My strides are more like shuffles as I breach the top of Mount Royal and begin the rapid decent down the other flank. The whip of the wind at this height is crisp enough to hurt. But skimming my eyes out over the city as it wakes, as the porch lights of the dark hours mix with the bath of morning sky light, I feel only lucky and strong and ready.

Running to work has become a practice — something I do frequently enough that it’s knit straight into the fabric of my day. I stuff clothes and lunch and the other particles of my daytime life into a backpack, bundle myself in whatever the pelting weather calls for, and out into it I go.

It’s sometimes hard to take that first step. Minus twenty and unplowed sidewalks and the throb of tired legs and 300 meters of up before any real down. On some days, there are no lack of whys.

But the truth is they disappear quickly. I love running to work! It kills two birds with one stone, letting me exercise and commute without taking more time than either would take on its own. It is glorious to watch the city awake. It energizes! The hardness of it sends me off to be bolder in other parts of my day. But mostly I love it because it takes my mind out into the tumult, where I stop intentional thought and any effort to calm the flitting of unprocessed ideas this way and that, and instead lean straight into it. The discipline of my run frees my mind to ideate in ways that I can’t force it to.

My work involves a lot of discovery research. I take unformed, vague questions and turn them into iterative investigations aimed at fast learning. It’s a lot like route-finding in unexplored territory — the expert navigator doesn’t have a better map, but instead a method for moving fast in hostile land that involves one part hair-brained hypothesis, one part learning from the weak signals that follow. Science is as much about creative ideation as it is analytical rigour.

And so I’m wracked with the challenge of trying to find practices to make myself more creative. I brainstorm, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. We activate different parts of our brains by visualizing, talking, writing, storyboarding, graphing, acting. These help, but the truth is that some of the most powerful and interesting paths forward are uncovered precisely when I stop intentional ideation and let the uncontrolled brainwork of my run take over.

For some, sidelong creative activity gives way to better ideation. Albert Einstein claimed that some of his greatest physics breakthroughs came to him while playing the violin. He wrote about the role of ‘combinatory play’ in creativity and innovation, arguing that intentionally interweaving seemingly unrelated activities from science, art, music, and sports fostered richer and stranger thought patterns.

For rappers, the practice of freestlying seems to foster creative freedom. Researchers recently found that lyrical improvisation re-organizes brain patterns in such a way to relax its executive control functions, allowing a greater number of novel ideas to sprout through the thicket of barriers that normally gets in the way.

In my experience, the gates are more likely to open when I settle into a solitary and physically demanding task, like my morning run to work. Rather than fertilizing my mind with adjacent creative play, I find the hum and struggle of running the same route over and over lets me take a backseat to the curious and amazing brainwork that is probably always at work under the surface of consciousness.

Researchers at Stanford University have shown that walking makes us more creative. For the period of our jaunt and shortly thereafter, our brains are more likely to engage in creative thought. Surprisingly, it isn’t the fresh air or the spectacular and diverse scenery of our walks that provokes this spurt of novel ideas — a person walking indoors on a treadmill in a room facing a blank wall is just as likely to experience benefits as someone walking outdoors. In other words, it is the physical exertion and the repetitive nature of walking that helps, not the visual and respiratory stimulus of being in nature.

Head out into the storm and see where it takes you! Others have written extensively about practical strategies for running to work, so I won’t go down that path (for a few examples, see here, here, and here). For now, here are three suggestions to help you surface your own curious brainwork:

1. Find solitude — I find my mind isn’t freed to work in its own way unless I’ve given it all the space I can. That means no headphones, no music, no podcasts, no television while on the treadmill. It also means no running partners. It’s okay if I’m surrounded by the hubbub of city noise. It just can’t be directly in my ears, with the intent of drawing my attention to something else. Let your run be a meditation.
2. Seek low focus — The less you need to actively engage in decision-making, the better. I often repeat the same route on my morning runs. Over time, it turns into second nature. The more active thought you need to direct to your physical activity, the less room you give your mind to maneuver. Team sports can offer amazing exercise, but they usually require too much concentration and communication to allow you to settle into the hum your mind needs.
3. Beware the temptation to log your novel ideas in the moment— When I first realized that my runs often led to unguided ideation, I wanted to capture it all in the moment, lest I forget it all before I arrived at my destination! I tried voice recordings on my phone, scribbled notes tucked into the laces of my sneaker, and other scrappy strategies. But the problem was that the more I tried to capture, the less I actually saw. The conscious effort to monitor and intercept novel ideas meant that the executive function of my brain never really shut off. Not having a net at the ready does mean that some ideas inevitably escape, but the upside is that so many others don’t.

Thanks for reading. Check out more of my essays here:

1. Without embracing vulnerability, we can’t innovate — Fear of failure keeps us from creating, yet innovation is fuelled by the smash-up of imperfect art. Get out there.
2. Sticky insights: Your message won’t travel unless you drop the junk — Quantitative insights are dogged by poor communication. Charts themselves are often the chartjunk. Focus on simple, concrete stories that connect emotionally.

Overhearing a quick summary of your research at the lunch table or coffee machine can be tough! The demon in your head shouts ‘wait, what?! that’s not at all the take-away!’ But deep down you know that it’s the communication that’s broken, not the ingestion.

I lead a research team inside a start-up that’s gobbling up growth — in customers and revenue, but also in team size. We’re now well over one hundred speckled across 10 cities in three countries. Add to the mix a wide and widening spread of backgrounds and skill sets as we build a company that is one part software, one part architecture and space design, one part real estate investment, and one part on-the-ground operations. It all makes for a brewing tornado when it comes to communicating insights and shaping decision making!

The challenge is particularly acute when it comes to insights derived from data science and quantitative digging. Our research team combines quantitative and qualitative methods to generate richer insights than either can yield on its own. But when it comes to stickiness, the honey biases to the latter. The bits that stick and that get repeated by others in meetings mostly derive from our thick data, not our big data. Put simply, the dissemination breakdown for quantitative work far out-weighs that of our qualitative work.

One fall-back argument is that it’s just harder to communicate statistical models and quantitatively derived findings. I’ve made that argument myself! But if I’m honest with myself, I think it’s bogus. Instead, the chasm has everything to do with style and almost nothing to do with content. We need to rethink how we talk about our data science output.

I come out of a background in ethnography and qualitative research. The texture and smell and glare and thickness of individual stories are an ethnographer’s bread and butter. We stay ever close to the data in our work. Flip through an ethnography and it won’t take you more than a few seconds to stumble upon quote after quote from individual participants, and reams of photographs that bring stories and artefacts and rituals to life.

This isn’t because anthropology and qualitative sociology are nothing more than anecdote. On the contrary, the best ethnography uses thick data to generate useful abstractions and theory. Instead it’s at least partly because the richness of the individual stories, interactions, and moments bring abstractions to life in a way that abstract and analytical arguments cannot. The thick description of a concrete moment is an effective communications weapon in the ethnographer’s toolkit.

This is almost never the case for statistical and quantitative work, where tables, charts, and other visualization tools dominate presentations. I’m as guilty as the next data scientist or quantitative researcher here! But reflecting on my past as an ethnographer and thinking about which pieces of our research stick and which don’t, I’m fairly certain that most public-facing quant communication is pretty broken.

To be sure, there’s something to be said for ‘knowing your audience’. Tabular or graphical summaries of dense insights can be effective in highly technical settings where the audience and speaker share layers of interpretative knowledge and language. But even here I think presentations often fail to achieve the most basic goal of communicating a core take-away from speaker to audience.

Edward Tufte is famous for his effort to reduce the dross — or what he calls ‘chartjunk’ — that overwhelms most data visualizations, rendering them virtually useless as communication tools. In his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, he introduced the concept of data-ink — “the non-erasable core of the graphic” or “the non-redundant ink”. He argues that the effective communication of quantitative information must involve a dramatic reduction if not total elimination of all non-data-ink and redundant data-ink.

I love Tufte’s work and I try to incorporate his suggestions in my own visualizations, but I think he misses the most important recommendation of all. When it comes to the communicating major take-aways from quantitative analysis, often the chart itself is the chartjunk.

As Stephen Few, another great student of data communication, argues:

“Don’t insist on a graph. […] If you can communicate your message clearly, efficiently, and with the desired impact in a simple sentence, that’s what you ought to do. […] It’s a mistake to force your audience to use visual perception to interpret a graph, struggling to figure out the exact values of the data encoded as bars or lines when the message has nothing to do with the shape of the data.”

In Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die, Chip and Dan Heath go further, arguing that statistics not only mobilize less than stories, but can actually have a de-mobilizing effect on an audience. They point to experimental research on participant’s willingness to support charities when sent solicitations containing either A) aggregate statistics on a country’s poverty level, B) a story about a single individual suffering from poverty in that same country, or C) a mix of both story and statistics. Research showed that the story alone trumped the two other campaigns. In other words, adding statistics to the story actually provoked fewer people to donate money to the campaign.

Made to Stick outlines a set of principles that help make messages memorable and impactful. I’ll mention just four here, but the whole book is worth reading.

Simplicity — We must relentlessly prioritize so that the message being communicated is the very core and most high-value message we want the audience to come away with. We should take it as a given that only a very small handful of messages — maybe just one or two — will be retained by the audience, and focus on making sure the ones retained are the right ones. The goal is not to dumb the presentation down into a small number of easy words, but instead to express the core in the form of a compact idea. Think proverb!

Concreteness — Research on human memory shows that we remember concrete, easily visualized nouns (e.g., bicycle) much better than abstract ones (e.g., justice). In proverbs that have endured many centuries, abstract and fairly complex truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

Emotions — For communication to be impactful, we need our audience to care, which must involve taking off their ‘analytical hats’. As we saw above, the analytical mode does not provoke emotional connection and action, yet it is precisely this mode that is stirred by statistics and data visualization. Rather than focusing on what we find most compelling in the quantitative data, we need to craft presentations that establish an emotional connection. This is the lubrication that helps messages travel and take root.

Stories — Using stories as a focal point of your presentation stimulates a mental ‘reenactment’ on the part of the listener, making it easier to recall later on. A flight simulator is more effective in pilot training than are flash cards. In many cases, great stories aren’t invented but instead collected, the way ethnographers and other qualitative researchers do as a matter of course. Don’t fear the individual data point as unrepresentative. Use concrete data as a tool to elicit emotional connection and action.

To many scientists and quantitative analysts, the idea of moving away from the hard-fact world of data visualization, data tables, and statistics is nerve racking. The thought of replacing these things with stories, emotion, and concreteness is downright crazy. I know —as a data scientist I’ve felt it myself, and I’ve talked to many others who betray the same emotions.

Yet an insistence on presenting complex visualizations to non-technical audiences who are strapped for time and attention is a road to nowhere. Just because a chart or table helped you discover a finding hardly means it needs to serve as the vehicle by which you communicate that same finding to an audience. Just because the output of a statistical model gave you the confidence to make a particular claim doesn’t mean that the model itself needs to show up in your presentation. Presentations to diverse and broad audiences are your chance to communicate core findings and their ramifications, not an opportunity to re-enact the science and exploratory spelunking that led you to y0ur findings in front of a crowd. Don’t confuse the two steps!

When I think about the many ways that I need to improve my presentation skills, I’m often drawn to the example of Steve Jobs. Jobs was famous for his on-stage communication skills. He wasn’t a researcher, but that’s irrelevant. He had the hard task of convincing a huge, diverse audience that the product he held in his hands would be revolutionary. That task very often involved communicating some measure of quantitative information, yet Jobs was a master at keeping story and emotion centerstage.

Jobs was ruthless about the simplicity of his slides, as you can see in the examples above. If numbers appeared, they were almost always alone and bigger than life. Graphs rarely made an appearance. Jobs relied overwhelmingly on his skills as a captivating storyteller.

One of his greatest performances took place on January 24, 1984, where he stood in front of Apple’s annual shareholder meeting to introduce the first Macintosh computer. He opened his speech with a narrative:

It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later Xerox is born. IBM has been kicking themselves ever since. It is ten years later. Digital Equipment Corporation and others invent the mini-computer. IBM dismisses the mini-computer as too small to do serious mini computing and unimportant to their business…It is now ten years later. The late 70's. In 1977 Apple, a young fledgling company on the west coast invents the Apple II the first personal computer as we know it today. Apple dismisses the personal computer as too small to do serious computing and therefore unimportant to their business… It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future. They are increasingly turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns to its last obstacle to industry control. Apple. Will Big Blue dominant the entire computer industry? [“No!” shouts the audience] The entire information age? [“No!”] Was George Orwell right? [“No!”]

Villain. Antagonist. Pace. Ominous tone. Interaction. Emotion. Concrete. Story. What a performance. Something to strive for!

Yesterday, while out on a long run, I had a flash of something I wanted to write. Something I wanted to create and share and contribute to the conversation. It wasn’t just a pull to craft a story. The tug was to share and get out there.

It’s happened a lot! But where has it all gone? My first instinct is to run home and furiously catch those thoughts before they disappear. It’s the second instinct that’s the killer. I note… and then I think, I read, I reflect, I worry about the parts I don’t know much about. What I don’t do is create.

I don’t create mostly out of fear. I mean, that isn’t what I tell myself in the bang-up of the moment. It really does feel like my creation would be so much better if I read just one more article, or spent just one more day sanding down the rough edges. After all, no one wants to ship a burnt pizza!

The big lie we tell ourselves is that our nascent creations are all burnt pizzas. That our contribution-in-waiting won’t push the conversation forward or appear as art, however imperfect, to some audience out there. That waiting and recoiling will lead to something more meaningful somewhere down the line. It won’t.

I read Seth Godin’s book ‘The Icarus Deception’ recently. The argument is obvious from the first few pages, though I still read every last page because it spoke so clearly to this fear of creating:

Share your art. It isn’t art unless it’s shared. Stop fearing. Sharing makes some pain inevitable, but nothing can be achieved without it. The world needs your art. And you need your art. Living meaningfully and joyfully means offering what you have to the world. “Art is vulnerability without the prospect of shame.” We have to know going in that failure is a certainty, that innovation and art never really happen without learning from failed attempts.

“It’s not useful to put yourself on the line, life or death, do or die. You are an artist, not the art. The only way to be vulnerable and go to the edge is to realize that if your art doesn’t work, you’ll be back tomorrow with more (better) art.”

— Seth Godin

It’s funny because my everyday is piled high with just this kind of create and share cycle — in a start-up, where I help define and drive the build-test-learn process that demands the sharing of fast, early, and unpolished work. Not because good-enough is a philosophy to live by, though it certainly can be when there are bigger fish to fry. Instead, shipping early and unvarnished is about getting out there, becoming a part of people’s lives, learning from their reaction, moulding and remoulding our art we go, only ever as our art collides with other contributions and needs.

But oddly that day-to-day of iterative innovation hasn’t been the catalyst I needed to embrace vulnerability, overcome fear, and just get out there. We feel so much more exposed when we create as individuals than when we create as part of some much larger group.

Ultimately, the stack was tipped by Seth Godin’s relentless mantra of “write like you talk — often” and by Brené Brown’s plea to dare greatly, to put vulnerability at the heart of our relationships — with people, but also with our own creative potential.

And also by the prospect of missing out on the infinite game that’s unfolding around us, where our lives can be endlessly enriched and where our own generosity can contribute to that collective enrichment:

“The purpose of an infinite game is to allow the other players to play better. The goal of your next move is to encourage your fellow game players to make their next moves even better. […] Infinite games bring abundance and they bring the satisfaction of creating art that matters. Play.”

— Seth Godin

The promise of that abundance, and the opportunity to contribute to it in some small way — that’s enough to provide the spark. The fire is really fuelled in the doing, in connecting with others who approach creating and making with the same spirit of generosity and vulnerability.

I’m in.