Trilogy of books

Insight Agents’ Founder, MD, and Chief Data Storyteller, Sam Knowles, is the author of the ‘Using Data Better’ trilogy of books, all published by Routledge.

For individuals and teams that want to leverage data to deliver greater impact within their organisations, the books tell a compelling, three act story.

Act I: Asking Smarter Questions

To make smarter use of data in any organisation, we need to invest time and energy in the forgotten art of asking smarter questions. This is true whether we’re conducting stakeholder interviews or analysing a big data set of social media content, whether interrogating a witness or writing structured query language to retrieve and manipulate data in relational databases.

Asking Smarter Questions: How To Be an Agent of Insight (2023) is the critically-acclaimed third book in the trilogy, though logically it comes first. The book introduces the Six Universal Principles of Asking Smarter Questions – Curiosity, Open-Mindedness, Preparation, Openness, Simplicity, and Listening. Find out more about this book here, and enjoy the animation that tells the story of the book.

Act II: How To Be Insightful

Insight is a nebulous, difficult concept to nail down. Too many organisations accept a low-bar definition of insight, often tolerating random data points or casual observations where only insights should be. One of the best definitions of insight is “a profound and useful understanding” of an issue, market, person, or audience. Insight answers the profound question “So what?”, allowing us to understand what the data mean. This allows us to address the more useful question “Now what?”, enabling us to appreciate what we should do thanks to our new insight.

How To Be Insightful: Unlocking the Superpower that Drives Innovation (2020) is the best-selling second book in the trilogy. It introduces a series of straightforward guardrails and frameworks that make it more likely that you will use the right data to articulate genuine, data-driven insights. These include the STEP Prism of InsightTM and Insight Agents’ super-simple Template for Writing Insights.

Act III: Narrative by Numbers

The award-winning Narrative by Numbers: How to Tell Powerful & Purposeful Stories with Data (2018) was the first book to come out, but – when all three had been written – it was clearly and logically the third act in the story. Sam confesses to have written the books in the wrong order in the preface to Asking Smarter Questions. Find out more about this book – and enjoy the animation

The Six Golden Rules of Data Storytelling

Having surfaced the right data to articulate genuine insights, the third step on the journey of effective data storytelling is all about how you use data-driven insights to communicate with impact. There are six simple and effective Golden Rules of Data Storytelling, from “Keep it simple – yet smart” and “Avoid false positives” to “Beware the Curse of Knowledge”. You can download this free, short introduction to the Golden Rules by the button below.

You can buy copies of each book – and, indeed, the whole trilogy – from the Routledge site, over there. And if you’d like a 20% discount code – or would like to order a limited edition boxed set, with each book signed and dedicated by the author – please drop us an email at hello@insightagents.co.uk