#135: Superweek 2020 - the Last Mile of Analytics

[music]

0:00:04 Announcer: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Tim, Michael, Mo and the occasional guest, discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com/analyticshour and their website analyticshour.io. And now the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

0:00:24 Michael Helbling: Hi everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 135. A couple of weeks ago, we were at Super Week maybe about a month ago and during our time there we live-streamed a full day of content from the conference and so what we thought we’d do with this episode is take a little bit of that content and set it out as an episode so you can get some of that flavor. So this is actually a talk that I did at Super Week that we also live streamed during the event, so to set this up, Josh and Tim sat down to discuss a little bit about what my topic would be and set up the talk, and then it goes right into the actual talk that I gave there.

0:01:14 Tim Wilson: So we’re moving into what will be our first attempt to actually go to a live session at Super Week which will be Michael Hobbling speaking about soft skills.

0:01:26 Josh Crowhurst: The last mile of analytics. [chuckle]

0:01:30 TW: I guess you got a little bit of a preview of his content. I’ve only seen the slider to where he’s directly mocking me.

0:01:36 JC: Yeah. I think mocking Tim Wilson is a core aspect of the tool belt that Helbs has.

0:01:44 TW: Thought you’re gonna say the Super Week or even more broadly the entire industry.

0:01:49 JC: Yeah, it’s one of his communication go-to’s.

0:01:53 TW: Yeah, which I think we’ve done at least one episode where we were kinda hitting these soft skills and as much as I like to mock the idea of these soft skills and the need for… I don’t know, I think he said, mindfulness last night while we were eating dinner and I made some joke about it and he was like, “That is not what mindfulness is.”

0:02:08 JC: Right. [chuckle]

0:02:10 TW: I guess I value those skills but do not have a sufficient knowledge of them. I was recently counting back, I think I’d figured out it was, I was thinking it was 2013 but now I think that’s wrong. I had counted backwards to figure out when it was the first time I ever saw Helbs speak at a conference was at the first Accelerate conference, which was in San Francisco and it was like a five-minute talk. In his five-minute talk, the theme was love and we need more love in the analyst community. So more love.

0:02:37 TW: More love, yeah.

0:02:38 JC: That’s so Helbs. I love it.

0:02:41 TW: And it was only a five minute. That was what it was dictated that needed to be and so it wasn’t quite… That was a little bit over the top but I think from…

0:02:49 JC: Snappy.

0:02:49 TW: Yeah, I knew from even knowing him before, I knew that was kind of his area, the interpersonal dynamics, and stuff but it’s definitely an area that he was very passionate about and does seem like the… Well, we joke about it on the podcast that that makes he and I the yin and the yang ’cause I’m like, “Yeah, do your fucking job.” Do your fucking job.

0:03:07 JC: Yeah but I think it really is so important as a skill to develop and for me personally, the thing is there’s a big gap between realizing that’s important and actually doing the work to develop that because to sit down and say “Okay I’m gonna learn SQL or I’m gonna learn to program and R, not to say it’s easy ’cause it’s just hard as you kind of make it.

0:03:28 TW: It’s more tangible I guess, right?

0:03:30 JC: It’s tangible and it’s… Learning to work on your communication skills is actually very uncomfortable ’cause you need to confront your own emotional state and your own biases and really your feelings, which I know Helbs is gonna go into and so to say I’m gonna work on that is one thing, but then to actually do the work is really, really challenging.

0:03:50 TW: That’s actually, it’s a good point ’cause even if you’re developing a hard skill, be it Excel or SQL, or Python, or R and if you’re asking somebody for feedback, there’s not a whole lot of motion of emotion in that. I think, well, I take that back. There are definitely the coder bros who will… You cannot say anything negative about their code but if you’re actually trying to learn and you go to somebody with that, “Hey, will you take a look at my code, and how we make it better,” it is like one step removed from kind of your core being, who you actually are. And I think the other thing, having one son who has some kind of struggles and therefore is getting help, there’s kind of the… You can’t say, “Oh, go and just read a book about this and now just go apply it in the real world.” and so that’s a definite challenge when it comes to those emotional intelligence and communication skills, is that really you need to practice applying them and really you sometimes need somebody sort of observing and giving feedback which goes back to your… It’s definitely uncomfortable to… It’s uncomfortable to give that feedback, it’s uncomfortable to receive it.

0:04:53 JC: To ask for it.

0:04:53 TW: To ask for it and then actually be in the situations where it matters, and so much of analytics is kind of working with people across the organization, with the coming… I feel like we as analysts, more often have a broad set of stakeholders that we’re having to meet, build trust with, engage with, maybe tell them things they don’t wanna hear and to do that smoothly and if you stumble, you botch some code and a query, there’s a chance that that can be caught before it gets blasted out as a big news to the whole company. Whereas if you botch an interaction with a human being, now you’re learning a new skill, how to recover from a bad interaction.

0:05:33 JC: Right. And you’d also, don’t always know what went wrong or why it went wrong or any of the context that’s happening with that other person ’cause there’s two sides of that interaction, right? So, knowing is it like did you…

0:05:45 TW: I usually just assume that it is they screwed up.

[laughter]

0:05:49 TW: Is that bad? Yeah, right, is that not good?

0:05:53 JC: But that’s maybe an approach that actually… I know you’re being facetious but an approach that some… I think we have to try to avoid that ’cause naturally, I think a lot of people will… And kind of coming from my agency experience and it’s always like, “Oh my client is such an asshole, they never take my recommendations and it’s like, actually probably there is… You can take more ownership of it than that and say that not getting buy-in and consistently, repeatedly, not getting buy-in, maybe in the kids that you haven’t… Your message hasn’t landed and it’s because you didn’t understand that person’s context, you were unable to empathize and take their perspective, you didn’t know enough about the challenges they’re going through in their own work and so, I think that is something that we all… It really is something that we all need to develop. It seems like Helbs is gonna be good to go with his talk as scheduled, which is meant to start in a few minutes here so we’ve really been hyping it up and…

[chuckle]

0:06:53 TW: And here we go, kick it up to the…

0:06:55 JC: Alright.

0:06:55 Speaker 5: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the one and only co-host of The Digital Analytics Power Hour, Michael Hebling!

[applause]

0:07:10 S5: Louder, louder.

[applause]

0:07:17 MH: Alright. So, thank you.

[chuckle]

0:07:22 MH: It’s always very interesting to try to figure out when you’re gonna start to actually talk and so, I think your host does such a great job of removing a lot of those uncomfortable barriers that you start to feel and there’s no time for butterflies in the stomach, you just go with it. I’m excited. We’re broadcasting this live, on a live stream today and so that’s pretty exciting too and I wanna talk about The Last Mile of Analytics and what is the last mile? So just get that set up in advance. We take all that amazing data visualization and we somehow chuck it into the brain of a person who needs to make a decision or do something because of our analysis and our insight and that’s what I’m gonna talk about today.

0:08:12 MH: This is the last data vis that will be in this presentation today. So not really talking about that and I think Tim covered that so so well yesterday and so I wanna obviously do a little different and then I found out like the Tim’s title was like neuroscience and I was like, “Uh-oh, I better cross-check what I’m doing with what Tim’s doing so we don’t… ” We wouldn’t want there to be an appearance of conflict on the Power Hour, which is so important.

0:08:41 MH: Anyway, so that’s what we’re trying to do. All this data, the black and white data, going into that gushy gray matter of people’s brains and how do we make that work and what does it mean for us as analytics professionals for that to happen?

0:08:56 MH: It’s a real problem. We work really hard. We’re doing tagging. You just heard today from the GTM team about some of the amazing things that are happening with that product and how it’s advancing and some of the cool things you can do with it but people are working non-stop to do amazing work, to get data collection up in place, to pull that data into reporting and systems for analyzing the data, to produce insights and to create recommendations for the business to personalize data, to optimize all these different things and yet, we gill through all that work. We then use all of the best practices for… What is it, the data, the pixel ratio that Tim talked about and really presented the best we can and all too often, we end up in situations where people disagree with us. They discount what we say or even disparage what we are doing.

0:09:54 MH: And so common, that it’s a joke that analytics tenure in our industry is extremely short and I think a huge part of that is for this reason. We’re not connected to what’s happening. We don’t have the right seat at the table to go and have these conversations and be successful in them and it leads to dissatisfaction on our part, lack of impact and lack of understanding and is it our fault? Well, we’re working extremely hard. I feel like we deserve better. We do teach sort of a data vis and story telling skill set. So even yesterday, an amazing application of Tim’s talk, you can see Moe posted this on Twitter and a business chatter on Twitter immediately was able to reduce the cognitive load of that image…

[chuckle]

0:10:45 MH: And provide an amazing improvement to that data visualization. [laughter] So we know these skills, we’re working those skills, right? We’re committed to our part in this process. Just this example, just propped up yesterday and I was of course, delighted to slip another slide with Tim’s face in it because I just never wanna miss a chance to talk about how quintessential Tim Wilson is as an analyst.

[applause]

0:11:12 MH: Thank you, thank you, yeah. It’s actually a drinking game, any time that gets mentioned, you take a drink, if you want to. No pressure. So huge thumbs up. But I wanna go a different way. I wanna take this conversation not go deeper into data vis or storytelling per se but let’s talk a little bit about maybe another way to think about this. Any poker players? Anybody likes to play poker? Yeah, analytics people make pretty good poker players, a lot of time so if you don’t play poker, you’re like, “No, I’m not that… “

0:11:48 Moe Kiss: Or the other way…

0:11:49 MH: Yeah okay or the other way. Yeah, we think too hard about it but you’ve probably heard this phrase, right? “You play the person, not the cards,” right? In poker, your hand is not as important as what’s happening to that person and what you can make that person think, on the other side of the table and so in analytics, I think we have an opportunity to maybe play the person or the team and not just the cards and so a lot of our hard skills, in terms of our ability to analyze and our ability to create a data visualization that really works, they’re all part of this but we’re still kind of playing the hand sometimes and we’re not necessarily thinking about how to play the person so we’re gonna go in a little different direction and talk about that today.

0:12:32 MH: Good news, there is science and actually quite a bit, more and more all the time, that can help us out. This is a research topic that’s of huge interest for lots of different reasons, in our society and I’m from the United States, we’re deeply interested in why people don’t seem to want to know true facts, sometimes.

[chuckle]

0:12:53 MH: And so we’re trying to dig into this and it’s not just a US problem, it’s a universal problem but it is showing up in our site in a big way and we are resilient against the truth and why? Why is that? So there’s some really amazing academic research happening and it has happened and it’s happening and I think we can benefit from that. Try to pull it into our sphere and we can start to build something so let’s get into it.

0:13:22 MH: First off, I wanna talk to you a little bit about the brain. It’s in here, in your head. Most people have one and I don’t know a lot about the biology of the brain or even… I have some vague idea about the pre-frontal cortex and those kinds of things ’cause I don’t know. I’m just using words now but there’s some really cool things we can know about how the brain does things. However, here’s something that’s really important for us. What we’ve learned through research, is the brain is maybe problematic at best. It’s not our friend all the time, when it comes to figuring things out and deciding things.

0:14:01 MH: I thought Tim’s slide about how the human brain struggles to understand the difference as an area is actually a great example. Obviously, the work of Kahneman and Tversky basically is exploring this whole thing so if you haven’t read some of those studies or looked into the field that they basically spawned in terms of behavioral economics and so on and so forth, like that is quite worth your time.

0:14:28 MH: The other thing is, what we’ve learned is our brain functions in it’s normal state more to take things and fit them with what we already think and not necessarily to fit them to what’s actually true. Isn’t that fascinating? We’re also not rational or purely logical when we make decisions and there’s actually quite a bit of research about how emotion and the decision-making process are so tightly intertwined as to be inseparable and people who lose the ability to leverage emotion in the decision-making process are usually cut off from effective decision-making completely and so that’s… Wow, okay! Whoa. Hey. And then I was like, “Well, how do we tie this in?” And I was like, “Well, you know what, let’s talk about machine learning for a second,” and I want you to think about maybe a person one degree of separation or two degrees of separation from the people in this room and ask yourself honestly, is the current consideration of how we are trying to approach machine learning and the things we think it will solve for us in a business context actually rational?

0:15:31 MH: My response to that is, “Hell no.” We get it, we’re doing cool things. Some of the talks will actually get into some really cool techniques and so you gotta go a couple of people out but that’s our audience, those are the people trying to convince, those are the people hiring data scientists left and right with some kind of magical hope that machine learning will provide an outcome different from what they experience when they went all in seven years ago on attribution or when they went all in 12 years ago on Digital Analytics or when they went all in on whatever it was before that and in five more years, we’ll start to see the next hype cycle take off of whatever that next thing is, VR or who knows what, brain implants, if Elon Musk is able to make neuro link work. Scary and exciting. Okay.

0:16:19 MH: We also have a tendency in our brains to have a connection to what we know and you hear this all the time in analytics, you have to translate your insights into the language of the person receiving it. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re localizing the insight so that they are able to accomplish or understand easily because the human mind, understanding something easily is then much more likely to want to assimilate that and believe it and the converse is true. When I see things of huge complexity, I immediately feel defensive and want to reject those things and so even in the construct of how we present analysis and we wanna look smart and we wanna show people all the work we do and the complexity of the analysis we present, we literally are pushing ourselves right away from the opportunity to do the things we wanna do to solve for the last mile.

0:17:13 MH: It also is very interesting. There’s a paper that was just published early 2019, I believe in Pennsylvania and they went to rural Pennsylvania and they showed people a number of different data visualizations and they showed all walks of life. People who work at a farmer’s market, all the way up into a local college and truck drivers. They just went all over the place and they said, which one’s your favorite? And the data was very confusing and astounding but one of the things they noticed was, people would select as their favorite data visualization, the data visualization that had some kind of personal connection or local connection to them. “Oh well, that’s from the New York Times but this one’s from my local newspaper so I’m gonna believe that.” or “Hey, my brother-in-law had this problem that’s being shown in this graph therefore that’s my favorite data visualization.”

0:18:03 MH: What the heck? That’s not okay but this is what happens in people’s brains is we just go connect to what we know and when we grasp it with ease, we’re excited to keep going with it. We also love a good story. There’s a fun book out there that talks about the different story types but the most profitable one in the movie industry is one called the man in a hole. It basically is, somebody starts out, they fall in a hole and then they climb back out again and they succeed and so The Godfather is probably the Paramount example of that story, the protagonist Michael Corleone goes down, things get bad and then he comes back. It’s amazing and never go against… Or whatever, it’s a long time since I’ve seen that movie but also movies like The Matrix, Shawshank Redemption, a league of their own, all represent this story trope of rise and fall.

0:19:00 MH: And why do I bring that up? It’s sort of like well, if we know this is a great story for people and people place themselves as a protagonist of their own stories and actually they fit data they receive into their story about how they are the protagonists and will discard data that does not fit their story of them as the hero, then you have a tool. You now can say, “Well, with this analysis, you’re the hero of this story and the story’s hero is gonna do this.” We’re in a tough spot is our business and somebody with vision and leadership has to increase our Facebook Ad Spent so we can climb our way out or whatever the insider recommendation is, I’m picking a simple one. But why not leverage that? And actually, this is why Tim’s talk was so important. Again, never miss a chance to highlight Tim as a quintessential analyst. Thank you, thank you.

0:19:52 MH: Tim deserves a lot of clapping and credit for that. When we do things like really make a data visualization understandable, we’re doing the work to help people take that step so this is how we’re solving brain problems and so this is very much what Tim talked about, is the brain is gonna fight us on a lot of stuff but if we do some of these things, that will help, it will help a lot. But we’re gonna move on now and we’re gonna get into emotional intelligence and empathy and I hope that doesn’t make you feel negatively but it’s okay if it does. I’ll explain why.

0:20:30 MH: Tim loves emotional intelligence, he just doesn’t like to admit that he loves it. But let’s start with something first. We just need to get out of the way. Who the F named them soft skills? It’s very problematic because it’s sort of like “Well, I like hard skills and I’m a guy. I like tools and I don’t wanna be soft and I don’t wanna be a push-over.”

0:20:54 MH: But turns out the US Military came up with that term in 1968 as they were trying to define like what’s the difference between shooting a machine gun, hard skill and maybe reading a map and understanding topography, maybe a soft skill and there’s a big argument but that’s when it’s first showed up. So if you’re a fan of the military industrial complex, by all means keep using soft skills. But I say that only to start to poke a hole in that concept because this sets us up for failure right away, a lot of times and maybe more so for guys than women and I don’t know that. So actually, I’m really keen to chat with Moe after my talk a little bit ’cause I wanna grab her and get her perspective and have her tell me how it is ’cause she’s my IT person and also the person I turn to for advice on how to better understand all parties. They’re really hard, soft skills are super hard to do and a lot of times we just sort of ignore them because they’re really also really hard to measure our progress.

0:21:56 MH: So we don’t have like “Well I… ” And then we have these namby pamby emotional intelligence EQ scores and stuff like that but basically, here’s how I like to think about it. As a hard skill is knowing how to use a sword, a soft skill is now in when to and so just sort of like balance it out and you can do that. Obviously, a generalization but it helps.

0:22:16 MH: Alright so let’s talk about emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence breaks down a lot of different ways but I wanted to start with sort of like “Hey, let’s do a common understanding,” and this is the way they did it when they tested me. They gave me these five categories and they tested my emotional intelligence and first, my own awareness of what’s going on with me. How aware are you of what you feel or what emotions are happening in your brain at any given time?

0:22:41 MH: Next is, how capable are you of actually doing something regardless of what your emotional state is? Self-regulation, right? You can see my self-regulation score is actually kind of low or I don’t know if it’s a low or high, I don’t know what it is in context but anyways, not as high as some of the other ones and then the other one is motivation. Motivation is just, why do you do what you outside of meeting your basic needs money, status, those kinds of things. As a whole person, why do you do what you do?

0:23:10 MH: I do analytics because I deeply love solving problems and enjoy it and I find myself more and more in love with helping people achieve their goals and those kinds of things in the context of analytics and so that’s why I do what I do, it’s my motivation and it’s pretty awesome to be in an industry that also helps and pays pretty well too over the years.

0:23:31 MH: Alright, next we go down to empathy and empathy is basically your ability to understand what is happening emotionally with someone else. We’ve moved from ourselves to the external. My first was, am I aware of what’s going on with me? Am I able to regulate that? Now, I’m trying to be aware of what’s happening. Can I put myself in your shoes and can I use social skills to influence outcomes based on what I can understand about that?

0:24:00 MH: I always joke with my former company that I’m a top scorer in empathy, which is a stupid way to say it ’cause you’re not trying to get a top score but that’s the joke.

[laughter]

0:24:13 MH: Okay. So let’s talk about a system and I’ll explain why this fits in to emotional intelligence in a minute and so basically, I wanna walk you through a practical thing you can do to build out a deeper skill set in this context. Here are the steps. First, do a mindfulness exercise and we’re gonna talk through each of these steps, then we’re gonna write it down or verbalize it and we’re gonna accept and reassert identity and then we’re gonna choose what to do next and so this whole exercise could take as little as five minutes. Mindfulness, just in case people aren’t familiar with that term, is sort of a cool term right now in psychology and has been for a while, about sort of being present, being in your own mind space, whatever. It’s kind of a theory a little bit but I can… People talk about it as if you do it all the time. I do it like every other week for two minutes, it’s hard but I get in there and I try to practice this.

0:25:13 MH: Okay. Let’s talk about it. The first thing about this is, if you’re gonna take a minute to be mindful of what’s happening in your own emotions and kind of identify it. I found and observed myself over the years, I very much struggle sometimes to actually enunciate what I’m feeling. Somebody asked me one time. They were like, Michael “How do you process anger?” And I literally did not know. I was like “Well, I just don’t get angry” and they were like, “Bullshit. You don’t even understand yourself.” And then I started thinking about it and then I realized, I had all kinds of anger and I was just not even aware of it and so I had to go do this exercise. So this is what’s called an emotions wheel and it’s used for all kinds of purposes but in this context, it’s actually super helpful for just picking out what you feel. You go in and you just start circling stuff, like you print this out or whatever and you just circle stuff that makes like…

0:26:07 MH: I feel this. I feel angry and not just angry, I feel disrespected and I feel… And you can just go through and just let yourself use that to guide you a little bit to get started and then over time, you won’t need it as much ’cause you’ll be a little more in touch with those emotions and they’ll just flow freely and you’ll be able to talk about them.

0:26:24 MH: Next, you gotta write it down and I’m gonna actually walk you through an example of this from my personal life. A little while back, I’m not making a big deal about it or anything but three months ago, I left my company I had been now with for over seven years and I started my own company and in that context, going out trying to find new clients, you face a lot of interesting emotions and one day, I was really struggling. I was having some really negative feelings. I was trying to figure out like “What’s wrong with me today?” And so I did this exercise and I sat down and I wrote the following. I have very negative feelings, what are they? I feel like I should be further along. Like I should have closed more business. People don’t like me or that I’ll disappoint people in a negotiation. Being disagreeable is really hard, I’m afraid. I feel afraid that people won’t like me, afraid that I’m not doing enough to be successful. Afraid that I can’t be successful. I’m afraid.

0:27:22 MH: Well, it was hard to admit some of those things to myself but here’s the next step in that process. Just ’cause I feel that feeling, that’s okay. Emotions are good. They’re good for you. It’s our choice about what to do with those if… And here’s actually the thing that’s happening when we do this process. Emotions start in our middle brain and a lot of those fear emotions are things that are way back in the early parts of our brain, fight or flight and all that kind of stuff but I don’t have a deep enough knowledge of the science but I know enough to know it’s not a place where we’re processing, it’s a place where we’re naturally occurring and those emotions are vital for us for our survival for all these things that don’t map well to being a knowledge worker in ‘2020 but they’re there anyways, as part of our evolution.

0:28:15 MH: If you don’t have emotions you are a sociopath so you need to have them. It’s good that you have emotions. You have to allow yourself the ability to say “Oh Michael, you really just took a shit on yourself. You should project a lot more confidence.” And “What’s wrong with you?” It’s like, “No, no, stop. It’s okay. I accept these emotions.” And as soon as you start to put it out there, write it down, verbalize it, whatever works best for you and how you process, you move that emotion out of the midbrain or the back of the brain and into the prefrontal cortex where judgment starts to take over and you start to understand… Actually Michael, you have a podcast, it’s very popular and a lot of people know who you are and you have a ton of business leads and opportunities and there’s a lot of great things happening and you’re actually making tremendous progress and even though you feel like that right now, the truth is it’s more like this.” and so, just by doing this exercise, admitting to myself what I’m feeling, I’m allowing myself to go process those things and emerge with a better decision-making capability.

0:29:19 MH: And then that’s the last thing, is; what am I gonna do from there? What action am I gonna choose? And this is actually the whole process ’cause a lot of times… And again, they go through the stimulus and response. There’s very little room in between that. Somebody does something; I don’t like it, I respond. This comes out as a driver. In Atlanta there’s a lot of heavy traffic, people cut each other off all the time. It’s a great way to observe stimulus and response, both for yourself and others so that’s the example there but if I slow that process down, I take a moment to recognize the emotion, I let the emotion merge out of the middle brain into my prefrontal cortex where I can do some judgment and assessment of that emotion and suddenly I’m working with a new set of things and I can make some choices now.

0:30:03 MH: Well, what’s best for me? Is it best for me to continue in fear that I’m not gonna be successful or I’m not doing enough? Well no, it’s probably not good for productivity and it’ll color everything else I do and I was in the middle of a tense negotiation at that point with a potential client but the reality was, in it’s current state, I would not wanna work with that company. It wasn’t the right set up, that’s why we were negotiating. But it’s hard sometimes ’cause I’m always gonna doubt myself about some of those things but PS, I’m really cool. They’re a client today. So obviously, that process worked in that scenario, which is obviously why I’m like, well, I can totally share that one with you but they’re… Every situation, whether it works out or it doesn’t, that process will prep you.

0:30:47 MH: Okay, let’s move on to other people ’cause honestly… Right?

[laughter]

0:30:49 MH: With a little less of us, a little more of their problems, very good but here’s the thing, we go back to those steps and you practice them you actually deepen your empathy for other people in that context and that’s actually really cool. I didn’t have to do any new activities. I’m actually gonna learn as I’ve learned like, “Well, it’s tough for me sometimes and I have emotions that I have to deal with and grapple with and now I’m appreciating the context in which maybe you’re having that too and I’m not gonna judge it so harshly next time. I’m gonna have a little more empathy and see where you’re coming from.” and when you process your emotions, you’re able to engage in much more healthy dialogue and conflict and conflict is a necessary skill, we shouldn’t necessarily avoid it but two people who are angry with each other, that’s not gonna be fun conflict, right? Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, not great conflict right now, which is…

0:31:44 MH: Anyway, sorry. No comment. And our ability to do that effectively is going to increase our social skills to influence outcomes on our behalf so this is why it’s so important. We understand a little bit about the brain, now we’ll understand a little bit about self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy and social skills. And here’s a little system, a lot of people are familiar with this, the six-hat thinking method. It’s a book written in 1985 by a guy named Edward de Bono. Apparently, it’s really boring but we’re gonna use this to increase our empathy. This is actually designed as a decision-making capability or methodology where basically, you go through and you kind of just put on different hats and you look at the same problem from different perspectives. Each hat kind of is sort of a different point of view and so there’s… You Google this, you’ll find a ton of blog posts and articles so really easy to look this up and it’s a good exercise.

0:32:40 MH: Like the classic sort of, ask the three whys, those kind of things. Another good example of sort of how to dig down into a problem and create new perceptions or frameworks for viewing it from multiple angles? So that’s good, blue hat. Sort of like how this is gonna work, what’s the process for it? Black hat, why won’t this work? If anybody was at Super Week a couple of years ago, when Moe did her talk about competing hypotheses, great example of a way to apply black hat. So like, why won’t this analysis work? What could possibly be wrong with it? Great exercise to do you for yourself before you go and show it to anybody else. Red hat, how does this make you feel? I’m a red hat guy. Green hat, creativity and ideation, also one of my favorites. White hat, focus on the data and all the hard facts so as analysts, that’s a good one for us, we love that one and then yellow hat, sort of like, what are the benefits of this choice and what I’ll have optimism about the potential outcomes.

0:33:34 MH: This is really good but actually what we do is we observe, what hat is the stakeholder wearing when we talk to them? What’s their normal hat? Are they always poopoo-ing every idea, they’re kind of a black hat all the time so they’re always having negativity about it. Well, it’s gonna teach us something about how to interact with that person. Maybe they’re a green hat person and they kinda need to be like they’re always into ideas and not execution and we gotta find ways to channel that or whatever.

0:34:04 MH: So as we go through and we interact with stakeholders and team members, sort of keep an eye on that and if we’re doing the exercise ourselves, we’ll be able to more quickly identify other people leveraging the same skill sets or hat and then be able to kinda quantify that a little bit over time. So it’s a really great system for building up your empathy, for understanding where something might be at or what their normal or default method might be.

0:34:31 MH: Okay. I’m gonna talk a little bit about decisions. So that’s what we’re trying to get people to do, make better decisions, take the data, make a choice, preferably the one we’re recommending. So we’re gonna talk a little bit about decisions. I like this decision process view, so I’ll walk you through it. Here’s a box, first, we set up our goal. So here is our goal, what are we trying to achieve? Okay. Next] What are uncontrolled inputs? What are the things we can’t change? What are our competitors doing? We need to like at least estimate out the things that are gonna affect us that we don’t have any control over, what obviously what do we have… What are our resources and capabilities? Well, I got this awesome data lake with some SQL skills and some data scientists so I know I can go in there and do some cool stuff with the data or whatever it is. I also have budget to spend this much money, whatever our resource and abilities are, then we come up with well, what are our choices? What are we gonna be effectively able to execute against?

0:35:28 MH: It’s always pretty annoying to present an analysis to someone without really taking into account whether they could actually execute it or or not and as analysts, we owe it to our stakeholders to at least be thoughtful about that ’cause otherwise, we’re just chucking bombs over the wall, making them feel worse about their selves and their jobs without ever giving them hope and then lastly, we do this. We understand the interactions, that’s analysis. Like we’re trying to figure out all the different things of how they all inter-relate and how they’re connected and then lastly, we take our action and then we go ahead and start all over again and actually, it’s a pretty great simple five-way of understanding that.

0:36:06 MH: I stole it off of a professor Hussain Arsham, University of Baltimore, really great stuff. He does some really cool research. Here’s something we always gotta keep in mind about decision making. As things become more complex or externalities and stress enter the picture, people’s ability to rationally approach this goes down dramatically and that’s super important.

0:36:30 MH: I don’t know about how it is in most business contexts but I rarely run into senior leaders who aren’t a little stressed out by what’s going on in the world of digital today and as a result, there’s a steep reduction in their ability to handle the bare bones or the raw information. So it’s just really important for us to mull like decision making in a rational context is compromised by what’s going on and as the decision is more complex, then we’re gonna struggle to get them to see our White Hat thinking sometimes.

0:37:00 MH: Good to point out what makes a good decision maker, there’s a lot of different attributes. I won’t step through all of them but if you read through these, you’ll actually see a lot of attributes and skills that are true of analysts. We are actually potentially really good decision makers. If we can just get somebody to freaking listen to us, we’d really fix some things, right? Just kind of the whole point of this talk but as you do that, if you look through that, you can also see like, “Well, I see where my stakeholders or my Executives are actually deficient, how can I use my empathy and social skills to train, coerce, help influence those aspects so that they can be better decision-makers?”

0:37:40 MH: It’s two way a street. Part of my work in consulting is I work with executives to help them understand their analytics teams better. How do you ask a question of your analytics team and then what do they give you back? Alright, let’s dive into that because probably there’s missing elements on both sides and we can identify those. You’re gonna have tremendous lift from how you’re communicating with your analytics team and oh by the way, since I’m totally on the analysts side, don’t tell anyone, except we’re streaming this live, I’m gonna be helping this executive respect what’s happening in the trenches as well, so there can be better symbiosis and creativity and those kinds of things.

0:38:17 MH: And this is cool too because every time you make a great decision, you basically get a next level to make an even tougher decision and the complexity just keeps going up because if we… The term low-hanging fruit. I always love saying that ’cause Jim Kane, my good friend, always hates that term but when you first walk into a company who’s doing a really poor job of analytics, like shooting fish in a barrel, it’d be like, “Well let’s put you TM parameters on all your campaigns, that’ll do some wonders” and then like, “Okay well, we did that. Now what do we do? I guess let’s start trying to understand them in context” but we get this rising level of complexity. So don’t be scared of that, that’s good. We’re well-suited for the challenge and we’re good at analytics so we’re gonna be all right.

0:39:05 MH: Okay, let’s synthesize this a little bit. We definitely, as analysts, need a seat at the table. This is something that’s been talked about in our industry since I joined it 15 years ago. Well, 16 years ago this year, having a seat at the table. Being part of the decision-making process, being looped in earlier and we worked really hard. There’s no shortage of passion and commitment. I’ve almost never run across analytics people who didn’t try very hard to produce amazing results and there’s outliers everywhere but the fact that you’re sitting here in Budapest in Hungary, taking time out of your schedule to come be with other analytics people, right there identifies you as sort of that cream of the crop. You work hard at this, you push yourself to learn, you push yourself to be better at those things and if we take the time to understand how decision-making works, how the brain works, how emotions work, we’re gonna equip ourselves to unlock those capabilities and maximize the value that we can bring.

0:40:08 MH: So I wanted to do something a little bit, I don’t know what the right word for it is. I realized I needed to help solidify this a little bit so we’re gonna introduce something new. We’re gonna introduce today a new discipline in the field of analytics. Thank you, thank you, Yehoshua I’m not qualified to do this, it’s not important to me that I be remembered as the person who came up with this but everybody has heard of CRO, conversion rate optimization and we do a lot of work to make our conversion rates go up. Well, introducing PRO, Persuasion Rate Optimization.

0:40:48 MH: Yeah. You’re a PRO. But Michael… You do have a podcast but please get a hold of yourself. What are you thinking? Well, here’s what I’m thinking. We need the ability to standardize some of these things. I got a chance to work with Tim Wilson, who’s probably one of the analysts I respect the most in this world, which is why I always call him the quintessential analyst and we were sitting together in a meeting with the chief marketing officer of one of our clients and Tim, he’s brilliant and just watching him work is a pure joy and he had the analysis down cold. He had the data and the figures and he was walking through them and it was masterful and then we were talking about something else and the CMO is like, “What about this?” And so I grabbed the thing, I went to the white board and I started chatting with him about a framework that we could use or whatever.

0:41:46 MH: And Tim took a picture of me at the white board and the CMO sitting there and the CMO’s attention was so wrapped and Tim was… I think he wouldn’t… I don’t know if he’ll admit it but he was like why, it’s interesting that you talk about something like this and he is just glued to you. I was going through all this stuff and honestly I feel like I wasn’t making a dent and honestly, it was a trying client relationship for lots of reasons but Tim’s work was amazing. He doesn’t do any other kind. So it was just, it got me thinking like A, it made me really happy I had something to contribute right. I’m not gonna keep up with Tim in any kind of analysis or data visualization but maybe there’s some way that I can… But I was like “Okay Michael, just because that’s you personally, you can’t ask people to be like you.” My personality type, how I approach the world, that’s not you and you being you, not me, you need tools and things you can actually leverage to grow these skills.

0:42:47 MH: So this is why we need to standardize these things. Take it out of sort of like “Well, it’s luck of the draw. Like Michael, you’re just good at that intuition stuff and empathy and that’s gonna take you places.” But I am gonna stay here, my data science and whatever the cool data science terms are and I don’t wanna get into that stuff, that’s okay, some people don’t want any part of it and I try to be cool with it but the reality is, you deserve more and that’s why we need something like this. So we create a category so we can have a tangible connection to this crucial process as different from this weird, nebulous soft skills bullshit that we’ve been force-fed by the military industrial complex for lo these many years. So we’re also really well suited for this. You know how analytics and statistics, you have to embrace the uncertainty. Yeah, talk about a data set, that’s uncertain.

0:43:42 MH: The human mind and emotions, that’s some fuzzy stuff but they just adopted the uncertainty. We were born in it. That’s to paraphrase Bane and that gives us actually a great approach to this. We already appreciate the ambiguity of those things. This is actually what actually makes analysts turn into great decision makers is actually some of these strengths and so by leveraging those strengths, in this context, analytics people are actually some of the best people to take on this work. So that’s the other reason why.

0:44:15 MH: And I’m also excited to talk about another new thing, so another product that actually exists in this space and since I invented the space, I guess I get to pick for now which products or technologies fit within it. So please, bare with me. There’s a company I’ve partnered with called Core Sciences and they have a product in stealth mode and I’m gonna show you a couple screenshots of what they do but basically, it is a personality evaluator that sits in your calendar.

0:44:40 MH: Imagine you’ve got a meeting coming up and you’ve got all these people in that meeting and it’s gonna show you all the layout, personality types, preferences and those kinds of things and it’s gonna let you make a plan for how you’re gonna interact with all those different sets of people and give you some warnings and ideas about how to incorporate things into that planning process effectively. Again, still kind of in stealth mode but it is being used in the real world to great effect and I’m very excited about technology. This is not a sales pitch but if you’re interested in it, I could definitely put you in touch with that company and I’ve partnered with them because since PRO is now a thing ’cause I said so, we need to build technologies because in Silicon Valley, there is no other way to solve a problem but build a technology for it. So, we’ll go there. Don’t you wanna be a PRO? All right, well, I wanna say thank you. I know that I’m the only thing standing between you and lunch, just remember: Keep analyzing.

[applause]

0:45:50 MH: A little bit after I got done presenting, moment I got a chance to sit down and talk a little bit more about that topic and so we decided to include that discussion as well and that’s coming up right here.

0:46:05 MK: Yeah, I think we’re not allowed to form too much except I really like to. I am…

0:46:12 JC: Tim did a pretty good job of not falling on the Twitter feed, I’m finding so… But I’m excited Tim to collaborate with you on a shiny app for measuring emotional real usage over time and then doing some physical analysis with R. But anyways okay, Moe.

0:46:28 MK: So just as a recap for anyone that wasn’t tuned in, Michael presented on The Last Mile of Analytics and I really liked I suppose your opening about how the last mile essentially is about how we get our analysis into people’s brands. I’m really curious to hear what was the motivation or the what spurred your interest in this space?

0:46:49 MH: Yeah so I think a couple of things. First off, all through my analytics career I’ve heard again and again and again, this problem of people don’t listen to what I say, I’m not being paid attention to, people don’t act on my recommendations and I feel like we’ve always addressed that as a make better data visualizations, learn better story telling techniques. That’s certainly valid but I think we’ll leave a lot off the table when we don’t actually talk about what happens in the mind of people on both sides and what is going on emotionally between those two parties because if I think that you’re the worst person in the world sitting across from me, giving me a recommendation, we literally are never going to have an eye to eye situation on where we’re gonna end up and sometimes it means like I just need to quit this job and go find a new job, like there’s no way for us to move forward and what a terrible end. And at the same time, when I don’t have that as part of my role and part of my job, I understand my impact as an analyst, I feel valued in terms of what I contribute the hard work I do matters, it means something like meaning is extremely important to people’s happiness.

0:48:03 MK: For sure.

0:48:04 MH: And so when that’s not happening… Where this is, I work hard and then everything I produce is being ignored or disagreed with for no reason, for not compelling reasons either, people aren’t using logic to refute me, they’re using bull crap ideas that they’ve just un-lodged in their head ’cause they don’t understand the data or whatever it is and so I just watched that happening, that same process and the average tenure of an analyst is two years, something like that, maybe 18 months in certain places and so we’re just re-doing this cycle again and again and again and then what also happened was, I was like “Well why are you good at it? Why did that happen where Tim and I were saying, Tim’s a better analyst than I am?” By a mile.

0:48:49 MH: So why was the CMO shutting him down? And then why did I get him to sit back down and listen to me? I was like. “Oh Michael, you should think about that.” And not just sort of like “Oh you’re lucky.” Like ooh, cool. You have that personality type so you’re…

0:49:04 MK: Or it was a fluke or…

0:49:05 MH: Yeah or just, “Oh, it’s good for you that you have that Michael.” But no other analysts, they just don’t get that and that’s too bad and I was like, “No that’s not good enough. We need to go back through and I need to think hard about okay, well what was it? What actually was going on? What did I do in that moment that created that outcome?

0:49:23 MK: What did you do?

0:49:24 MH: I was using empathy I was mirroring his concerns and then showing him how the data was gonna map to answer what I was hearing in that moment, was his biggest problem and in the same way, when people hear, I care about what you’re worried about and I’m gonna use all my skills to help address the challenges that frankly is keeping you up nights and sometimes they’re really bad at telling you so you’re picking up cues and emotional states, how they react to other things so there’s all these innate stuff that’s happening and I was like, we gotta pull it out of that innate thing because I think we were really willing to give up on it and just say like, “Well it’s a soft skill it grows over time.”

0:50:06 MK: But that, okay, that’s.

0:50:07 MH: And so we need to systematize those things.

0:50:09 MK: And that’s the thing that I’m really struggling with at the moment and not to toot my own horn but I think I’m not totally crap at this stuff as well.

0:50:17 MH: No. You’re great at it Moe.

0:50:19 MK: But I’ve heard a few people lately who I’m mentoring who’ve been like “This is really where I need to develop is… ” And they’ve kind of talked about stakeholder communication skills but it was literally sitting in a room in a very similar situation where, occasionally, I was paraphrasing or just saying it slightly differently and then the stakeholder was getting it and they’re like “I wanna learn that from you” and I’m like “Oh I don’t even know how you… “

0:50:42 MH: How do I even teach that?

0:50:43 MK: Professional development, like if someone wants to learn Python, I mean you have these resources but…

0:50:49 MH: And that’s why we tend to skew towards those tactical skill sets, anyways. I can see myself progressing in my knowledge of SQL or R or Python or data visualization. Even during a story telling I can… Those are amazing and this is the whole thing is, this doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t spend the time working on those skills. All of those really matter. ‘Cause you don’t get to sit down and present a recommendation if you don’t have the chops to go put the data in the right place and get it to a place where it’s actually gonna bring value so you still gotta be a great analyst but then now with a new skill that people can train on and learn on.

0:51:27 MK: But I think it’s also such a cop-out where for so many people managers, there’s I guess just the assumption that it’s something you learn over time. That you just have to give it time, the more experience, yes, the more experience you have with stakeholders, the more you’re gonna be like, “Well, I try that thing and it really didn’t work so I’m gonna try a different communication style” but I suppose I’m really particularly interested in how you can help develop junior people which isn’t just give it time and…

0:51:58 MH: Yeah. Well, I think first and foremost you start with just recognizing that these things that matter and in this workplace, the things you’re feeling are part of your development and growth. Like the fact that you have this thing and as leaders, that’s probably our challenge is to be willing to go there. That’s part of why I shared something kind of pretty deeply personal in my talk ’cause lots of people would be like “Wow! Michael, great. You’re awesome at this.”

[chuckle]

0:52:26 MH: It was more because I actually wanted to connect people to the fact that that is a universal feeling that everybody feels. Fear is built into us from our very earliest origins. It’s what kept us alive in the stone ages, our ability to be like, I’m afraid of that thing, I need to figure out what to do about it.

0:52:44 MK: Mmm.

0:52:44 MH: So to go back now and pretend like you shouldn’t have that, I’m sorry, it’s built into us so it’s okay and so first, it needs to be communicated that it’s not wrong for you to feel that and then grow people in that capability and then people leaders themselves, ever since I became a people leader, I took this opinion that this is probably the most crucial job you can do in a company and actually what’s interesting is the Gallup organization that did StrengthFinders, they recently came out with a new book. They basically identified managers as the single differentiating factor and actually Google does tons of analysis, their own HR and they’ve come to the same conclusion, who your manager is, literally predicts positive or negative outcomes almost 100% of the time and it’s like, “Well you shouldn’t ignore that”. Okay, well then how do we make those people into people that bring the most out of those people in terms of their development and all those things and both hard and soft skills? We don’t have another word or terminology for it yet but…

0:53:47 MK: You should make one up.

0:53:48 MH: Well, that’s what I did. I made up persuasion rate optimization to say, in the field of analytics, this is what we’re gonna pursue and it’s hard because I don’t know, I’m not even a big fan of doing that. I just think it’s good for us to start to try to put language around a set of systems and tactics that we can build around ’cause I think other people are actually way better at that than me but I care about people progressing this because actually, what would give me the most joy is to see people five, 10 years from now saying “Michael, I’ve been working on these skill sets and I’m… Here I was here and now I’m here and I’m achieving the things I thought I’d never achieve. I have satisfaction in my work. I’m making an impact at my company.” How fulfilling is that for everybody? That would fill me up. It makes me emotional just thinking about it.

0:54:41 MK: I’m gonna say something kind of controversial.

0:54:42 MH: Okay.

0:54:44 MK: So I’m in lots of sort of women in groups. Women in data, women in tech, women in engineering, all sorts of stuff and this topic comes up a lot. Like I mean it is a very, very, very consistent thing and I guess most of the women that I work with or are in that space are pretty aware that that’s a skill that they need to develop or they need to pay attention to.

0:55:09 MH: Yeah.

0:55:09 MK: And the AI, it can be multiple different facets of AI which also have to do with confidence and impostor syndrome and all that sort of stuff. I suppose what I’m getting at is like who’s responsibility is it to lead the charge on this? Because in a company, it has to come from somewhere and I do have friends that are really passionate about developing AI in the workplace and sometimes the feedback is kind of like “Oh great. Women talking about emotions again”. You know.

0:55:37 MH: Oh and trust me, I feel very uncomfortable as a guy bringing it up and I purposefully am rejecting that feeling as erroneous. That’s a wrong thing and actually so, this is actually what I wanted to talk to you about is, I only have sort of my perspective and a guy’s perspective to a certain extent, I’m not even like every other guy but I’m like me and I don’t have a view point that’s the same or identical and what I’ve observed and certainly not universally but throughout the years, I try to leverage empathy in the context of the women I work with, women leaders, people who are like that. I’m like “What are you doing to help them be themselves, the best”?

0:56:23 MK: Yes.

0:56:23 MH: Because what I’ve come to understand is that I have observed that I don’t have to adapt as dramatically a lot of times in a workplace environment as I see women needing to and feeling pressure to. Like, in 25 years ago, I was like one of the guys. You adopt all these masculine traits and even be told “Unless you get in there and really pound people and negotiate hard, you won’t be respected.” That’s like “Well gosh darn it. I don’t want anyone to change or try to change who they are just to achieve success.” That’s not good enough.

0:57:00 MK: I had a senior engineer, a very senior engineer who recently said that to me that basically she’s like, “I don’t feel like I can be my authentic self at work. I feel like I have a work self and a personal self and there needs to be a really clear difference” and I’m like “Oh God, that’s… Yeah” it’s really hard to be empathetic or to turn on all these things that you need to turn on in the workplace if the starting point is, “I can’t be myself”. Because how are you gonna coach someone or…

0:57:27 MH: So then the thing that I would do in that context for as long as I was at that company would try to create a space where you can be yourself with me.

0:57:35 MK: Mmm. Ooh I like that.

0:57:37 MH: I’m here for you. I see you. We can be ourselves with each other and we’re gonna invite other people into this cohort and we’re gonna build that ’cause you asked the question like who leads the charge? And it’s great if you’re the CEO and you can kind of drive the strategy downward. A lot of times, in analytics specifically, we’re working from the bottom up, right? In the organization, we’re working upward to try to make an impact and I’m really excited about the work I get to do with leaders and executives at companies because I’m trying and as part of this to actually start to take it and drive it from the top down because you’re gonna have much more impact at scale if you can get people bought in and what I’m loving is the next generation of executives are getting a much better appreciation of this and as we see people who from previous generations, leave the workforce and leaders emerge from sort of Gen X and onwards, they understand that emotional health is actually fundamental to business success and they’re gonna prioritize it as leaders to help drive it.

0:58:40 MH: It’s not always done rightly or whatever but at least there’s some better awareness ’cause honestly, you’re like a lot of times, you’d be like shove it in the hole and shut up and never bring it up again. That’s nothing to do with your work. Get back to work. You don’t have to like them, you just gotta work with them. All these different sayings that just sort of live within our lexicon but that’s the thing I would do is, if somebody said that to me, I would just be like “Well, then you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna create a space right here and then we’re gonna try to grow that space.” And maybe there are people better than me that know how to start revolutions. I’m a work with the next person and we slowly build a wave, that’s my style.

0:59:17 MK: I think that is how you start a revolution.

0:59:19 MH: No, well maybe but there’s other people like they stand on the top of thing and they rally people and so, I wanna validate that point of view as well ’cause there’s probably another way to do this that isn’t my way of doing it, that I think is also able to do that but I would say, if you’re in this and you understand how important it is, the success and you care about the success of your company that starts with you, no matter where you are. If you’re a leader, that’s great.

0:59:44 MK: There’s always… And I keep coming back to thinking about this, about you can do so much in and of yourself to improve this. There’s always assholes at work who don’t get this and I was thinking particularly about the self-regulation piece that we discussed during your presentation. Sometimes with self-regulation, I assume that the decision-making process would be around “Okay, I could go and challenge this person that I disagree with or we have yeah, completely opposing views however, is that gonna be in my best interest? Maybe it’s not and in the workplace that can kind of mean you could potentially get trodden on or taken advantage of by some of these assholes.

1:00:28 MH: Absolutely, there is a choice you make. I always say it this way, I choose to love and I know that choosing to do that means I will get hurt by people and at the same time, that is a choice I make in advance, knowing that that outcome will happen and I’m calculating that the positives from it, versus the negatives, will balance out in a positive fashion in my life and in my experience.

1:00:54 MK: But what about… I mean the thing is it impacts your team too, right?

1:00:57 MH: Absolutely does, and so…

1:00:58 MK: So you have someone that walk all over, you decide not to push back on something and so then you’re gonna be pushing whatever that thing is downwards to your team, which you might be protecting them as well because they’re now not exposed to whatever is going on but…

1:01:12 MH: And I’m not good at this but there’s a guy in the United States named Daryl Davis and he grew up as a, he was a jazz musician and he grew up and learned about racism and things like that and literally what he does today is befriend members of the KKK and get them to change their point of view about racism and black people and those things kinds of things, there’s this whole documentary and I was just amazed because the thing he does, like we talk in our society about these people who are racist and those kinds of things, they’re not people to engage with, you shut them out and he does the exact opposite. He goes to their house, he has dinner with them. He forces them through friendship to confront the fact that what they’re trying to hate in him is not hate worthy and he literally collects robes from the people as they give up these beliefs and start to transform their opinions and he’s again, this guy doing it, one person at a time, one relationship at a time and I love what he’s doing and the model that he’s demonstrating and in our society today, we’re not good at that.

1:02:19 MH: Somebody steps out of line, we come to bash them over the head, we cast them out and on one hand, it’s not appropriate to let this stuff happen, absolutely not but engagement, I think is the only way to change and those people who are being those assholes today, if we’re building these structures, it will improve what we’re doing and they will feel intense pressure to try to adapt because they’re getting left behind, they are not going to be as successful as the people who are doing this, this work and so from my point of view is, “Oh you wanna get left behind? Do you wanna be antiquated? Well, you’re making some choices right now that are gonna put you right there.

1:03:00 MH: I think actually there’s an opportunity for you and we should talk about this situation and what I first wanna do is tell you that I wanna be your friend and I wanna help you achieve success” And if I’m their leader or their co-worker or whatever, even if they spurn that message completely initially…

1:03:16 MK: Kill them with kindness, is part of it.

1:03:18 MH: Yeah but even that’s like an over-simplification.

1:03:22 MK: Well, it is, but you also need it like…

1:03:23 MH: Because I… Well, I’m not… I can’t tell people what to do in those situations because there’s so much that goes into that. People are hurt, there’s hurting people and so when somebody does that, you know or does things like that, you don’t necessarily have the self-regulation to not respond in kind of that moment and be more like that Daryl Davis character and be kind and I’m not here to judge that situation ’cause I can’t. Lord knows I have all kinds of people in my past, in career and friendships and relationships.

1:03:57 MH: I mean Tim and I just on the podcast frankly, where I can’t do a good job doing that killing them with kindness thing or choosing to actually engage with that person as opposed to just shut them down. Even in my own friggin family, I struggle with this. You know what I mean? The people that are even closest to, you’re like “I don’t wanna talk to you right now”, so yeah.

1:04:17 MK: That’s an amazing point to finish on.

1:04:20 MH: That’s right.

1:04:20 MK: Thank you so much for your amazing presentation. Like I said, I really enjoyed it.

1:04:20 MH: Alright and that about wraps up this episode. As always, we wanna give a special shout out to our producer, Josh Crowhurst for helping us out with each episode. Also, if you wanna reach out to us, would like to talk about it, obviously I shared a bunch in this episode, would love to hear from you on the Measure Slack or LinkedIn page or on Twitter, so please don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll be back next episode with sort of our more regular content I think.

1:04:56 MH: Alright, well hey, I know I speak for my two co-hosts, Moe and Tim, when I say no matter what your emotional state, keep analyzing.

[music]

1:05:10 Announcer: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, or Measure Slack group. We welcome your comments and questions, visit us on the web at analyticshour.io, facebook.com/analyticshour or @AnalyticsHour on Twitter.

1:05:30 Charles Barkley: So smart guys wanted to fit in. So they’ve made up a term called analytics. Analytics don’t work.

1:05:38 Thom Hammerschmidt: Analytics. Oh my god! What the fuck does that even mean?

[music]

1:05:47 TW: But I think we may also be able to salvage Helbs’s talk and create an episode out of it. So that’s…

1:05:53 JC: That’s great.

1:05:54 TW: That’s what I’m hoping for.

1:05:55 TW: There’s our set up salvaging.

1:05:57 JC: Yeah. Yeah, that’s not quite… I gotta work on my communication skills.

1:06:01 TW: Skills. [chuckle]

1:06:01 TW: You know…

1:06:02 JC: Sorry Helbs, I’ll edit that part out.

1:06:04 TW: Yeah. [chuckle]

1:06:04 TW: It’ll be in the outtakes and…

1:06:15 TW: Yeah, salvaging Helbs.

1:06:15 Yehoshua Coren: Michael Helbling, Michael Helbling, you are wanted at the club. Not yet, not yet, not yet, not yet, not yet, not, music stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. The signal would be like this…

[music]

1:06:25 YC: Music being broadcasted? Music is not broadcast?

1:06:33 MH: Oh no, I think, so we’re slow dancing?

[music]

1:06:44 YC: So I was hoping to go that last mile of analytics with Michael Helbling. Woah!

[applause]

1:06:55 YC: Damn! Alright.

[music]

1:07:00 TW: But for now, I have pulled away one of the speakers and attendees and one of my favorite people, Astrid Illum, I’m getting… I’m up to what, a B minus on my pronunciation of your name?

1:07:15 Astrid Illum: I think that was actually a step back.

1:07:17 TW: That was backwards?

1:07:22 AI: Yeah. [chuckle]

1:07:23 TW: Damn it!

[chuckle]

1:07:26 MK: Oh my god, I will seriously, I will buy you…

1:07:28 JC: That was on the money.

1:07:29 MK: I will buy you all the drinks that… Okay, right. That was awesome, thank you so much guys.

Podcast: Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS