(00:15): Have you ever watched a movie where, at the beginning of the movie, the main character is happy, everything is amazing in their life? Then a bit into the movie, the main character is happy and everything's amazing in their life. Then, around the middle of the movie, the main character is happy and everything's amazing in their life. Then towards the end of the movie, the main character is still happy and everything's amazing in their life. And then at the very end, the movie ends with the main character, you guessed it, happy, and everything's amazing in their life? Have you ever seen a movie like that? Well, if you have, I bet you probably didn't sit through to the end of it. And why is that? Because that movie is boring. Everything is amazing. That's probably the life we all dream for, all want, but it's boring to watch. 

(01:06): And that is because our brains are wired in such a way that we look for conflict. We look for drama, we look for some ... These things, they spice up the experience of watching a movie, or as a matter of fact, the experience of life. And without them, without this uncertainty, without these conflicts and challenges, life or a movie, or a story for that matter, wouldn't be exciting, wouldn't be worth watching, and just be boring. And so that same thing applies to presentations. Drama, or the term we're going to use is tension. Tension in a story is captivating, is exciting, it keeps people on the edge of their seats, makes them want to find out what's going to happen. And so that applies to stories and specifically to presentations as well. And this is where the topic is extremely relevant to data science. A few weeks ago, we had on the podcast in episode 395, we had Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, who is a best-selling author in the space of data visualization, the author of the book called Storytelling With Data. 

(02:21): And she spoke a bit about this narrative arc. So today we're going to describe or explore this narrative arc even further to understand what goes on inside a narrative arc and how you can build one for your presentations or your stories in data science. 

(02:41): So a narrative arc is a framework that has been developed over time and actually is in the basis of pretty much any movie or story you can think of or you've watched in the past. From Harry Potter, to Lord of the Rings, to Star Wars, to Cinderella. To whatever you can think of there is a narrative arc in the story. There might be several narrative arcs in a row, a combination of them, but ultimately the main building block of a story is called a narrative arc. And we'll include in the show notes, if you want to look at the diagram, we'll include in the show notes, you can find them at superdatascience.com slash the number of this episode, and you'll be able to find the diagram there, but I'll try to explain it briefly here. And then we'll move on to an example, of an actual example of a story being dissected in this narrative arc form. 

(03:35): So the narrative arc has three parts. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. So just imagine like an X, Y axis. On the X axis you have timeline. So basically the time that's passed in the story. On the Y axis you have tension. So at the very start in the beginning you have ... And then you have these three areas. So the beginning is going to be the first area. Then on the timeline you're going to have the middle, and then on the end you're going to have the end part. So in the beginning, there is no tension. It's really flat. It's a flat horizontal line, and that's called the exposition. That's when you're painting the picture of the background of the story, or your problem, your data science problem, whatever it is. And then between the beginning and the middle there's a specific point in time where there's an enticing incident that happens and that gives rise to the story. And from there it's no longer a flat horizontal line, it's now a slanted line, a sloped line going upwards. And that's how the whole middle progresses. 

(04:32): And that main part is called rising action. Things are happening. The action is rising. Then before the end of this middle bit, and still in this sloped line, you have a crisis. That's a point in time. And then after the crisis you have the climax. And the climax is when the solution is revealed. And after the climates you have the ending bit, the falling action, which consists of another sloped line going downwards, much steeper and faster than the rising action, which just slopes down quite fast. It's falling action. The things are getting resolved, the end of the story, they lived happily ever after. And that's the resolution. That's the end of the story. So main points are exposition, enticing incident, rising action, crisis, climax, falling action, resolution.

(05:15): Once again you can to find the diagram at superdatascience.com slash the number of this podcast episode. And that is how a narrative arc is structured. So it doesn't actually ... you can draw it as an arc. It actually looks more like a flat beginning, and then like a triangle. Up and at an angle, and down at an angle. And any story, a good story should follow this narrative arc because that's, as humans, what we have been hardwired over millions of years, well, language was developed not that long ago, so hundreds of thousands of years of telling these stories to each other. That's what we expect. And if you make your presentation follow the narrative arc, then you're going to hit the nail on the head. You're going to really drive the point home, and people are going to be able to follow your story, and are going to be excited to listen to you. 

(06:08): And we're going to dissect a famous story. So you've probably heard of this story. It's called the story of Cinderella. The actual story, children's story of Cinderella. So let's dissect it. Let's see if it fits this narrative arc. Right? So Cinderella, in case you are not familiar with the story, it's the one where she went to a ball and she lost a shoe, and then the Prince still found her based on the shoe. So the beginning is in a kingdom a long time ago where the stepsisters treated her badly and she was mopping these floors and so on. And so that's the beginning, that's the flat part, or what we called in our description, the exposition. Right? So they're telling you about, okay, setting the scene. And you can think of Star Wars, right, where like in a galaxy far, far away. Or you can think of Lord of the Rings, where they were at the very start, they have this festival and Bilbo's turning like 100 something, 111 or something years old, and they're preparing. So there's no action, there's no drama, there's no tension. They're just setting the scene for you. 

(07:22): But then there's an enticing incident, right? There's an enticing incident in the story. And in the story of Cinderella it's the invitation to go to the ball. So this invitation comes through and that's your enticing incident. In fact, in the story of Cinderella there's an enticing incident, it has two parts. There's a second part where Cinderella has no dress to go to the ball, right? So together that's the enticing incident, or a two part enticing incident where, okay, now the tension starts building up. There's an invitation to go to the ball, but she doesn't have a dress. If you're thinking of the Lord of the Rings story, for instance, it's the ring. Right? So they find the ring, Bilbo puts this ring on. Oh okay, well that's no big deal, he becomes invisible. 

(08:04): But then when Frodo picks up the ring, Bilbo leaves the ring and Frodo picks up the ring. He throws it in the fire, and they see these letters appear, him and Gandalf see these letters appear. So boom, it's a magical ring. It's got a history behind it And it's cursed. And you feel the tension rising. Those riders are coming out of Mordor and they're riding their horses. They want to find the ring. Tensions rising. So that's your enticing incident. 

(08:32): Then you have the rising action. So the slope line continues. And for instance, in the story of Cinderella, let's focus on that. We've got the fairy godmother appears and helps Cinderella. Then Cinderella goes to the ball. Cinderella dances with the Prince. In the meantime, so diagrammatically it looks like a straight slope. So a sloped line, a straight sloped line. But at the same time, in a real story, it's kind of like up and down, up and down. There's tension goes up, like will Frodo and his Hobbit friends, will they make it away from the horse riders? And then tension goes down. They did make it out of that. They got onto that ... What's it called? Like the little ferry thing that crosses the river and the horses couldn't follow them. 

(09:24): And then next, now they're in the inn, the Horse Inn something, like the hotel where they were staying. And the riders come in with their daggers, and they're about to stab the pillows or stab their beds, and the tension rises. But then we find out that they weren't actually in the beds. I hope I'm not ruining Lord of the Rings for you. So they're not actually in the beds. And the tension drops. And so it's kind of like up and down, up and down, but overall the tension's rising, the story's building. Right? So we've got fairy godmother appears and helps Cinderella. Cinderella goes to the ball. Cinderella dances with the Prince. Cinderella leaves in a hurry, losing her slipper. So that will be our crisis situation. So in a long story like Lord of the Rings, there could be several crises situations, which are followed by slide resolution. But then the story keeps building. 

(10:17): In the case of Cinderella, she leaves in hurry situation, losing her slipper. That's the crisis situation. And then the Prince says that he will marry the woman whom the slipper fits. That's still the rising action. So we're very tense. What is going to happen? Are they going to find out that it was Cinderella? Is it her slipper? Are they going to fall in love? Are they going to live happily ever after? 

(10:39): And then the climax, the very end, so the climax is when things are resolved. The climax is stepsisters try to force their feet into the slipper, but it only fits Cinderella. So boom, at that point in time, everything resolves, and we can see the happy ending coming. We can see like everything is going to be fantastic. And like in the Lord of the Rings, that's the point in time when the ring is actually in the lava, it's being destroyed. We know, okay, because right before that, there was a moment where Smeagol bites that finger, the ring off of Frodo, and you don't know if he's going to end up in the lava or not, but then ends up in the lava. So there's your climax. Anyway. So that's the climax. [inaudible 00:11:29] falling action. Cinderella and the Prince get married, Cinderella forgives her step sisters, and they all live happily ever after. That's your resolution, that's your ending. 

(11:39): So there we go. That's how a narrative arc is structured. And the point is when you're making data science presentation, or any presentation for that matter, if you're presenting to your kids some road trip that you're going to go on, or you're telling this story of a road trip that you went on, or something that you did to your friends, you're not going to make it flat. Or if you do make it flat, then it will be boring, right? Like everything is predictable. Everything's the same, there's no tension. You need to put that tension in. We do that in our normal day to day lives in stories we tell. Do the same thing in your data science presentations, whether it's to a board meeting, whether it's to your manager, or it's to 200 people or 1000 people now with virtual events and conferences. Make sure to build that tension in and follow this narrative arc. 

(12:29): So once again, exposition. Describe the problem that you're solving. Like what is the business background that they need to know of the problem. Then enticing incident, right? Like, "This happened, and we saw that our sales were three times lower than predicted." Okay, whoa, what's wrong there? Then rising action. See how it was building up. Like, "We looked at the data and it turns out that our affiliates were underperforming. But in addition to that, the marketing team tried to start this initiative, which did good results, but then that failed." So build it into a story. Describe what happened, describe the insights you got from the data. Not just in a flat factual manner, but build it into a story. Build some tension into it. Get people sitting on the edges of their seats. Get to the crisis situation. Really that will bring the colors out and everything, and everybody will be thinking, "Oh, okay. Okay. Well, how did it resolve?" 

(13:32): So then like, "And sales dropped by 70%. And this is the issue that we're facing right now. If we don't bring up the sales back then we might have to close these departments," or whatever else it is that you found. And then climax, boom. "The solution is we clearly need more people on the calls, or we need more technological solutions to take care of the excess volume of calls in order to prepare this. Or we found that, through natural language processing, we found that typically the sentiment on these calls is this and this. So the solution is this." And then you see the falling action. Then you describe the solution in more details. The kind of the proposed solution, as part of a role of a data scientist, to come up with, not just insights, but also proposed actions. And you describe solution, and boom, resolution. 

(14:26): And that is how you get people to listen to you, get people to be excited about what you're telling, want to know more. And also finally take action on the insights that you have found for them. 

(14:42): So there we go. That was our extended FiveMinuteFriday, but I think it was important on the narrative arc and the storytelling. So again, you can find the diagram and the show notes at superdatascience.com slash the number of this episode, like a three digit number of this episode. And also if you want to learn more about storytelling there was a great podcast with Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, which was not that long ago. It was episode 395. So hope you enjoyed this, and good luck with your narrative arc. It's a very powerful tool. I'm thinking of running a webinar sometime soon on this topic, or visualization. You can look out for those. We'll send some announcements if that's going to be happening sometime soon. But yeah, just remember narrative arc, very powerful. I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.