflic
And a picture book needs to be like at very max 1,000 words and ideally a lot shorter than that.
16:11.61
Jon
Yeah. yeah Yeah. Yeah.
16:17.72
Cole Knaflic
Daphne comes out I think somewhere like 700, 800.
16:18.18
Jon
yeah
16:20.58
Cole Knaflic
But so you’ve got to really simplify things. But with something like this, you’ve to be careful about oversimplifying. right I wanted things to still be factual and complete. ah So that was one thing to balance. But one thing that was different ah is my business books have all been written in first person, present tense.
16:38.56
Cole Knaflic
It’s me talking to my reader. And so an earlier iteration of Daphne was also written in that manner. And thank goodness for i had know a couple dozen people ah review and read it and give feedback ah early on, like before we illustrated or any of that.
16:55.75
Cole Knaflic
and I got this feedback from one person and it changed everything, which was, you know, this is a book that adults will read aloud to kids. So it can’t be first person present tense because the person reading is not a dragon going on an adventure today, right?
17:04.94
Jon
Mm-hmm.
17:10.67
Cole Knaflic
It needs to be about the story that has happened historically.
17:10.77
Jon
Yeah.
17:13.01
Cole Knaflic
Well, it’s one of those things that as soon as somebody says that, you’re of course, but it would have been so easy for me to miss if I hadn’t gotten that feedback.
17:16.34
Jon
Right. Yeah.
17:21.00
Cole Knaflic
So that was super helpful. um But yeah, it’s just it’s different in terms of, I think, the the level of the conversation. But as I mentioned before, one of the things that’s interesting, maybe not surprising, is the things that Daphne does to her graphs,
17:30.29
Jon
Mm-hmm.
17:37.66
Cole Knaflic
lot of the same things that we teach adults.
17:38.96
Jon
Yeah, right. yeah
17:40.17
Cole Knaflic
It’s just, you know, we’re using different language or she’s approaching it differently.
17:40.63
Jon
Yeah.
17:43.68
Cole Knaflic
So, you know, and so if you want people to look at the one data point, instead of making the bar blue and the rest gray, like we might in Storytelling with Data Land, Daphne’s circling it with a pink crayon.
17:53.84
Jon
Yeah.
17:54.09
Cole Knaflic
So it’s just making things, ah I guess, tie more closely to the audience in this case, like, you know, the six to nine year old crowd.
17:55.74
Jon
Yeah.
18:00.16
Jon
Right.
18:03.95
Jon
Right. But the other thing I noticed when you described the book is that… um And this happens with with, I mean, I think really with lots of really good kids books is that there is another lesson sort of embedded in there, right? That um is about friendship or about respect or about being kind or whatever it is. And it sounds like the way you described it, that this story is about you know, kind of Daphne’s bravery and her sharing with friends and standing up for others. Like when was, did you have that intention at the beginning or is that something that sort of evolved over time?
18:43.87
Cole Knaflic
It definitely it it evolved as the story came through like yeah through through rounds of editing and figuring out.
18:47.83
Jon
Yeah.
18:51.07
Cole Knaflic
I knew that I wanted it to be a sort of heroine’s journey where she goes and learns something about herself and then comes back, right?
18:56.13
Jon
Mm-hmm.
18:59.61
Jon
Mm-hmm.
18:59.81
Cole Knaflic
Spoiler, but at the end she comes back, realizes she can make friends by being herself. goes back, helps her brother with a problem.
19:04.03
Jon
Right.
19:06.99
Cole Knaflic
um But yeah, the the lesson of sort of leaning into what might seem like a quirky ah talent, I think, was definitely an intentional part of it.
19:19.99
Jon
Yeah.
19:22.36
Cole Knaflic
um you know Clearly Daphne is intentionally a an empowered female going and and doing this
19:29.27
Jon
Yeah.
19:31.13
Cole Knaflic
um Yeah, i had I had another thought that I was going to go into after this, and it just completely escaped me. It’ll come back.
19:39.71
Jon
It’ll come back as soon as we hang up. It’ll it’ll come back, im sure. um Did you… So you have three kids.
19:45.91
Cole Knaflic
Oh, I remembered what it is, if I can cut you off.
19:46.68
Jon
ti Okay. No, go ahead. Go ahead.
19:48.88
Cole Knaflic
One of the neat things is because it spans a nice range of kids. I think definitely target range is kind of third graders, so eight to nine-year-olds, but it can lean younger down to you know preschool, kindergarten, where to your point it’s more a story about friendship and being yourself and paying attention to the colorful pictures, but can go all the way up to I went and talked to my son’s sixth grade, ah the entire sixth grade at his school about it, and we read the book, which they they were as excited about the book, honestly, as like the second and third graders, but then we got to do some really fun graphing with
19:56.74
Jon
Yeah.
20:01.72
Jon
Mm-hmm.
20:04.21
Jon
Yeah.
20:08.67
Jon
Right.
20:22.26
Jon
Yeah.
20:24.95
Cole Knaflic
teenage use of cell phones and like stuff that they cared about.
20:26.74
Jon
Oh yeah.
20:28.19
Cole Knaflic
And so it can kind of flex either way depending on if you’re paying more attention to the story or the graphs and the visualization and what you can do with those pieces.
20:28.51
Jon
Yeah.
20:37.99
Jon
Right. um So I wanted to ask, cause you mentioned the Daphne you know, female protagonist. You have three kids.
20:45.39
Cole Knaflic
Yeah.
20:45.77
Jon
You have a daughter. Like,
20:49.08
Jon
I guess, like, did you model the character after either the kids? Did you have, like, did you have your kids in mind as like, hey like the under like, I’m sure your kids are like my kids, right? They know all about data viz. They all know all about, like, good slides. Like, they know all that.
21:05.48
Jon
So, but for this sort of this sort of secondary message, like, did you have them in mind as like, this is this is how they’ll read it? Mm-hmm.
21:14.33
Cole Knaflic
Not directly. So i mentioned that I’d gone down a lot of different paths and come back from. One of those streams was an adventure where ah basically my kids were the main characters and they helped a dragon with it ended up being like population dynamics and got way too complicated and way too long.
21:35.96
Cole Knaflic
But that was where the dragon.
21:36.49
Jon
Right.
21:37.24
Cole Knaflic
So yes, initially the kids were very much in the story.
21:41.62
Jon
Mm hmm.
21:41.74
Cole Knaflic
um But then when I had the idea to turn the dragon into the main character, i think that fell away a bit. um But absolutely, the idea that you can use math as a superpower was core and intentional.
21:55.39
Jon
e Yeah.
21:57.96
Cole Knaflic
I mean, I, because you mentioned, yeah, we each have kids who have seen us work in the world of data their whole lives.
22:02.39
Jon
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
22:04.16
Cole Knaflic
But even with that, my third grader, so last year, she was in second grade, she came home and she said,
22:04.60
Jon
Yeah.
22:09.81
Cole Knaflic
I don’t like math, it’s hard. was like, whoa, no, like of all children, you are not going to see this.
22:11.50
Jon
Right.
22:14.75
Jon
yeah
22:15.55
Cole Knaflic
And then it was shortly after that that she came home saying, mom, we read a book about math.
22:15.63
Jon
right
22:20.10
Cole Knaflic
And I was like, that’s fantastic. like What was it called? The book was called something like, I’m learning to love math. And
22:26.29
Jon
Hmm.
22:26.33
Cole Knaflic
like this struck a chord with me and I kind of went on a bit of a tirade and also an Amazon spiral of looking up this book and then getting served up all of the other titles like this which is just reinforcing this idea that math is hard and boring and complicated and for nerds and I hate this narrative.
22:28.58
Jon
Right.
22:36.47
Jon
Yeah.
22:44.16
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
22:45.70
Cole Knaflic
And and you it’s portrayed in so many cases, right? Movies and books and that that I think more than anything is what I’m trying to subvert with Daphne.
22:52.13
Jon
Mm hmm.
22:59.16
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. My wife has a story about her third grade teacher, fourth grade teacher. ah and I won’t say her name, even though I know her name, ah that that said to my wife, you’re just not a math person.
23:11.59
Jon
And that just, you know, that set her off that, you know, now she, you know know, that said, okay, you know, as a kid, you say, okay, I remember that today.
23:18.65
Cole Knaflic
And she remembers that today,
23:21.05
Jon
And a teacher says, you’re not a math person. And what is a kid what is a kid’s reaction going to be to their teachers? Say, oh, okay, the teachers must be right.
23:27.02
Cole Knaflic
that.
23:28.04
Jon
I’m not a math person. So I’m not going to, try, I’m not going to have interest in it and and all these sort of all these sort of things. And and and I’ll just say before I put my foot too far in my mouth, she is amazing at lots of things. um and so But you know this this teacher like had this you know profound effect on her.
23:45.12
Cole Knaflic
yeah
23:45.27
Jon
um Okay, so let’s switch gears because you have that. Daphne came out um when? ah Mid last so fall of last year, right?
23:52.10
Cole Knaflic
Fall of last year, yeah.
23:54.29
Jon
And now you have another book with ah some of the storytelling data team coming out when? This fall?
24:00.71
Cole Knaflic
Yes, September 2025.
24:01.48
Jon
Yes.
24:02.71
Cole Knaflic
So the next book is Back to the Adult Audiences.
24:03.03
Jon
Okay.
24:06.73
Cole Knaflic
And this one was different because I had the pleasure of writing it together with Mike Cisneros and Alex Velez. And it is a book that is entirely makeovers.
24:19.38
Cole Knaflic
And that’s really, and we talked about this before, like that.
24:19.75
Jon
Yeah.
24:21.54
Cole Knaflic
the magic is when you see this happen to all these different examples.
24:22.95
Jon
Mm-hmm.
24:26.14
Cole Knaflic
And so we’ve worked with thousands of clients over the past decade and have a ton of different examples to be able to pull from and thought And we’d like to share these in a I guess, kind of a curated way.
24:41.54
Cole Knaflic
Let’s pick some of our favorites and pick some of the things that are, i don’t know, more gnarly than the straightforward declutter-focused attention.
24:50.27
Jon
Yeah, yeah.
24:50.55
Cole Knaflic
Like, let’s get into some real-world stuff. And so we’ve, of course, anonymized everything, but the book is made up of 20 makeovers that are all inspired by true events, but where we start with the
25:00.02
Jon
Mm-hmm.
25:08.13
Cole Knaflic
typical graph or slide or a presentation and then take the reader through the process of what are we looking for, how are we looking at it, what changes are we making, what strategies are we applying and taking them through that transformation so that they can see the impact in lot of different cases.
25:10.40
Jon
Yeah.
25:27.51
Cole Knaflic
And so it crosses industries, different types of data. ah different considerations when it comes to the scenario at play. And it’s been it’s been a really fun book to work on.
25:38.43
Jon
Yeah. Have you kind of, you you I’m guessing you’ve had the joy of going back to old projects that you haven’t thought about in several years and be like, Oh yeah, I remember that was a good one.
25:44.95
Cole Knaflic
Yes.
25:46.61
Jon
Yeah.
25:47.38
Cole Knaflic
And the fun thing is because because we we see so many.
25:47.79
Jon
Yeah.
25:50.70
Cole Knaflic
Sometimes you go back and like, oh, that was really good.
25:51.57
Jon
Yeah.
25:53.53
Cole Knaflic
like, oh, wait, I did that.
25:53.80
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
25:55.15
Cole Knaflic
for um I At least Mike and I have that reaction.
25:59.52
Jon
yeah
25:59.99
Cole Knaflic
um Yeah. Yeah. yeah
26:02.39
Jon
have you Have you pulled from the storytelling with data community because, or examples in the community? Because I know ah at least for a while that there was like, um I still use one from, Neil Richards did one on ah an early one was like, you know, just annotate a simple chart.
26:10.92
Cole Knaflic
and
26:20.28
Jon
But like, are they are they all, ah you said anonymized, so they’re all anonymized from clients or do you have any from the community that people
26:24.00
Cole Knaflic
um
26:27.09
Cole Knaflic
No, these are all these are all from client work and, again, anonymized from client work.
26:29.53
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
26:31.57
Cole Knaflic
um But, yeah, there was no shortage to pull from there. So we haven’t partnered with these others.
26:35.35
Jon
So how do you, so when you anonymize it, you’re anonymizing the data. Are you anonymizing? Like I can just imagine, you know, someone from the utility company in Minneapolis gave us this, like in that case, do you just say, you know, it’s utility company in San Francisco?
26:51.27
Cole Knaflic
We’re fully we’re so like swapping stuff around so that you know if you take if you take a given example that is from a client in a certain industry, it’s this kind of data, it’s going to be shown in this way in this circumstance, we’re mixing and matching that across scenarios so that there’s not going to be any sort of identifying um or you know we’re not giving away any secrets with what we’re doing.
26:54.35
Jon
Yeah.
27:02.44
Jon
Yeah.
27:06.00
Jon
All across. Yeah.
27:09.40
Jon
Right.
27:12.76
Jon
Right.
27:13.70
Cole Knaflic
So not only changing the numbers, but mixing and matching ah
27:17.10
Jon
Yeah, sure.
27:17.46
Cole Knaflic
costs so that while inspired by true client events that the the details have been changed.
27:23.29
Jon
Yeah, that’s the that’s a tag as you open the book, inspired by true events.
27:26.56
Cole Knaflic
Yeah.
27:26.77
Jon
um what um What happens with um with the tools? Because a lot of, not a lot, There are not many books out there. The few books that go in sort of doing these redesigns, doing these makeovers, they tend to be focused on a specific tool, um which has its own pros and cons.
27:44.20
Cole Knaflic
Yeah, the makeovers themselves, yeah, pros and cons for short, the makeovers themselves are all tool agnostic, just just like our other books, where it’s more the thought process and the strategies that you’re employing that you can do in your tool of choice.
27:48.28
Jon
Yeah.
27:50.56
Jon
Yeah.
28:01.90
Cole Knaflic
ah we The examples in the book were all done in our normal suite of Excel and PowerPoint because it’s still what we find ourselves using the most with our clients.
28:13.16
Cole Knaflic
And so we will likely be providing all of the downloads along with that for people that want to go in and see how things were done. But it’s not meant to be any sort of advertisement for PowerPoint.
28:23.58
Jon
Yeah.
28:23.82
Cole Knaflic
these are the The tool is not the lesson here.
28:27.44
Jon
Yeah.
28:27.63
Cole Knaflic
It’s how do you get the, like, what should you be thinking about um when it comes to those things.
28:28.36
Jon
Yeah. I’m with you. I’m with you on that one. so So let me ask this, because this is ah a topic that’s come up a few times more recently. I talked to Enrico Bertini, I think maybe late last year.
28:40.33
Cole Knaflic
Mm-hmm.
28:42.78
Jon
And one of the things we were talking about was… um the sort of structure of data when it comes to creating visualizations. And I think a lot of us that are in the data visit ah visualization world, specifically in the and the sort of training and teaching, we kind of gloss over that whole process of data, getting the data and cleaning it and restructuring it to like make the graphs.
29:04.96
Jon
So um maybe maybe the book isn’t the right forum for this, but so I’ll ask this more generally, but have you found yourself talking more to people or teaching people more about the underlying data itself, cleaning it and working with it and structuring it?
29:22.16
Cole Knaflic
We don’t get into a ton of conversations on that because the examples that we get from our clients, typically they’ve already done that step.
29:24.41
Jon
Yeah.
29:29.15
Cole Knaflic
And so we’re taking what they give us as, you we’re assuming that’s already been done in a robust manner.
29:29.69
Jon
Yeah.
29:34.86
Jon
Yeah.
29:37.37
Cole Knaflic
We do get into a lot of conversations about it that come up through questions or as we’re parsing the different examples.
29:37.90
Jon
Right.
29:44.80
Cole Knaflic
And so we’re talking about that with groups, but we don’t get into that in the book specifically.
29:48.93
Jon
yeah
29:51.17
Jon
Yeah, i I have found the same thing. I mean, I think the one thing that I’ve started to add to more of like the hands-on workshops of making things is just demonstrating the difference between a wide data set and a long data set and how to navigate between the two.
30:03.97
Cole Knaflic
Yeah.
30:06.71
Jon
I have found that most people just don’t, maybe they instinctively, if they’re if they’ve been working with data, they know the differences between the two, but they haven’t really thought about, some of the tools want, like Tableau is a good example. Generally, not always. The Tableau people will come after me, but like not always, but oftentimes it wants the data in a long format.
30:25.62
Jon
um Flourish is a good example that for some graphs, it wants it wide, some graphs it wants it long. And just that basic, Non-trivial task of flipping between the two is kind of an important technique. And I haven’t really started teaching that until you know last year or two.
30:42.93
Cole Knaflic
Yeah, we often draw on the distinction between the exploration of data and the explanation and do kind of the hand wavy, you’ve already explored it, you’ve found what you’re going to do, and then now we’re going to help you explain it.
30:48.89
Jon
easy
30:52.36
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. but Yeah. To the same thing. Yeah.
30:56.35
Cole Knaflic
But yeah, these are all things that need tackled as part of that exploratory process.
30:56.57
Jon
Yeah.
31:01.18
Jon
Yeah. so um ah So we’re about to run out of time, ah which is too bad because I have like nine other things on my list, but that’s okay. um So when have you found in um in the in the workshops and in the teaching and and now with this, so this is kind of a two-part question.
31:20.03
Jon
Have you found people asking for different things, changes? I mean, we’ve been you and i’ have been doing this for 10, 15 years now. There’s been like lots of…
31:28.71
Cole Knaflic
Are the questions evolving? Is that the question?
31:30.44
Jon
Yeah, the question’s evolving. Yeah, that’s good way to put it. um and And do you anticipate using this book in workshops?
31:41.13
Cole Knaflic
The… Questions, I would say some evolve over time, at but I would say the majority of them are the same and have been the same for the past decade.
31:46.82
Jon
Mm-hmm.
31:51.05
Jon
Mm-hmm.
31:53.54
Cole Knaflic
When it comes to thinking about how to plan and the different strategies to employ, i think where things have evolved. So, you know We can anticipate in anything we do now, we get some sort of question that has the AI bent to it.
32:09.20
Jon
Yes. Yes.
32:10.44
Cole Knaflic
I had to laugh because I even, it was at the um the reading that I did at a bookstore on the day that Daphne Draws Data came out. And so this is like to an audience of children.
32:18.45
Jon
Yeah. Right.
32:20.66
Cole Knaflic
And you know Teddy, the third grader, he’s in my daughter’s class, raises his hand and asks an AI question.
32:29.93
Jon
ah That’s pretty great.
32:31.29
Cole Knaflic
But i think I think there’s some really interesting things there.
32:31.70
Jon
That’s great.
32:33.73
Cole Knaflic
because oftentimes the question is something along the lines of, you know is AI going to make all of this moot and machines are going to do this for us? Which I actually think is the wrong question to be asking.
32:40.76
Jon
Yeah.
32:43.06
Cole Knaflic
I think the interesting question is, because I think the answer there is no.
32:43.55
Jon
Mm-hmm.
32:46.67
Cole Knaflic
And you know I caveat that maybe I’m naive, but I think we need our brains because we’re the ones that actually have the context and know the people and can navigate these things.
32:53.30
Jon
Mm-hmm.
32:56.06
Cole Knaflic
But I think the interesting question is, how can AI help us be more thorough, more robust, more consistent? Where is it going to help us do things that we just haven’t had the person power to do before.
33:08.88
Cole Knaflic
So I get excited by things like qualitative analysis. Like I remember being at Google and you know having to read through verbatim comments and try to code things and get sentiment like what that all looked like to try to make sense.
33:20.71
Jon
Mm-hmm.
33:24.89
Cole Knaflic
That sort of analysis with natural language models can be done in seconds now.
33:29.77
Jon
Yeah.
33:29.94
Cole Knaflic
And so when you think of the amount of additional insight that gives us from call logs and customer service complaints and like this whole host of things, I think there’s really interesting new insight that we’ll be able to get more quickly that we can use to just add another level of information
33:39.10
Jon
Mm-hmm.
33:49.58
Cole Knaflic
I don’t know, understanding to everything that we’re doing. i think also there’s some really interesting ways, and actually this is maybe coming back to some of the underlying parts of your questions about the exploring data, but how do we make sure we’re doing this in a smart way and that we’re not being biased in ways that we’re not
34:03.40
Jon
Mm
34:07.24
Cole Knaflic
ah that we’re not cognizant of. And you know how do we anticipate questions? like AI can be a great brainstorming partner on these sorts of things that can actually help us be a lot more robust in how we’re working with data.
34:21.22
Jon
hmm. Mm hmm.
34:21.67
Cole Knaflic
I think can be cool. um So yeah, I wish questions that would evolve a little more than they have, but they’ll get there.
34:23.86
Jon
Cool. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I no I think that’s right. Well, on that note of future looking, um thanks so much for coming on um Let’s remind folks, if you can, where they can find you, get involved in the community, all that good stuff.
34:38.12
Cole Knaflic
Yes, so storytellingwithdata.com is where you’ll find everything adult-facing. So wholl find information on our trainings and workshops. I’ll just mention on the workshop piece, we have upcoming master classes. Those are full-day sessions that anyone can register for in-person in London at the end of April and in New York City in October.
35:01.01
Cole Knaflic
we also have an eight-week course, the next cohort starting in September. and we have books and podcasts and YouTube channel and community and all those good things. So all of that’s at storytellingwithdata.com.
35:13.14
Cole Knaflic
Everything Daphne and kids related is at DaphneDrawsData.com.
35:19.06
Jon
Well, I’ll see. Cole, always a pleasure. Thank you much for coming on the show. And I’ll talk to you hope.
35:23.67
Cole Knaflic
Great to chat with you, John.
35:27.21
Cole Knaflic
Sounds great.
