I love this quote by James Clear,
“The two skills of modern business: Storytelling and spreadsheets.
Know the numbers. Craft the narrative.”
But it made me think of a third skill: understanding the technology we use.
It’s not enough to know the numbers, you have to know what to do with the numbers. It’s one thing to be able to look at an excel spreadsheet, it’s yet another to know how to use pivot tables and macros in order to make those numbers really useful to you.
It’s not enough to craft the narrative unless you know how to use the advertising, social, and search tools to deliver that message. It’s one thing to craft a narrative, it’s yet another to get that story or message to the people who need to hear it.
Too often we understand the basics of using tools, but we don’t know how to harness all the features and benefits of our tools. Excel can help manipulate and make sense of data far more than I’m capable of using this powerful tool. Zoom allows breakout rooms and surveys that most people don’t use. PowerPoint can record, and translate, and follow different paths depending on responses to questions. Twitter is more powerful if you understand hashtags. Website analytics can tell you where people are visiting your site from, what they click, and what pages they leave your site from.
Yes, we need to know the numbers, and be able to craft a narrative, but we also need to know how to harness the power of the tools we use to make sense of our numbers, and to transmit and share our narrative to its intended audience.
This is a great point David. I agree that actually being able to use the tool is essential. I just am mindful though of focusing too much on the tool. This often leads to discussions about SAMR and redefinition of learning. Although I think that change and transformation is important, I prefer Doug Belshaw’s discussion of digital literacies.
So true Aaron,
We often see the focus be too centred around the tool and not the purpose or intent of using the tool. The question, that I ask in the final sentence, is how do we (meaningfully) harness the tool? The step you are taking in your response is to look at how the tool transforms the message.
A lot of people know the quote: “The medium is the message,” but seldom continue the quote: “…This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” ~Marshall McLuhan
The idea of scale is interesting. We can know the facts we need to share, we can create the narrative… the tools (medium) we use will determine the scale of consequences of our sharing. But when we focus on the tool, we often do not spend enough time on the message itself.