Why do so many research decks end up as 80-slide encyclopedias that nobody actually reads? Chuck and Maggie tackle the classic tension between wanting to show off all the hard work that went into a study and giving busy stakeholders a story they'll actually remember. They compare how different backgrounds shape that instinct, discussing how academic training pushes people to over-explain every footnote, while advertising experience trains you to grab attention in 30 seconds flat. From there, Chuck and Maggie dive into five straightforward ways to cut through the data clutter. They talk through why locking down a single "essential question" with stakeholders before a project even starts can save weeks of misalignment later on. They also call out the bad habit of giving every single survey question its own dedicated slide, making a strong case for trimming decks down to a crisp 25 or 30 slides. Listen as they unpack how researchers can step up as true consultants, whether that's tailoring decks for specific rooms, creating a single visual "money slide," or throwing out bold recommendations just to get a good business discussion started.
Key Takeaways
Quotes
Resources
Maggie Bright 0:00
Hey everybody! This is Maggie Bright from Murphy Research, and you're listening to the Key Takeaways podcast. Today, Chuck Murphy and I are going to talk about storytelling and the five fundamentals of great storytelling. We hope you enjoy. All
Chuck Murphy 0:23
right, welcome everybody. We are super excited to be talking storytelling today. I know Maggie loves to talk storytelling. I do.
Maggie Bright 0:32
It's what I think about day and night. Mostly, I think about what else we should call it besides storytelling. But
Speaker 1 0:38
for sure,
Maggie Bright 0:38
excited to talk about it.
Chuck Murphy 0:40
If anybody has any ideas there for the renaming of storytelling, Maggie would like an alternative. You know, perhaps narrative, perhaps
Maggie Bright 0:49
yeah, whatever
Chuck Murphy 0:51
story
Maggie Bright 0:51
of the details. I don't know.
Chuck Murphy 0:53
Let us your let know your ideas. But let's let's talk about storytelling and maybe a good place to start with storytelling. A good place to start our story. Which, by the way, whenever I say a good place to start a story, it makes me think of the Princess Bride. That's what I thought of doing. Is that not? It's like such. It's one of my favorite little. Such a good
Maggie Bright 1:11
movie. Yeah, part
Chuck Murphy 1:12
of a movie that they're like, let's start at the very beginning. Like the way he lays it out is so cute, and you know, obviously we're researchers and our our lives, our data, but you could make the argument that storytelling is perhaps the most fundamental part of our job, and I think it's something that I think you know. When I always think about it in terms of progression of skills, right? Like, what do people learn in this business, and and when you know, if you think about the progression of skills of an average researcher, I would put storytelling right at the end of the line, right? Like if if once you understand how to tell us a story of data, I feel like you've got this field right. Like you start with like the basics, how does it work, and then you get into things like you know in you know on the on the vendor side of it, you get into like things you know after a year, you're starting learn how to put together questionnaires and discussion guides or how does you know data quality work and then you know after a couple years you're learning about how to kind of assemble that into like you know a cohesive format whether it's qual or quant and a slide but sort of the last hill you climb is how do you take this mountain of data and turn it into a useful story, and I think it's it's it's really really hard. But I also make the argument that it's it's the whole reason we exist as a field, right? Like the data is great, having the data is great, talking to all these people is great. But if you can't at the end of you know six weeks or 12 weeks or whatever it's been, turn around and say this is why we did this, and this is the most important thing we learned. Then you could make an argument that everything else has been for naught, right? Because
Maggie Bright 2:47
I mean, you know, one of our pillars is enduring insights, and the way to have enduring insights is to be able to craft a narrative that people can understand that resonates with them, and that they will then carry on to tell someone else. So I think it's it's sort of fundamental to our DNA. But also, I mean, you can spend hours looking at these data sets. There's so much information that we can collect, especially now. And if you can't package that in a way that is accessible to someone who isn't used to looking at numbers the way that we are, then you're right. Like, what's the point of doing it? And I mean, obviously, when we talk to researchers, they speak the same you know numerical language that we do often. But when it gets beyond that, you do have to be able to tell a compelling. You have to answer the questions that were asked, and a lot of times that has to be done in a narrative process, or it doesn't resonate with the people who have been asking the questions. So I would agree with you. I think it is fundamental, and I think it is becoming more and more important as our attention gets stretched across more areas as professionals. So yes, it is like core to what we do. Yeah, and it's fun. I mean, I think it's the most interesting part of what we do too, because if you can take a, if you can start with, I have this question as to why this thing is happening or how do I reach this audience, and at the end you get to an answer that you can tell in a story. Like that's a really exciting process. So fundamental to what we do,
Chuck Murphy 4:18
and I feel like there's you know there's all these famous you could you know you could read books on stories or whatever like you could you could find anthropologists or or social scientists out there that that will tell you that humans have always learned by stories right that's a large part of the way our brain works and stories are not necessarily bad but they they're they're basically in the way I always think about it not to to get too cognitive on you is they're they're a memory device, right? Like they're they're a way for us to to take all this all this information and and recall it later in this format that's simple, and that's a big challenge in what we do in this in this field, right? Is like how how do we take all this information and turn it into something that a lot of different types of people can. Can remember and be like, hey, yeah, you know, two years ago we did this big project and we spoke to all these people, and the reason we did that was this, and and what we learned was this. Like, that's a hard ask for a lot of people. Like you said, there's all there's all different people. There's some people that love to see data. There's some people that love to, you know. I always think there's there's people like us that are used to dealing with data, and even inside that group, I think there's people that think like a little bit more qualitatively, or people that think a little bit more quantitatively. I've always been a very quantitative person. Numbers always speak to me, and it's it took me. It's taken me a long time in my life to realize like it doesn't work that way for a lot of people. Like if I tell someone like, "Hey, 30% of this group does this, and only 10% of this other group does this. For some people, are like, "Wow, that's amazing, and other people are like, "So, like, this is funny. It's like, but so you have to kind of figure out how people think and then what speaks to them. Yeah,
Maggie Bright 5:52
I totally. I mean, as a history or population, right? We are our roots are like as oral storytellers, right? Before language, you know, written language evolved, and all of that. So I do think it's like a, it's not only a way to create sort of these lasting memories, but I think there's more you, you create more of an emotional or nostalgic connection to some of the information or to the project as well. So it it works kind of on two levels: one, imprinting a memory, but also like usually if it's a good story. It's a positive memory in a lot of ways, and so I think that even carries the research a little bit further and makes it, you know, a lot easier to bring back up years from now when you're like, hey, haven't we talked about this before? And you're like, yes, I remember this visual or I remember this narrative that came through. So I think I think it's really important not only in terms of, you know, getting disseminating the information further into the organization, but creating this like history for the work that you've done over time that you can recall more easily than, you know, I saw this bar chart once. You know, the recalls better.
Chuck Murphy 6:56
And it's in a field like ours. I feel like storytelling is a little bit like wisdom, right? Like it's like it's a little bit of like you kind of, you know, you have to really kind of earn your stripes to get why things, why why like why you have to earn that wisdom, or you have to kind of earn that ability to tell these stories by having a lot of different skill sets underneath it, a lot of different things you've seen.
Maggie Bright 7:17
I have this visual of you around like the fireplace as the wise old storyteller, big hat. Well,
Chuck Murphy 7:23
I'm not even. I don't even think I'm a good storyteller. I mean, I am Irish, so so I've got this you know predisposition to it, right? But but it is you know it's funny because I was there are certain people that are just extremely gifted at it. I was I was telling some of our colleagues the other day that like we're working with this client right now, who I you know I first met 20 plus years ago, who it was just a tremendous storyteller, like just so good at weaving that together. And I I remember when I first started in this field, I we would do these giant projects for Microsoft, and there would be just just enormous amounts of data. And it was for me, you know, I had come from academia. I had never, had never, it had never occurred to me that someone could spend this much money on data collection and accumulate this much data. Like it just, it literally to this day, just I just remember blowing my mind. I'm like, wait, we're going to talk to how many people? Like the narrow countries? Like it would. It just blew my mind that that was even possible because I hadn't seen anything like that before. But um, and then I remember seeing as this as the data collection goes, just thinking like, oh my gosh, like we could spend years talking about everything we could learn from this data set, and and they're like, yeah, but we have an hour, you know. And you're just like, well, wait a minute, you know.
Maggie Bright 8:45
It's it's so interesting that you say so. Your frame of reference is academia. My frame of reference, I came from an advertising agency, right? Which is an entire like you're trying to tell a story in 15 seconds, 30 seconds,
Chuck Murphy 8:58
right? Maybe
Maggie Bright 8:59
a minute if you're in the Super Bowl, right, and so I think that that, and then I went client side before I went supplier side, and so I have received those decks that are like, you know, every question has a slide and there's no story at all, and I think having those two experiences really shaped my supplier side view of things. I'm like, I don't, I don't ever want to send over a deck that doesn't tell, like quickly tell a story about why we did this research. There's nothing worse than someone launching an 80 slide deck over the wall and being like, "Best of luck. So I think for me, that's really informed how I think about research and story planning and and telling sort of the like why like what this data means and what you can do with it in a in a more narrative format so it's interesting that we come from such separate sides of the spectrum in terms of how we've related to data in the past and kind of ended up in the exact same spot of like hey you have to take all this data and make it into.
Chuck Murphy 10:01
There's a lot of things to love about academics. I mean, they're a lot. I love them to death, but they are not good storytellers, right? They're they're the worst storytellers you've ever met in your life, which is what they want
Maggie Bright 10:10
to do the unabridged version of everything.
Chuck Murphy 10:12
Yeah, academics. I mean, I remember we used to. I've talked to some different. As we hire academics over the years, I would always tell them like like they have this impulse to To cover every detail and have you know 72 footnotes, which I still write like that in emails. I'll have like five parenthetical comments because I still think that way sometimes. But it's it's it's so much better to come from an ad agency perspective and and and see the other side of that because I think that's the thing that when people come up in this field, it's hardest for them to grasp. Right, like they're just so in the weeds, they don't understand sometimes that many people come into these presentations. It's one of 25 things they need to do today, and they they don't have you know an hour and a half just to try to come to grips with some of the basic data. And I
Maggie Bright 10:54
think in a lot of organizations, the insights function is still fighting for validation sometimes. So it's like you have to be a little like there's a bit of a salesmanship that goes into all of these meetings too. That's like, hey, I have value here. My information has value here, and it should feed into the strategy or into innovation or those types of things. And I, I mean, that's not true of all companies, but in some, it's still very much like you have to, you know, you have to show your worth in a lot of these meetings, and you can't do that with a very dry deck that is super numbers heavy. When when you know the the last meeting the person could have come from could have been with their ad agency, where they're seeing all this amazing creative and things like that. So,
Chuck Murphy 11:36
right,
Maggie Bright 11:36
the context is really important there too.
Chuck Murphy 11:39
Right, and and you you kind of you know it's funny because you talk about almost like polishing it, but but I think at a deeper level, it's like you have to know where the leverage is and explain to people like that's that's kind of the best way to prove the the ROI of the insights function, right? And and I think a lot of people, um, they they are a little bit too academic. They they're not as aggressive enough as saying that's where the leverage is, right? Because it's because sometimes our knowledge it's like poker, right? Or something. Sometimes your knowledge of where the leverage is is still a bit of a guess, right? You don't. It's still an incomplete information, and so you don't. So they don't have that confidence because they focus on the whatever 60% chance that could be wrong, or you know what I mean? It's but it's like you still know more. It's better to have an informed bet than an underinformed bet, and so they they're not as aggressive as they can, which I do think is is part is part of the things we'll talk about today a little bit. Yes,
Maggie Bright 12:34
I love it. Maybe
Chuck Murphy 12:35
we should too. You know, we just did a very long winded intro, which is probably not good storytelling. But we decided to talk about storytelling today, and we decided to wrap our story in the framework of five fundamentals of storytelling. And of course, stories in our field, in any field, take a lot of different formats, and there's a lot of different challenges. You know, I've worked on studies where I literally knew the the slide that would be the the end all be all of the presentation when the questionnaire was written, and then I've had you know there's other monster studies where you get all this data and you literally go through it for weeks and there's there's a an argument maybe in your head or with your colleagues about what the key takeaways are and where the focus should be and that's and then this story is like a little bit of a fight to to come together, and so there's all different kind of challenges, but we decided that that we kind of wrap our story today in terms of five fundamentals, and talk about these different things that that impact most of the studies that we encounter. So yeah, let's just dive right in. I love a good
Maggie Bright 13:40
I love a good five five item list.
Chuck Murphy 13:43
We know my. I always want to get to three, and maybe you can make the argument that I should have cut two items up. I love the rule of three. Everything should be three, but I do think for for today five is five is awesome. The fabulous five fingers
Maggie Bright 13:56
for a reason, so you can list them off. We don't just
Chuck Murphy 13:58
that's true. It's all my. I love the Fab Five thing. Maybe we should go the Fab Five. I love it.
Maggie Bright 14:03
The Fab Five fundamentals of storytelling.
Chuck Murphy 14:05
I love it. And as a
Maggie Bright 14:07
Michigan alum, I love that too.
Chuck Murphy 14:09
So quick culture check: If I say Fab Five, who do you picture?
Maggie Bright 14:12
I go University of Michigan basketball team.
Chuck Murphy 14:15
That's what I thought too. I was some, you know, that's what I figured. But I go with. I think for my whole life that's who the Fab Five will be, but I know that 1993
Maggie Bright 14:24
is that is that the right year? I think that's the year.
Chuck Murphy 14:26
No, I'm terrible with that, but I do remember the timeout.
Maggie Bright 14:30
Yep. Now this time,
Chuck Murphy 14:33
he's thinking, can I name the Fab Five, which we cut from this podcast? But Jalen Rose, Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris Webber. Shoot, I can't believe I'm fighting. Weber,
Maggie Bright 14:43
Chris Webber,
Chuck Murphy 14:44
Weber. Thank you, Weber, thank you. Elon Rose, Chris Webber. Then they had the real tall dude.
Maggie Bright 14:49
They were all tall. Um, I should know the answer to this. I was, oh my God,
Chuck Murphy 14:53
Jawan, oh my God, Nicole knows Jawan Howard. Look at Nicole. How did did you do that? That was amazing. Jawan Howard, Jimmy King, and Ray Jackson. See, I never would have gotten Jimmy. I wouldn't have gotten the
Maggie Bright 15:04
last two.
Chuck Murphy 15:05
Juan Howard, Jimmy King,
Maggie Bright 15:06
and Ray Jackson. Although I will say they had all five of them doing commentary two years ago at the NCAA men's basketball final. Do they really? Michigan was in in the final. They were in the final four, I think. So
Chuck Murphy 15:19
yeah. All right, we just dated ourselves because half the people listening to this podcast don't know. And you can totally
Maggie Bright 15:24
cut all of that out, Nicole, because it-I don't think it helped our story. I'm amazed
Chuck Murphy 15:27
how quickly Nicole got that, though. I mean, I mean
Maggie Bright 15:30
AI. I
Chuck Murphy 15:31
don't know if it's AI or she's that much of a college basketball field. Okay, so let's dive in. Our first fundamental of storytelling is-is maybe one of the harder ones to communicate in terms of a podcast, but the the way we wrote it is the the essential question has to be clearly articulated right at the front, and this is one of those things that I think sounds easy, and everybody nods their head and be like, yeah. But in practice, it's actually it's actually very difficult for a lot of organizations. Would you agree with that?
Maggie Bright 16:00
I I would 100% agree, and I think the the the this piece of the puzzle relies on having a good, really good working relationship or partnership with your client, because at this point you are 100% reliant on them to give you the information or the access to the information you need, and for them to have a pretty clear POV on what they want, so that you can then deliver against that. So it's like this this dance of you need to be asking the right questions to get what you want, but they also need to have access to the information, and it's not always possible for them to answer the questions for myriad of reasons, and sometimes it's hard to get to stakeholders who might be able to give you some of the answers to those questions too. But I, if you don't know what the starting point is, there's no way you're going to know what the end point is. So I, I agree with you that this is sort of crucial to getting, you know, to getting all the pieces you need to write the story in the long run.
Chuck Murphy 17:01
It's funny you kind of mentioned so one issue here in terms of getting the essential question articulated is that it's sometimes hard to get stakeholders to weigh in on right so in that it's like you you you don't have visibility right the other thing that I think happens a lot in this scenario is you know somebody from products is going into this research with the idea that they're going to get X out of it, and then somebody from you know comms is going into this project with the idea they're going to get Y out of it, and you know someone on the research team hears that right now. Sometimes they don't; they're not savvy enough to hear the difference, right? But assuming that they're now savvy enough and they know that these two people have slightly different goals. The natural inclination sometimes is to kick the can down the road and not, um, not have any conflict, right? Like you just like, oh, well, we'll just resolve that later. And then you get to the final presentation, and the two people assumed that their version was the version that was happening, and you get this kind of, uh, you know, anger or or like, hey, why'd you do it that way? I needed this, or blah blah blah. And it's almost the worst thing that could happen. Like, as as the can gets kicked down the road, it gets harder and harder to solve. Like, I always like think about it like an architect, you know, presents a plan and you see a problem and you don't fix it, and then the builder starts. And the longer that builder goes, it gets harder and harder to change it. Whereas, if at the plan stage, the architect could have moved that wall over three feet pretty easily, or the architect could have told you you can't do that, and here's why. And I think it's really important to kind of get that up front. And a lot of times, when you force those discussions, you also force the resolution. Like, okay, we can't exactly do it this way, or we can't exactly do it that way. But how about if we do a blend that's this way, or we clearly tell people like, "Hey, look, you know, this person over here's needs are bigger than yours, or where they've got more budget than yours, or whatever. So we go that way, but it's better to do that up front, right? Like, and and I
Maggie Bright 18:54
can you tell at the beginning of a project when it's going to be hard to get to the story? I mean, it's so it's it's often very obvious to me, even in the experience where you're like, nope, they didn't figure out what the core question was, or you have that first meeting and you're like, oh, these are the these aren't the stakeholders that I thought I'd be talking to, or they're. That's kind of why
Speaker 2 19:13
this
Chuck Murphy 19:14
is like. I think this a lot of these storytelling skills are are kind of wisdom type skills where it's like they they're earned after years of doing it a lot of times, and sometimes when you're younger and brasher, you just like, no, I don't need to do that, or I don't need to this. You don't see why meetings or or some of those early stage alignment type things need to happen.
Maggie Bright 19:31
We we write pretty detailed proposals. I think when we get requests, and if I I find that if I cannot write the draft of a questionnaire in a proposal, then I then there's problems with, like I I worry about some of the problems I might have with that project. So it's like if I can't articulate, even if I don't put it in the questionnaire, if I can't sit down and write the outline of the questionnaire or the discussion guide or whatever the survey tool is prior to sending the proposal, that I'm like, ooh. Gonna have to work really hard at the beginning of this project to make sure we're all clear on what the objectives are. Yeah. So I worked
Chuck Murphy 20:06
with a guy when I was younger in this field, the real smart guy, and he he like you know this was the area that he was actually best at. You know, it's funny everyone has different skills. Yeah. Some like and and this was he was he was fantastic at this, and he used to like on everything he touched. There would be one slide right at the beginning of the deck that he would just say, "This is the essential question, and all the key stakeholders had signed off, whether in email or in a meeting, on that essential question before we ever started like any sort
Maggie Bright 20:38
of
Chuck Murphy 20:38
you know all the projects. And sometimes I'd be like, I was like, you're over, you're you're over wringing, you're overthinking this, you're hand wringing. He was like, who cares? Like, just I used, I would, I was always like a person in a rush. It's like, we gotta go, go, go. But the older I got, the more I'm like, oh, that's really smart because he basically, it's like almost like a little contract. Like, no, no, you said when we started, you said the essential question was this, and I have it. I have, you know, and and everybody being forced to agree, you know, especially you know how some of these companies are, where there's so many different departments and kind of needs and everything, was really smart. It kind of avoided a lot of problems later, and it was it was a it was a tool that he used for kind of like cohesiveness, and he would really get everyone together, and he was good at doing that presentations too, and he would go back over it, and it's a little bit like politicians, you know, where you have to repeat the same phrase over and over sometimes, or you're like, but you know what? There's a reason that they do repeat that phrase over and over. He would repeat the essential question in every every meetings or seem totally relevant.
Maggie Bright 21:34
I'm gonna try that in everything I do from now on.
Chuck Murphy 21:37
I think it's a good practice. I think it really is a good practice.
Maggie Bright 21:41
You too.
Chuck Murphy 21:42
Make sure you know that essential question. All right, that's our first fundamental. Our second one is leave them wanting more, right? Which is this is like a classic, like kind of Hollywood kind of saying, right? Like, but I do, I really do think it's important. Like, there's so many researchers that just want to, you know, send over so many slides, slides pack full of data.
Maggie Bright 22:06
I think the thing, the mistake that I see more often than not, and I have I'm guilty of this sometimes myself, is if I put a question, if I posed a question to respondents, that question must show up in the deck, and it must have a dedicated page, and I must come up with an insight from that, and that somehow must feed into my executive summary. And I think that there is like no worse path than you could take than deciding that every question needs to see the light of the presentation, right? Because some, I mean, we have a good reason for putting the questions in the questionnaire, but not all of them merit, you know, space and time in the final presentation. And I think if you know some of our questionnaires become, you know, you could have a 50 questions in a questionnaire, and you do not need 50 slides of questions. And I think that learning how learning how to edit yourself down, becoming a very fierce editor is really important when you're trying to give a cohesive narrative about you know when you're trying to answer that essential question, right? Like you don't need every single point to answer the question. You need the most important points to answer that question.
Chuck Murphy 23:19
My one of my favorite the way I think about this all the time. You guys, humans remember stories, right? Like there was, there was this. You know, there's this famous TV writer Aaron Sorkin. He did like The West Wing. He did a few. He's he's written so much good stuff. But at the in the the first season of The West Wing, he had two shows that were greenlit. One was called Sports Night, and one was West Wing, and they both became really big hits. Nobody really remembers Sports Night, but it was basically a take on ESPN. Like it was like, how does this work? It was actually a great show. But they had this this episode on there where they hire this young analyst or editor or whatever they called him, and they they're putting together the the highlight reel for the night, and he's got to put together the package on this baseball game, and they're like, "Okay, you could you do this, and you know they're like, "Okay, you have 90 seconds to cover this baseball game, and he comes back with a 15 minute highlight reel, and they're like, "No, and he's like, "You can't understand the game, and you know they're like they're like, "We have 90 seconds. We have to cover 17 baseball games tonight, or something, whatever it was. But it was such a funny interaction because you know Aaron Circuit's such a good writer, and he kind of showed this dynamic where the analyst who's been working on this-it's-it's the thing they've been focused on for you know a couple months.
Speaker 3 24:34
Yeah,
Chuck Murphy 24:35
they want to show you every single little thing and every little news and facet, but the the audience, you know, maybe if certainly is not as engaged as as the analyst would be, but they don't. They they've this is one of many things they have to get through that day, and so it's you have to really be intent. You know, very intentional, and like, what are you showing them? Why are you showing them this? And how does this all tie together? Obviously, it should tie. Back to that essential question, but it's a very hard skill for analysts to learn. This is something we spend so much of our time training people on.
Maggie Bright 25:06
I think it comes back to your previous idea of wisdom too. There, I think if you haven't done this a lot, you feel like you need to take someone on this stepwise process so they understand every single thing that goes into the the stories, so to speak. But if you're someone who's like, no, I have credibility. I can curate this for you in a way that you know you have to trust me a little bit. But let me show you what's important to you. And I think that's a really hard thing to wrap your head around when you're new to your career. This idea of like you have credibility. You know the data better than anyone, so you can highlight the points that make the most sense to tell in answering your essential question, or resolving the business conflict that you have to resolve, and it's it's hard to to think of yourself as the person who gets to pick the facts that everyone else is seeing, and it takes a lot of practice to make you know to have confidence in yourself that you're picking the right facts, or that it's not the right facts; it's picking the facts that are most relevant to the to the story you're telling or the question you're answering, and I do think that that is a skill that I think some people have it inherently, but most people it takes time to nurture that skill and to to build the confidence. I think it
Chuck Murphy 26:13
takes a lot of time for most people, even better natural storytellers. They don't, you know. There's just a lot to learn in a business like this to be to be a good consultant, you have to kind of understand the category, and you have to understand the research, and you have to understand the the the moments, right? The essential question we're talking about, and and then you have to look at all the data and be like, what would be most impactful here? And you know, the thing about our business is like there are there are sometimes insights that come that you weren't originally looking for, right? Like you're just like, wait, this is really interesting, and you have to know when those are things that should be elevated. You kind of bang the drum a little bit of like, hey, this is really important. Like, yeah, throughout my career, like the more experience you have, the when you see it happen, you know, you you see these moments, you know, like there's so many examples of this of something that comes up that you don't expect, but then there's other times where it's like, "Hey, you're you were hired to answer a question, so what's the tightest, quickest way to answer that question? Which is, you know, more like the example that Aaron Sorkin used. Like, okay, there was a baseball game. You've got 90 seconds to summarize it. Sounds easy, but then when you watch the whole baseball game, trying to figure out like, what would what would be what's what do I show here? How do I tell the story of this? It's harder than it looks if you're not the one cutting it down.
Maggie Bright 27:25
Yeah, I think it's an interesting challenge too. Of you can't go in with bias, right? Your own personal biases about what the story should be, but you also have to have enough confidence to trust your gut when you do find the story, and obviously you're backing your gut up with a lot of good data. But like, it's an interesting balance of, hey, I can't, I can't be biased and tell the story that I think I, you know, that I think should be told. It has to come from the data, but I also have to trust my gut that I am highlighting the right information that's relevant to the people who need it. So like, it's it's a hard it's a hard place to be sometimes
Chuck Murphy 28:01
it is. It's for a lot of people, and that's why you know. I kind of do think a lot of times in these scenarios, and this is the way we train a lot of our people. If you're not quite sure, go back to like a kind of process, like the right. And you know, I I'm sure you've probably heard me say this before, but like if I wasn't quite sure, a lot of times, what I would back in the old days, I would print everything out, like all the different, you know, there's different ways to do this, but like you start with like everything, and I would try to get it down into three chapters, and then I would try to get my three chapters down into, you know, something like 10 steps per per chapter, and no more than two or three kind of sub steps, right? You you try to. Sometimes you'd be like, nah, nah. These two should. You might end up with four steps or four, you know, kind of chapters. But you you kind of have to start wrangling. And then one of the biggest things, like giveaways, when when someone hasn't wrangled the stall, is like if someone has a deck that's got like 65 slides, and it's like question one, question two. It's like, okay, you haven't thought about this at all. Like you haven't, you know what I mean. And that's one of the the things that like you have to the hardest mountain to climb, I think, is teach people to to just break out of like this rote kind of order that you started with before you saw the data and try to get them wrestling with the data in some way that makes sense to them because oftentimes those people who first looked at it have a really good grasp of it because they've spent so much time looking at this, thinking about it, but they but they're not confident enough to to reorganize it. If that makes sense,
Maggie Bright 29:34
yeah. No, I I think that makes a ton of sense, and and I think this idea of spending a lot of time with the data before you create a single slide, is really important, and it's it's hard to like exercise that kind of restraint when you have a deadline and you know you need to create an end product. But if you can really spend a lot of time with the data before you make your deck, it'll it actually saves time in the long run, right? Because you you. You like it
Chuck Murphy 30:02
too too, right? Like if you stand up and you present 75 slides and you're rushing through them and nobody has any questions or anything, then a lot of times they have it fully engaged, right? Maybe maybe they check the box that they did have fully engaged, but if you stand up and present 30 slides and people are like, you know, I'd really love to see X, Y, or Z, that's like a sign that you've hooked them into this little bit. You've got something that they're thinking about. They're asking for more. They want to see this, and it's actually a better place to be in, I think, than having this like encyclopedia that that no one wants to read. I mean, I know we talk about this a lot internally, and it varies by project or type or whatever. But I really, I really want to see like a presentation that's under 40 slides, right? Ideally, 25 or 30 shows a lot of hoots, but right. Like I like it. I really like it. Like I've, I've, you know, I remember like we've walked into presentations, you know, hour-long presentation like 12 slides before, and those tend to go great. Like it really means you know what's important. Like, and you really take the time to talk about how to leverage that.
Maggie Bright 31:04
I love that in our in our story planning meeting that we do for every single project. My favorite, you know, everyone comes with this document, and my favorite thing to do is to you know sort of be like, let's not look at the document. Tell me the three things I really need to know about this. Like, what are the three things that you want me to take away from this? And if if the you know if our team can say oh 123 then I know that they've really spent a lot of time thinking about what should come on the pages that we're going to go over if they're like well the um you know then I'm like okay go go back to the drawing board because I want to know the three things because if if most of our clients don't have time to sit through these desks, you know these decks. So if we can be like, hey, here's the three things that you need to know that came out of this, then they're like, great, got it, thanks. Yeah, and then we we can keep going. So
Chuck Murphy 31:54
and one of my favorite games too, to follow up and exactly the same thing you're saying is that try to fit those things on one slide visually. Yeah,
Maggie Bright 31:59
great.
Chuck Murphy 32:00
Can you somehow show this visually? Because I think that really shows like a mastery. Yeah. Hey, here's why this is really important, and I could show you. Yeah, which is is a little bit more of a quantitative thing to say, right? Like it's it's slightly different than qual, but it it definitely I think is a big point, and it's hard for a lot of analysts. It's very hard. We were talking before how this is this isn't just like a research or a marketing issue, right? Like they talk about this in Hollywood, they talk about this in writing, and it's it's very hard to have something you work so hard on to then cut. But like you know, they they I love movies. They talk about all the time that like some of the best movies ever made were remarkably tight. You know what I mean? Like, there's a lot of movies out there that are like very iconic that you remember, and you look back at it. You're like, man, that thing wasn't even an hour and a half. Like, just boom, boom, boom. They just they knew exactly what points to hit, and they cut anything that that distracted you. And that's true. Shouldn't
Maggie Bright 32:59
have three hour movies, Chuck. Is this another podcast that we need to do? A separate. I
Chuck Murphy 33:04
think it's you know this is not my domain expertise at all, but I think it's kind of a well-known thing. You know, there's there's legendary stories that that Stephen King used to tell where he would send in, you know, 3000 page manuscripts and his editors would would try to get it down to like 600 pages and it would kill him. He would be so upset about it. That's so good, but that's it. Is it's it is true that like you have to you have to look at this like from an you know using outsider's point of view sometimes and and really think about like hey what's the I want to get the most important thoughts across I don't want to get every thought across right there's time for that but I can't like you know, there there was a famous. I'm going to mess this up, but there's a famous saying that don't let the weeds over overrun the flowers or whatever. Like you know what I mean. You have to you have to know what your focus is and get get that out of the way so you can come up really make sure people understand the most important things. Which is one of those things that is it is a lot of ways the hardest part of our industry, right? Like everybody's busy. There's so many people to wrangle, and they they say they're, you know, engaged, but but it's hard to get their attention and hold it. So you want to make sure you you first get the most important things across when you have their attention, and then if you could get the, you know, 15th to 25th most important things across, that's fine. That's fine later. But let's make sure we get those.
Maggie Bright 34:19
We have follow up questions later too. That's the nice thing about our job that there's plenty of time to ask follow up questions.
Chuck Murphy 34:25
Absolutely, absolutely. For the next year, we'll be answering follow up questions. Right.
Maggie Bright 34:29
Exactly. The projects never end. I think that like leads us to our like very nicely into our third fundamental around customizing to your audience, which is crucial in what we do, right? Like you, you need to know who you're talking to, and then you need to be able to curate that presentation or story to that audience. So if you have, you know, you don't want to talk about, I think the example that you gave was, hey, don't talk about, you know, don't bring all the merchandising insights to the product development team. Because that is a complete, you know, it doesn't fit. So you know, and don't bring a very data-heavy deck to perhaps the senior leadership that wants the highlights or the you know sort of the two-page version of the presentation versus the 30-page version of the presentation. So not only is it important to you know customize your deck to the right audience, but like actually know which audience you're speaking to when, and make sure that you know the. I mean, everyone should have the same essential question, but how how in depth do they want that essential question answered, and then you know appropriately speak to that in your presentation? Yeah,
Chuck Murphy 35:34
and I think sometimes younger people are are nervous to do this, right? Like they they but some some of them don't even think of it as an option, right? Like, and by the way, that's not just vendors; that's clients and researchers too. I sometimes am like, "Hey, look, who's this? Who's in this presentation? Like, what are we? What are what are they going to care about? People get nervous, like, "Oh, well, this this deck's already been through my boss; it's already been approved, or whatever. And it's like, "No, no, let's. And you should be fully transparent about it. You know, if you're meeting with a you know product guy, you can be like, hey, listen, we have a whole separate kind of you know merchandising deck that was developed. It's been through. You can always access it if you want to read it here. If you're totally transparent, everybody will understand. But I pulled out the 12 most important slides to you, and I want to show you these things because I think they're important to you. And the same thing if you're doing like you know a deck to high level management, you can say, hey, listen, I pulled. I've got this short you know 20 minute presentation. I'm going to show you. There's an hour and a half version that's stored here. If you want to look through it, or if you want more data, like you can be transparent about it. But I think a lot of people don't even ask the question. They just will like, okay, I finished this presentation, and now I'm going to give give it to these nine different teams. Well, those nine different teams are very different, and like, yeah, it takes a little bit of work to customize it. But if you ask that question, you'll get way more engagement, and the number one, you know, back to your point of like sometimes you know insights could be ignored. Number one reason I think it's ignored is they they do get too academic of a that they they feel like their time is being wasted and they can't find the ROI. So you have to kind of really be be clear and intentional about. Listen, here's why I have your time. Here's why I'm showing you this. Here's what I think you'll be most interested in, and just you know, cut it up or show them a certain version, and you know, give them a link to everything else. Yeah, people really appreciate that.
Maggie Bright 37:09
I think so too. I think the other thing that we often forget is that our voiceover doesn't travel along with the presentations in many cases too. So it's often you're going to have an audience that doesn't even get the benefit of a presentation, they're getting the you know here the someone's pulling the 10 slides that they think are important, you know maybe without your participation in that. And so there's there's also this this point that has to be made that's like make sure that those slides can kind of stand on their own or make sense. And and I know that we're not getting into like visuals and all of that specifically within this podcast, but there is there is a whole art to creating a standalone deck too that doesn't you know that doesn't need the voiceover piece of it, and I think that's an important part of understanding your audience as well. Is like how many of these people are going to look at this in a vacuum, and if they are, what do you need to communicate to them, and how do you do that in a really succinct but successful way?
Chuck Murphy 38:03
Yeah, and I mean, ever since we developed the AI version of you that travels with all the decks and does voiceover, it's been so much easier because now people can have AI Maggie. You know, they could make it 4x speed if they can handle that cause.
Maggie Bright 38:14
God, no one needs me at 4x speed. They do it at right at four speed or something. Didn't we decide it was Maggie with a Y. That's the. I actually might need
Chuck Murphy 38:22
your AI agent at two thirds speed. I just might need it to slow down so I could process the information that's coming into me. But
Maggie Bright 38:27
non ADHD AI is what I have.
Chuck Murphy 38:30
But I do think I do think that's an important point. Yeah, and it's something that is is very doable. And it's uh oh, laundry's done. Yep, that's funny. Every
Maggie Bright 38:44
time we record a podcast, I forget to turn that one alarm off.
Chuck Murphy 38:48
Nicole, Nicole is just fuming right now. She's on mute. I told you. All right, so let's talk about our fourth fundamental here. The way we worded it in our little shared notes is think like a consultant, right? And I'm happy to kind of do the lead into that.
Maggie Bright 39:09
Yeah, I mean, I think that this one this one is near and dear to my heart because I think a lot of times as researchers we forget that there is a business. At the end of the day, we're we have to answer business questions, not just research questions, and so we need to be able to take the insights that we have drawn out of the data set and put into this narrative, and be able to say this is what this is why this matters, and this is what you do with it. There's this, you know, one of the questions I feel like we get most often in presentations is like okay, what do I do now, or how how do I make this actionable? I feel like the word actionable was in every single sentence that I heard in 2025. Like, how do we activate against this? And I think that's what this speaks to is this idea of you have to look at this through not yet a wider aperture than just the. Research piece of this, and be able to say, okay, we've answered the essential question, and this is how it relates to the business questions, or this is how it ties into the strategy you're building, or this is what it means for your innovation pipeline, or this is how it relates to merchandising or product optimization, or you know all of the things that we are building back toward, and I think that's the piece of the of this sort of process that I see missing the most. One is like I don't know which question I'm answering, and the second is I have all this data, I don't know how to turn it into a strategy or into a recommendation. And I think this is like such an important piece of it. I think of it like from the marketing or advertising perspective, it would be the call to action in your creative, you know, and what you deliver. Eventually, it would be like that. Hey, and now go do this. And I think it's hugely important. And sometimes it's hard to get out of your research head into your business head. And that's what this step is. It's like pulling yourself up a level.
Chuck Murphy 40:57
And it's funny, and I think it definitely happens with researchers. And researchers are, you know, by nature a little bit of a cautious bunch, but I also think that this happens with everyone in an organization. Is no one wants to be the one to make the leap from I think we should do X. And I used to work with this this guy when I was when I was young to this business, and he would make us at the end of everything we sent to a client, he would make us list at least three things we should be the next steps. I think you should do this. I think you should do that. And it's hard because a lot of people are scared to have someone go. That's a bad idea. Yeah, which it often is, by the way. Like you know what I mean. Like when I I still think about that. I've been doing this for so long now. I've done 1000s of projects, and I still, if I say to a client, like if we finish project and I say, here is the you know five things I really think you should do next. I still think most of my ideas kind of suck, right? Like I don't know, like it's they start a
Maggie Bright 41:47
conversation, like they start a conversation, and that's the important part. Well, that's
Chuck Murphy 41:50
the you know when we do like workshops, and you know when we try to make the exactionable and talk to people about it, you do like realize the first rule at the at those workshops is is to kind of take your critical hat off, right? And like, and the reason for that is like you want to start the conversation. You want people bringing ideas to the table. You don't want everybody nodding and be like, "I agree. Let's circle back on that. You want people to be like, "Wait, why did you say that? Why do you think we should do X? You want to start that conversation, and it's totally okay. It's it is funny because there's a fine line to walk you, right? Because on one hand, the The nice supportive part of me wants to be like, "Hey, it's okay. Like, if your ideas are bad, but the reality is, if your ideas are always bad, you're going to be judged for that in some areas. True, right? I mean, it's true, right? Like, it's it is that's how the world works, right? I think that your
Maggie Bright 42:32
ideas, it's like it's not yet time for that idea. Not necessarily that it's a bad idea.
Chuck Murphy 42:38
Well, I think it's okay to say there. You know, yeah, there are bad ideas, or there are things that won't work, and it's okay. It's all all that is fine, but you have to remember that everything we do is towards a purpose, right? If we were a sports team, it would be like to try to win more, right? If we're, you know, it's to try to grow in some way, usually, and that's okay. But I, but I think if you force yourself to say, and now I'm going back to my research rant, if you force yourself to say what should we do next, it oftentimes makes your brain go, you know what? In order for me to, I can tell you whether or not that's a good idea because I have X, Y, and Z. So it actually makes you think through these second and third layers of your data sets that you sometimes don't think of if you just report, like, hey, you know, but and it also makes you think of combinations, like hey, I could actually think I, and that's when the story starts to get really interesting. And so there's that part as it forces other layers, but it also does it forces you to to learn to think that way, right? Because that's what ultimately a lot of people who are stakeholders in these have to do. They have to take what you just told them, and they have to say, should I allocate budget to this, or should I, you know, cut this thing, or change this product, or whatever it is they have to do. So the more you train yourself to think like them, I think the more empathy you have for their job, which makes you better later. So there, I think there's a really, really important kind of feedback loop that happens if you do this, and at the very least, it does start a conversation, and and it it opens the door to you learning more about like why a a certain you know client or stakeholder or whatever may think that's a bad idea or a good idea, which just teaches you more about the business. Yeah,
Maggie Bright 44:19
I think it's really interesting too. In some, in some of our clients are very, you know, it's funny. When I was on the the client side, I was in an environment that very much encouraged. They were risk takers, right? And so that conversation, it was a you had to have that conversation at every meeting. Like, okay, now what are we? What are we gonna? Which boundary are we gonna push next? Now, there you can say there's some good and some bad in that approach to business, but I do think that you know a lot of companies have more of a bandwidth for that kind of thinking than other other companies. So there's also this this balance of like some companies love it when you really push hard and and there's they you gain a lot of respect. Sort of pushing the envelope a bit with some of those recommendations and suggestions on what's next, which can be really fun. So I think some of that's like feeling out, okay, what's the environment here? How far can I push this conversation? You know, and it's not like we're making absurd recommendations on what to do next. They are always grounded in data, but it's you know it's kind of like some some companies really have a huge appetite for hey, let's let's push and see how far we can go down this path of these unknown questions or what happens next or you know in terms of innovation and and I think that can be really fun right it makes our job interesting
Chuck Murphy 45:32
yeah
Maggie Bright 45:32
to be able to do that and and a lot of times that leads into these really exciting workshops where we're brainstorming together and things like that too so it it also sort of feeds the the cycle of research and questions where we keep finding new essential questions to ask through that process too, which is fun. Yeah,
Chuck Murphy 45:50
yeah. You just you keep learning. You keep learning. Yeah. All right. So now our fifth our fifth law fifth fundamental here.
Maggie Bright 45:57
There should be a drum roll or something.
Chuck Murphy 46:00
Sorry, it's what
Maggie Bright 46:01
I said. I feel like we need like a drum roll or something. We're building this fundamental.
Chuck Murphy 46:06
Maybe, hey, maybe maybe Nicole could roll a drum roll into this. We could actually have sound effects. We've never done that before. Maybe we should. Maybe why have we never done that before? We haven't thought about our sound effect game. It's funny because there. I listen to a this like golf podcast, and they have all these little sound bits that they roll in. Like it always makes me think of something like Howard Stern would have done, like 20 years ago, when in that movie when he's like hitting all the buttons, and it's got sound effects or whatever. Give
Maggie Bright 46:32
me a little sound mixer for you, so you can like bring up different. I'm
Chuck Murphy 46:36
sure there's a sound mixer. Yeah. Okay. So our last fundamental is make it visual, and I think that this is this is one of those things that is like obvious, but also like a pain point for a lot of people because a lot of people are not good at this, and and it it it's it's a sticking point I think for a lot of people, but I also think it's really really important. Kind of like we were saying, people learn through stories. People remember imagery and visuals. And if if you could find a way to kind of tease apart these things and show them in a way that is memorable and simple, it could go such a long way towards people remembering it, towards people passing it along to someone else. I mean, a picture is worth
Maggie Bright 47:19
1000 words, right? Like that's the the old
Chuck Murphy 47:23
adage. A very impressive, very impressive adage. Yes,
Maggie Bright 47:26
I am. I am a very visual learner. So for me, like this is the most crucial piece of any deck. Is like, what's that slide that I will look at and be like, oh, I get it. You know, it makes sense. Or yes, this is like we. I mean, we call it the money slide a lot, but I don't know if that's you know. There's a there. I think you mentioned this a little bit earlier. Like if you can have someone tell you the three most important things and then draw a picture of it, like that's what that is the most that shows this command of the of the data and the story better than anything else.
Chuck Murphy 47:59
It does, and I there's another reason, like I've jokingly called that the money slide for like 15 years now. The other reason I always would push on the one slide thing is if you say something like make it visual, and and let's say you're like a you know you're you're someone that's knee deep in the production of this presentation, or or it could feel overwhelming. You know what I mean? It's like it's like if someone tells you like, "Hey, I want you to work out every day for the next 365 days, it feels overwhelming to commit to that. But if someone's like, "Okay, tomorrow go to the gym for an hour, can you do that? It's you break it apart, and I always felt like if it's like, "Okay, look, don't don't feel like you have to like make the whole thing because because you know for someone that struggles with it it could you know and you if you have this 40 slides in front of you and try to make them all visually look better but people get lost and and obviously good designers do this very quickly and designers are so helpful in this in this sense and but sometimes if you're just like hey just take the most important slide and make it look really cool oftentimes that will flow to other places in the presentation or things like that you can use, but it seems more surmountable, right? Like it seems like okay, I can make this one slide really visual, and I could, and I think that that that's like 90% of the payback. Like I used to, I remember I used to. There's an old newspaper quote where they're like, I feel like I use this in some other podcast, but there's I always love this quote. There's like I can't remember who said this, but do you remember I'm talking about where like they're like if you have an hour to write a newspaper, spend 55 minutes on the title and five minutes on the rest. Like there's something about that of like you're only going to break through so much. So if you could get the most important thing to break through and be really cool.
Maggie Bright 49:40
Yeah,
Chuck Murphy 49:41
that's 90% of of your job, and then hopefully you could do more and do to continue to do the rest better. But that's at least like an accomplishment that that might be enough to be memorable and make you feel more confident. Like
Maggie Bright 49:53
it, I'm only going to work on the title to all my proposals now. Not going to work on the content.
Chuck Murphy 49:58
Just there you go. Just, but I can't think of who said that. That the I
Maggie Bright 50:03
remember this the the anecdote that goes with it, but I can't. I wouldn't be able to tell you either.
Chuck Murphy 50:08
Now I just expect Nicole to type the answer. Right,
Maggie Bright 50:11
I know
Chuck Murphy 50:11
30 seconds now that she's in the nap.
Maggie Bright 50:13
She's like, this is the longest podcast on how to tell a succinct story ever.
Chuck Murphy 50:18
Can I just can I just be like a psych nerd for a second too, because can I tell you from my pretty much my whole life, even pre-market research, I've been fascinated by little skill sets like this that certain people have, and you know we've talked about this internally before. Like sometimes you hire a person that you never really know exactly what skill sets people have, and there's certain people that I've come across in research that they just think visually, and then they have the ability. It's almost like people who could draw, right? They see things, but then they have the ability to to then like recreate them with a pencil. And like, there's certain people that like see things in stories, and then they could just create these visuals. And it's it most of the time, I think it's innate to them. Like I don't, we can't really. It's very hard to train people to do it, but there's just certain people are like, boom, I would organize it this way, and then they're really good at it. Like I think it's a fascinating skill to have, and I don't know. I just think it's really funny. I never really had that skill. I always had to really fight with myself to be like, how would you make this visual? I also never had any art skill either, so these two are related.
Maggie Bright 51:22
I don't know. I no. I I am much better at using words than pictures, but I prefer to see things in pictures than words. So it's a very odd disconnect. Yeah,
Chuck Murphy 51:33
yeah, and it's it's yeah, it's it's it's a it's fascinating. It is fascinating. Yeah,
Maggie Bright 51:38
I love it.
Chuck Murphy 51:39
By the way, I know we have we're probably over our allotted time here, but I do think when we when we push this out, we'll we'll put a link to we have over the years collected books that we like as recommendations. This I'll just throw a few out there. The Story Wars is awesome, and for those of you that haven't seen this before, the Story of Stuff is part of is is is featured very prominently in that Story Wars book. I love I love that. Yeah,
Maggie Bright 52:07
I the story of stuff has stuck with me for years because she was like, I had this great story, but I couldn't find the audience. Like no one would listen to me until I retold the story in a more compelling way, and so it
Chuck Murphy 52:17
it
Maggie Bright 52:17
makes the fundamental argument of how important storytelling is when you're trying to get across a difficult or unpopular or a story that people are unaware of, and I think that that was what was so amazing about the the story wars. And if she
Chuck Murphy 52:33
does such a good job of highlighting what I think a lot of researchers struggle with, because she was essentially a researcher. It's different. She was doing environmental stuff, but but but she does such a good job in such a quick way. You actually, even if you don't want to read her book, you could just watch that YouTube video and learn so much. So we'll put links to that in the blog post. There's also Made to Stick. There's also the books by Nancy Dorty, which cover a lot very directly what we do as researchers and data analysts to visualize that. So we'll put links to that when we post this, but yeah, really appreciate your time, and this has been really fun. And
Maggie Bright 53:06
yeah, I always I always love chatting with you about all sorts of different topics. So this was a fun one. This is one that came really naturally to us too. So
Chuck Murphy 53:14
exactly. All right, five fundamental rules. We'll talk to you guys soon.