Beyond Binary: How to grab your audience’s attention 

“We work with people who only want the data; the facts. Do I just stick with facts or tell stories?” This is a frequent statement I hear from leaders all over the world.

Most leaders stick with just the data, often stemming from their subject matter or technical expertise. Unsurprisingly, this results in little or no audience engagement and very little recall. On the other hand, a few leaders use stories only, and this can feel hollow: where is the data to back it up?

When it comes to data versus stories, we are asking if we should appeal to people’s heads or their hearts? Much as we like to believe that people are rational beings and that appealing to their heads with logic should persuade them, we know this to be far from the truth. If logic alone does the trick, life would be so easy: we could tell people the logical thing to do and they would do it!

Sally Hogshead, the author of How To Fascinate, says 100 years ago our attention span was 20 minutes. Today our attention span is nine seconds. You read that right: nine seconds. We have essentially become mean, lean scanning machines –  a survival mechanism that gets us through the challenges of living with daily information tsunamis.

Interestingly, the nine-second stat applies only to data. The minute we engage with emotion and story, a much wider window of attention opens up.

So it’s time to move beyond binary: yes, use data, but also connect, engage and inspire with the right story.

Please comment, I love hearing from you.