How to marshal your insights for powerful communication
Too often we are dealt raw fact—data and statistics in communication. Who recalls this? But, wrap a story around them and the situation changes. Let’s see how this plays out.
Facts are facts – data and statistics.
Insights are facts in context – the causes and the consequences of the facts. Now things start to get a bit more interesting.
Here is an example of a fact: ‘In the decade between 2002 and 2012, Victoria experienced a 58 per cent increase in the number of children in out-of-home care’.
On its own it signals something huge, but it’s still just information. When you go on to articulate the causes and the consequences for this fact, that’s an insight.
One of the causes in this case involved babies born to drug-addicted parents. A consequence included carers not being able to afford the right level of care on the allowances they received.
Still, this remains information.
Knowledge is applied information, the kernel in the nut – what you have learned and absorbed and practiced – your expertise.
Bring to that information your personal knowledge and experience of the causes and consequences and share it intelligently with others, and that is your value and your story, which completely changes the response to your communication.
The child protection worker who told me this insight, went on to say she had visited a woman who was a regular foster carer. She had a toddler on her knee and was in tears. She told the child protection worker she could no longer afford to buy his nappies, and even though she loved him, she couldn’t look after him properly and would have to return him.
Wrap this story around the insight, and the people who need to hear it would resonate emotionally and recall the fact.
What insights can you wrap a story around?
Sandy McDonald