Everyone talks about being “data-driven,” yet in a world where AI can generate dashboards, run analyses, and surface insights in seconds, the challenge has shifted entirely. The bottleneck isn’t accessing data—it’s cutting through it. The real competitive advantage today isn’t being data-driven — it’s being data-fluent: using data strategically to communicate with clarity and drive decisions that matter.
Organizations recognize this shift. Companies like Bloomberg, Adobe, and Guardian Insurance have established data academies to help employees across all disciplines develop analytical capabilities. Meanwhile, AI-powered analytics platforms promise to democratize data insights for everyone. Yet paradoxically, as data becomes more accessible, decision-making often becomes more muddled. We’re drowning in dashboards, metrics, and AI-generated reports—but starving for genuine insight.
The solution isn’t more data or better tools. By keeping three simple principles in mind, you can stop drowning in data and start using it as a life vest — one that bolsters your ideas and brings clarity to your message.
1. More data does not necessarily lead to better insight
In The Tyranny of Metrics, historian Jerry Muller describes two critical problems with our data obsession:
First, tying outcomes to data-driven metrics can backfire. Think of call center employees who are measured solely on call volume. They may rush customers off the phone to hit their numbers, effectively destroying the customer experience the metric was supposed to improve. The measurement becomes the goal, and the actual objective suffers.
The second problem is more insidious and affects daily work: We convince ourselves we don’t have enough data to decide. With AI tools capable of generating endless analyses, this trap has become even more seductive. We can always run one more query, generate one more visualization, or pull another cut of the data. We spin our wheels hunting for the perfect dataset while our audience drowns in a flood of facts and figures.
The antidote? Focus ruthlessly on the right data. George Orwell advised writers to never use a long word where a short one will do. Apply the same principle to data: Never use five statistics when one will make your point. In an AI-saturated environment where anyone can generate impressive-looking charts instantly, your competitive edge is knowing which single number or visualization will land, then having the discipline to stop there.
This leads to the second principle:
2. Breathe life into your numbers
There’s often more to the story than what the numbers tell you, and uncovering that context can be more compelling than any statistic. Here’s a simple example: Your company’s customer satisfaction score dropped 5 points this quarter. That’s the headline number—but what’s the story behind it?
Maybe you lost three major accounts that skewed the average, but your other 200 customers are actually more satisfied than ever. Or perhaps the drop reflects a deliberate decision to stop over-servicing unprofitable clients. The number alone doesn’t tell you whether to panic or celebrate… you need the context.
Sometimes the most important story is what your headline statistic doesn’t reveal. Perhaps there are critical insights buried beneath your top-line numbers that your audience needs to understand the complete picture.
The truth is, data doesn’t provide insights or context on its own. Data doesn’t have a heart and doesn’t walk and talk. It won’t tell your audience how the numbers affect them personally, or why they should care about your story. That’s your job as the communicator.
In a world where anyone can ask an AI to “analyze this data and create five charts,” the premium is on human interpretation—the ability to understand what the numbers mean for real people facing real decisions. AI can process data faster than any human, but it can’t replace the business acumen and audience understanding that turns raw information into actionable insight.
But it takes time to unearth and explain those stories, which leads us to our last point:
3. Give yourself time
Finding the most important data to influence your stakeholders — and digging into the story beneath the numbers — requires time. Unfortunately, we often have too much data and too little time. This might seem tangential, but it’s actually the most critical principle of all.
Give yourself time to find the story your audience needs to hear. You might use similar data to tell nearly identical stories to different audiences, but every audience has distinct priorities, challenges, and contexts.
You’ll deliver more cohesive, well-organized, audience-centric stories when you step back from the data and walk in your audience’s shoes. What do they really want (and need!) to know? What pain points or challenges can you help them solve? What’s happening in their world? How would you explain your insights if you were sitting across from them over coffee?
In other words, take the time to humanize your data, and transform valuable insights into actionable recommendations that resonate with your audience.
Remember the five Ws of information gathering — who, what, where, when, and why? Your BIG Idea is the “what” — what your data and your story are fundamentally about, captured in one short statement. When you start with a bold, clear big idea, you can devote more energy to making your data and insights more cohesive, more human, and more likely to be heard and acted upon.
Transform data coal into storytelling diamonds
There’s no denying the value of data in business and in our lives. We’re surrounded by it, constantly using it or being influenced by it.
AI tools have made it easier than ever to access and manipulate data, generating impressive-looking analyses on demand. But they’ve also made it easier to generate noise that masquerades as insight. The real power lies in human discernment: knowing which data matters, understanding what it means in context, and communicating it in ways that drive decisions rather than just documenting information.
The next time you climb a mountain of data, keep in mind that it’s coal waiting to be transformed into diamonds for the story you want to tell. Your audience doesn’t need more data; they need you to make sense of it for them.
