I help accountants and auditors turn insights into impact by improving their business writing.
How do you tell a story in a finance presentation?
You’ve read lots of posts that talk about data storytelling but what does that mean? And how can you tell a story in a presentation when you’re an accountant with a load of finance data?
Bad writing costs your organisation a lot of money, too. A few years ago Josh Bernoff did some research into the “Sad State of Business Writing”. He surveyed business people who write at work and got over 500 responses. Amongst his conclusions were these gems: Bad writing was costing the American economy about $400 billion a year (that’s 2 per cent of GDP) 81% of respondents said that poorly written material wasted a lot of their time Only 38% agreed that their writing teachers at school/college prepared them well for business writing.
I’ve long had the view that accounting is about words as well as numbers. That’s why I keep writing about the need for accountants to be better at writing and presenting.
I write the first drafts of everything in a text-editor app rather than a word processor.
Here’s why.
Do you create your presentations by writing a series of slides containing bullet points? Lots of people do. And yet, do you like to watch presentations where the presenter talks through lots of bullet points? Do you think your audience is different from you? There are lots of problems with bullet points in presentations. They: are distracting increase cognitive load look and feel robotic bore the hell out of everyone make you predictable Bullet points also look like they are your speaking notes, and probably should be your speaking notes and not on the screen.
Richard Feynman said, “If you can’t explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood.” Feynman was talking about physics but I think the same sentiment applies to accounting and finance. Except, instead of a first year student you should be able to explain finance to a non-financial manager. If your audience is not made up of qualified accountants you need to use simpler language. With a non-financial manager you can’t hide behind terminology like amortisation and volume variance.
You’ve read many times the advice to keep your writing clear and concise. But how do you do that? Here are three things you can do on your next piece of writing.
CIPFA includes communication and impact as one of the key competencies for public financial management professionals. That means developing skills in telling stories with financial data. The ability to take data — to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it — that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades. As luck would have it, late in 2022 the World Bank published A Guide to Data Storytelling in the Public Sector.
Writing is different from most skills. For most everything you want to get better at the advice would be to practise it. But, the recommendation from writers to wannabe writers is to read as much as possible. Well, I can listen to as many songs as I want, watch as many football matches as I like, and eat in as many restaurants as I can afford, but I won’t get any better at playing guitar, football or cooking.
I’ve read ten articles on writing better emails at work. Here are the best 3 tips to improve your emails.