The FP&A Trends Group hosted a webinar exploring the winning formula for FP&A storytelling on April 4, 2023.

The Power of Stories

A story is the most effective way to capture an audience. Think about how an engrossing book or a movie can captivate our undivided attention. If we extend this to the business world, the art of compelling and impactful storytelling presents a significant opportunity for FP&A teams and business stakeholders alike. But why is it so important? Because FP&A professionals who master this skill can help their audience:

• Gain a quick and common understanding of the facts and data.
• Ensure great business conversations occur after the facts are understood.
• Influence business leaders’ ACTIONS, which will ultimately deliver improved financial results!

During this webinar, we have also unveiled a storytelling framework detailed in a recently published FP&A insight paper. The steps in this framework are as follows:

1. Define your audience.
2. Craft your story.    
3. Add credibility and
4. Bring your passion.

Using the framework is a very effective way to tell stories, and we elected to start the webinar with a discussion of the abovementioned framework.

The panel, including Deepak Bhandari, Jürgen Faisst, Taylor Otstot and the author of the article, emphasised that to tell stories effectively, finance professionals should understand their business drivers and utilise data visualisation tools wherever possible. Indeed, they also should learn from mentors and practise storytelling to improve their skills.

We welcome you to check the most interesting insights from this session.
 

A Practitioner’s Storytelling Framework: the ‘What’, the ‘So What’ and the ‘Now What’

Figure 1

Deepak Bhandari, VP of FP&A at Highliner Foods in Toronto, provided a compelling framework for storytelling which resonated very well with the audience, given its intuitive nature. His framework split storytelling into three components. The first component is ‘The What’, which essentially provides the facts. Part two is the ‘So What’, a part of the story where FP&A presents the implications of ‘the What’. Last but not least, the third of this three-part storytelling framework is ‘The Now What’. It is the most important section. This part of his storytelling process outlines the resulting action(s) the business will take.

Our discussion then evolved into how much time FP&A should spend on each of these three components. The panel also emphasised the importance of knowing the facts and taking time to truly understand ‘the What’ before moving on to the ‘So What’ and the ‘Now What’. This investment will pay off and will lead to better outcomes. As FP&A individuals and teams become more mature, they can invest more and more time into ‘The Now What’.
Before moving to our next presentation, we conducted a poll to understand what tools for FP&A storytelling are being used by our audience. The results showed that PowerPoint was the most dominant tool that practitioners are currently using (40% of respondents).

Figure 2: Polling Question #1

Then we moved to the role of dashboards in storytelling. There is a common misconception that dashboards tell stories, so Jürgen addressed this in his presentation.
 

Do Dashboards Tell Stories? Demystifying the Role of Dashboards

Jürgen explained how dashboards could be a fantastic tool in storytelling, but he emphasised that they do not tell stories. If done well, dashboards can help FP&A teams gain a deep understanding of the business quickly and enable them to spend more and more time on the ‘Now What’ and the ‘So What’. This helps them provide tremendous value to stakeholders.

Jürgen compared FP&A professionals to investigators or news reporters. He said that dashboards could be a great tool, but ultimately the FP&A team must then ask questions and get to know the business deeper to truly add value. The role of creativity and context becomes extremely important, and dashboards in isolation cannot tell the story. He also clarified that Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT could not do this either. They can be a significant asset in storytelling but cannot develop an effective business story in isolation.

After it, the panel was all set to discuss another important step – incorporating passion or emotion in your FP&A storytelling. Before we touched on this matter, we polled the audience to understand the biggest barrier in storytelling. The most significant obstacle was the poor data quality. However, lacking skills and time have also gathered many votes.

Figure 3: Polling Question #2

The Role of Logic and Passion in Storytelling

Taylor then talked about the art and science of telling a story. His presentation explained how important it is for FP&A to incorporate logic AND emotion. The role of emotion, which we eventually relabeled as passion, is a critical ingredient in effective FP&A storytelling. Taylor used a powerful analogy of the elephant and its rider. If we do not incorporate passion, the elephant does not move. In a storytelling context, moving your audience to where you want to take them is pretty much impossible. Taylor’s advice was to capitalise on our tremendous ability to use facts and logic and couple it with a passion that will help the story resonate.

Figure 4

Taylor’s four steps in effective storytelling were as follows:

1. Start with the data and facts. Provide context.
2. Move to the subject and conduct analysis.
3. Find the insight (treasure or obstacle).
4. Move to the action!

Conclusions

After the panellists shared their insights, we moved to key takeaways. Here are some of the key conclusions:

• Effective storytelling is a critical skill for FP&A that we all can learn.
• Using a framework like ‘the What’, ‘the So What’ and ‘the Now What’ is an effective way to develop world-class business stories.
• Tools like dashboards can be a fantastic asset to help build the story, but they do not tell stories themselves. These tools can help us understand the facts we should focus on.
• The use of logic and passion is critical in compelling storytelling.

We are grateful to Think-cell for sponsoring this webinar.