Episode 28: 3 Tips When Data Alone Isn't Enough to Take Action
Storytelling, Moral Values, and Open Discussion
We may all agree that data is the foundation of excellent decisions.
But what happens when the data doesn't lead to action?
The data, by itself, data doesn't tell a story.
So, it's up to you to turn your data into something meaningful for your customers and prospects.
Here are the three tips from this episode:
Use storytelling to convince
Speak to moral values
Be open to discussion and disagreement
Resources:
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
How to Change Minds When Data Alone Isn’t Enough by Professor Jonathan Haidt
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Podcast Transcript:
Kiva Sade: [00:00:01]
Hello and welcome to Collab with Kiva. I'm your host, Kiva Slade. From the marbled halls of the US Congress to my racing-themed office chair, I've learned that there is no perfect path to the life of your dreams. My journey over the past 20 years has included being a Legislative Director for a member of Congress, Policy Director for a nonprofit, stay-at-home mom, homeschooling mom, jewelry business owner, and now the owner of a service-based business. Whether your journey has been a straight line or full of zigs and zags, join me and my guest as we share insights, hope, and lessons learned from our female entrepreneurship journeys. May the collaborative sharing of our stories be the tide that lifts your boat. Let's dive in.
[00:00:56]
Hey there. Welcome to another episode of Collab with Kiva. I'm your host, Kiva Slade. So, I'll just say from the start this week, the topic, the podcast, it may feel a little different. And there actually may be more questions than there are answers. And then that's okay. So, hang on in there with me and I'm going to kind of take you on a journey around something I was reading and thinking and it still all centers around data. So, let's dive in.
[00:01:41]
For starters, I'm taking a course called Building a Second Brain, which when I originally told my husband, he was like, "You're going to do what?" And I think he took it a bit more literally or more physically, figuratively than I had anticipated. But the concept behind it is for those of us we collect a lot of information, we take in a lot, we're high fact-finders. You probably have sticky notes, notepads, journals, email files, some sort of repository that may or may not exist of all of the stuff that you have been accumulating. Sometimes I feel like Rosie Perez in White Men Can't Jump. You just know all the foods that start with Q just in case you're on Jeopardy one day.
[00:02:49]
And the building a second brain is not just about that intake of that information, but actually processing it in a way that you can get your hands on it when you need it to make things happen. And one of the exercises that we were asked to do in the beginning was to come up with our 12 problems or your 12 questions, kind of the things that when you think about yourself, the things that kind of keep you up at night, the things that your brain always comes back to that you find fascinating, that you find intriguing, that you might actually find vexing in some cases. And so, to write those out. And for me, one of my questions was how do we deal with an increasingly divided world that continues to deny truth to live in an alternative reality? And a lot of that obviously stemmed from in the US in particular, there's "fake news".
[00:04:05]
There's all of these things that tech in some cases has enabled people to manipulate. Recordings, sound, so many things that in some instances, circles, beliefs, fill in the blank with whatever you feel is the best fit there. In some of these areas, this alternative reality has become reality. And I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and all of those things. But I do think that there's something to be said for when presented with truth we now have truth being denied as not being true.
[00:05:06]
So, I say all that to say that's one of my questions. Again, it's how do we deal with an increasingly divided world that continues to deny truth to live in an alternative reality? And then I was reading and I shared this in my mailing list and on LinkedIn, I touched on it. I just recently finished a book called The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis. Quick summary, obviously it's about COVID, and I'm not here to debate COVID with anyone. But a 13-year-old girl who has a dad who's a scientist and stuff. She basically is working on her school science fair project, which she's always done with her dad. And they pretty much, with the help of a few others, create a model to replicate what the spread of COVID would truly look like.
[00:06:07]
And while it felt like it was small scale because again, she was doing this for her science fair project it actually wound up being used by the White House in trying to understand what this virus was going to do and how it was going to look and how it would impact society. So, it obviously grew beyond her 13-year-old self over the course of time. And so, what was interesting in that book is not only where we kind of started with this, but the various things that led up to the pandemic that told the story of what people...the things that we knew, the things I think they wish we didn't know. And really reading the tea leaves from things that were taking place in other parts of the world.
[00:07:18]
And for myself, I live in Maryland, my governor, his wife is South Korean. So in South Korea, certain precautions were being implemented early on in the process. And I have to assume that information from her family, from contacts there, he implemented. Procedures, processes in Maryland, he was one of the first three governors, I think, in the country to do some of the things that he did. Procuring test kits, requiring masks, social distancing, so many different things. Because again, of what he was seeing abroad that you knew was coming with this virus and how a virus travels.
[00:08:21]
The book is obviously a scathing indictment of the CDC and how they handle things. But that's not my focus nor the fact that we've had 990,000 deaths in the US, 6.22 million worldwide, according to the latest numbers. What I was struck by and what stuck with me after reading the book and trust me, there are a ton of takeaways in this book around leadership, around data, around the importance of collaboration, openness and transparency and so much more. But what struck me and what stuck with me was data doesn't make everyone act. Data doesn't make everyone act. And that was surprising to me and not in a naive way, but surprising that when presented with numbers and models and real-time data, decision-making was either extremely slow or it didn't happen at all in some cases. And to be frank, not doing something is in itself a decision.
[00:10:07]
So, data doesn't make everyone act (A) in the same way (B) in a timely manner. And so, it led me to really start asking that question a little bit deeper. Why doesn't data make everyone act? Why doesn't it move us? Why doesn't it propel us forward? When we see something say something. When we see something in our lives, in our businesses, why don't we say something? Or why don't we do something to alter, change that course or trajectory? And being the fact-finder that I am, I started researching and I came across a keynote speech at a conference by Jonathan Haidt, and I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, and he's the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University.
[00:11:19]
The conference was at a Fivetran event. So, it was tech-like folks, and it was like how to change minds when data alone isn't enough. And that's where I was. Here we have this pandemic, we have these deaths, we have these sicknesses, we have these illnesses, we have all of these things and no matter how much data there was, there wasn't enough or there wasn't enough to change minds in the way that they could have been changed. And so, I want to share some of those takeaways because I find that they're definitely important to us as business owners in how we use data to show up for ourselves, to show up for our businesses, to show up for our clients. So, one of the things that Professor Haidt talks about is that if you want to change minds with data you have to account for what he calls the human element. And that's that person at the end who's going to evaluate those insights you present. And when you think about that, that's your client or in some cases your prospective client.
[00:12:49]
What about that information that you're sharing? How are they evaluating those insights? Because that is going to be key to getting them to do what it is that you'd like them to do? Whether that is sign up for your mailing list, book a call with you, whatever the situation. And what I thought was interesting is he shares three points. The first is being using storytelling to convince. And if you've been in this online space there's no shortage. Donald Miller has an entire business built on building a story brand. Storytelling is not a new phenomenon. But what he talks about in terms of storytelling is we all have reason. Every single one of us. And it's not impartial because obviously it's been informed by who we are, our life experiences, our education, so much more of what composes us as people.
[00:13:59]
And so, when we want to believe, he said in a proposition, we lean towards it. And he likens that to the elephant part of our self. We walk in that direction. Now, what's interesting about that is as we are walking in that direction, because we are leaning into a proposition that we want to believe, we steadily filter out information that contradicts our favored position and we will find any piece of evidence that can support whatever contention we want to make. I'm going to say that again. So, when we want to believe something we lean in towards it. We're going to walk in that direction. And as we are walking in that direction we're steadily filtering out information that contradicts. That anything that would keep us from walking in the way that we're walking, we filter that out. We do not listen to it.
[00:15:20]
And you might be asking, well, Kiva, what do we do then? And he suggests that you tell a story, not a made-up story. But when you're clear that data is a story that you know is happening, in this case with the book. These amount of people are seriously going to die if XYZ doesn't happen. Tell a story where the data supports the story. Because storytelling is an age-old methodology of actually getting people to be convinced of something that they may not have been convinced of previously. You can help them see something a different way if through storytelling. Which once again always harkens back to when I'm talking about data, having integrity with the data, and not utilizing it to tell a story that's not true. Because again, we're not making up stories here. I think that's one of the comforts of data, is it's black and white. It's not the gray kind of fuzzy areas that can happen with some other things.
[00:16:48]
So, use storytelling to convince is his first tip. His second, though, is speak to moral values. Now, I have to admit, this one kind of...it threw me because I feel that morally our compasses are all over the place lately, I guess, is what I'll say. But if you can identify that other person's foundational concerns and speak to them using their language. So, coming at it from working in an understanding of what you have in common. Do you have a shared history? Do you have common identities? What do you need to understand others in order to understand yourself? And I think that was a part that we missed in the pandemic. Because of a lack of leadership and a void. We started telling stories a bit late, but there was no shared identity. There was no commonalities that was touched upon, I guess, for lack of a word.
[00:18:19]
And so, it's important that you're speaking the language of those that you are wanting to serve. And that leads to a next point, which was his final, which was be open to discussion and disagreement. I think sometimes we're open to one, not necessarily the other. And depending upon age. When I was younger, I was very argumentative. That just was who I was. And now I'm older it's not so much that I feel like I'm less argumentative. I am more aware, self-aware, and just probably won't engage in a lot of conversations that I know are just foolishness in some cases. And that's different from a discussion. So, discussion is where both people are listening, not just one-sided lecturing in terms of that.
[00:19:27]
So, being open to discussion and disagreement, the reality is that research has shown high or low IQs are not a predictor of one's ability to make better decisions. We think that that correlates when honestly it doesn't. Because the fact is most of us don't use reason very well. And that's why he calls this last mile for data is like this human part of it. The tech, the computers, the analysts can put together all of this information. But that last mile for data, that's a difficult part. That's the human part of it. And that's the part where sometimes there's success and sometimes there's not success. Because that last part is hard sometimes to get over the hurdle, to get over the hump that is the human brain. It just is. And I feel like that's where so much went awry with the pandemic. And I also feel like it's still not a resolved issue, so to speak for me. It's still a question that I have around.
[00:21:01]
As our world continues to be divisive what does it take for truth, for data to tell the stories that need to be told, for people to act in a way that they need to act? And I obviously talk about measurement and analytics in one's business. What are those numbers telling you? And are you being the elephant that's walking in the direction of I don't need those numbers and there's nothing that they can tell me because I know what's going on in my business and things are going well? Or are you open to discussion and possibly disagreement? Because the numbers are saying something completely different than what you have latched on to as your version of the truth.
[00:22:12]
I'm not asking these questions for shame, shade, or anything else. Genuinely, this is a question that I have that I feel will continue to be explored as our world continues in the way that it is. And I want to encourage everyone. Let's have those conversations where we're both listening and we're speaking to our commonalities. When you're in business and I've seen this a lot lately, where the great resignation has yielded a lot of business start-ups. I see people in groups that I'm in. They've just started their fill-in-the-blank business and we're throwing out all the confetti and we're so excited and happy for them. They'll share their website and I'll go to it and there's nothing installed there for any sort of data collection. Or I'll see someone ask, "Hey, I'm not getting people registered for this event I have coming up. What do I need to do?"
[00:23:35]
And you go to their website, their landing page, and there's nothing set up for data collection. So, you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what has happened, who has visited, where they've come from, how they visited, how long did they stay, where did they fall off in the process? There's so much that we don't know and we get that information from data. The question becomes, though, once you have the data, are you going to be moved to act? Because that's the next step in it I never want anyone to collect data for data sake. I'll repeat that. I don't want anyone to collect data for data's sake. The numbers can tell a story but you first have to have the numbers to tell the story.
[00:24:47]
So again, I share that this was not going to be your typical podcast with me because I really am thinking through and wrestling through some various things and I feel like this is a forum that we can share those things and have those conversations. So, I look forward to what are the questions or problems that you would find that keep you up at night or things that you want to "solve." And what was a good book that you've read lately? I am changing how I listen to and utilize audible and my printed books. So, I'm always looking for some suggestions so feel free to shoot them over to me. And I will link to the keynote speech by Jonathan Haidt in the show notes as well as to the book, The Premonition, as well as Building a Second Brain. Thank you again for listening this week to Collab with Kiva and I look forward to talking with you next week. Bye.
[00:26:09]
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Collab with Kiva. Each of us has a different path and I hope that this episode gave you some takeaway that has left you inspired and motivated to keep pressing forward on your unique path. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. And of course, your reviews on Apple are greatly appreciated. You are a small business owner ready to start making data-driven decisions in your business, and you know that without the data you're really just guessing. Make sure to visit my website the516collaborative.com and let's schedule a time to talk to make sure that you can harness the power of data in your business. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.
Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.