Grounding Numbers

There are a bunch of different types of work that are broadly called “data science” but today I’d like to talk about insights. For me, insights work is all about changing minds. Perhaps ‘changing’ is too strong and adversarial a term: if we give a decision maker extra confidence, that’s probably still OK. But the gold-standard of a good insight is that it leads to somebody changing what they were going to do. It’s much less certain than a bunch of other data work because it deeply involves people and people are deeply unpredictable. If you can sit and work closely with the person you’re trying to influence, it’s much easier to understand what they’re motivated by, what they believe the key facts are, and then how you can fit into their process and offer them value. But so much of very senior insights work isn’t like that at all, and much more closely resembles research work in nature. You spend a while working on an area and building expertise, then you take a chance. You find…