There is a dangerous belief that, because data is objective, it can speak for itself: as long as the charts and tables and slides are accurate, then the analyst’s work is done.

This is analogous to stopping and going home after running 25 miles of a race and believing that you have completed a full marathon. What gets delivered in a report or as the result of an analysis, and HOW it gets delivered, is as critical in determining whether stakeholders take action with the information as the underlying analysis itself.

More information is generally NOT better. Changing up the data visualizations throughout a presentation primarily just to “mix things up” is a terrible idea.

Presenting “the data” and expecting the stakeholders to draw their own conclusions is a guarantee that they will draw no conclusions at all!

The great news is that there are a range of straightforward tips and techniques—grounded in some basic understanding of how the brain processes information—that can be learned and immediately put into practice to ensure that analytics deliverables are clear, understood, and retained by the business stakeholders to whom they are delivered.