🎬 the three-act chart.
a storytelling framework for data communicators.
The Three-Act Structure (3AS) is a fundamental model of narrative-driven storytelling, and applying it to your charts will make you a better at communicating meaning with your data.
It’s helpful to first understand how the Three-Act Structure works. Imagine a graph of story ‘tension’ versus time:
Pick your favourite movie/novel/anime and you’ll likely be able to relate. Each act has a purpose, and sets up the next:
Act 1 - Setup: The status quo world your characters inhabit, where you provide exposition and context. A sudden change at the end of Act 2 (plot point 1) leads to
Act 2 - Conflict: There is a sudden increase in stakes and action, leading to tension. Things escalate until a climax at which point you enter
Act 3 - Resolution: the dust settles, big finale is over, and your characters return to their normal world, but somehow changed.
Applying this to charts
It is obvious how you might apply the 3AS to a time series chart, as below:
What brings the story together in a business context is:
a good action title and
callouts + insights to focus audience attention
You could apply the same logic to a bar chart by using a before-after view:
Telling a longer story
Let’s imagine you’re using the data above to walk leadership through business trends. One way to interpret the data might be:
AMER used to make up most of your revenue, until 2020 when something changed…
…and everyone’s revenue shrank, but after confronting this change..
APAC revenue grew, and now makes up most of the business.
After digging around, you find a few root causes and insights as to why. Applying the 3AS, you might create a slide sequence like this to tell your story:
What next?
I don’t think the 3AS is the One True Way to tell stories with data - at a previous organisation, we instead preferred the similar Hero’s Journey, and in my current org it’s increasingly (and sadly) common to see people just dump data on a slide and hope for the best - which actually works with some stakeholders.
The benefit of 3AS is that it’s going to work in most situations; use it as a way to frame your overall narrative, and as a reliable option when you’re stuck.
media I’m consuming this week.
3 recommendations to help you learn and grow.
1. Top Down Communication Explained by Firm Learning
Heinrich runs probably the best YouTube channel for Strategy workers, and most knowledge workers could benefit from his content. This video focusses on how to communicate ideas to leaders - you’ll see similarities to my comms framework, and we’re all converging on that solution because it just works.
2. A look at all 35 international fintech startups at YC’s winter 2022 Demo Day via TechCrunch
Particularly impressed by Nigeria’s massive showing this year. It would seem we’re still in the hype phase for fintech, and models that can be predatory (EWA, BNPL) dominate. Still, it’s clear that exponential change awaits the financial world.
3. If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done? via McKinsey
I’ve been pulling 60-hour weeks and late night calls for a few months straight now, and yet feel insecure about my actual deliverables. This resonated a lot - the pandemic has fundamentally shifted how we interact at work, and in my opinion, it’s made things worse. This article provides some strategies for coping.
Imma steal this.