Hi ,
Have you seen Knight and Day?
If you haven't, I wouldn't bother.
It's a Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz action-comedy from 2010, and was both a critical and commercial flop. And rightly
so.
Because despite being an entertaining-enough way to spend a Friday night, the filmmakers never make the audience care.
To care about a movie, there needs to be something at stake - life and death, career and family. Yet, while watching the movie, the other night, I never once feared for the main characters' lives.
And although I saw it through to the end, I'm still not sure what would have
been lost had our heroes not achieved their goal.
Contrast this to the 2022 Oscar-nominated box office hit Top Gun: Maverick, which I also recently watched, and you'll see what I mean. In Top Gun: Maverick the stakes are clear from the word "go".
Tom Cruise's Maverick must train a group of elite pilots to fly an impossible mission, and if he fails, people will die.
Stakes don't
get much higher than that and the result was that I cared.
Here's the thing...
The stakes for your data analysis may not be on par with your average Hollywood blockbuster, but if you want your stakeholders to care, you need to make them known.
It's what a former boss of mine used to call the "so what?" factor.
What do your stakeholders stand to gain from following your recommendations and what do they stand to lose if they don't?
With Hollywood movies,
the greater the stakes, the more people care. That's why so many successful movies come down to life-and-death battles in the end.
Make the stakes of your analysis high enough and your stakeholders will be queuing for the sequel.
Talk again soon,
Dr Genevieve Hayes.
