How to have more constructive conversations inside your organisation
Our anti-social, socially-mediated world is more polarised and toxic than ever before – and more obviously and enduringly so. Friends and families are either pulling themselves apart, creating and reinforcing fault lines past the point of no return, or tiptoeing round subjects that previously generated lively but reasonable debates. More and more topics are on the verboten list.
It doesn’t help that 2024 is the year of peak election, with 64 countries – and very nearly half the world’s population – going to the polls. With Parliamentary elections in the U.K. and France run in just the past week – and with both pulling against the tide of the global drift to the far right – the world holds its breath to see whether POTUS 46 will choose to step aside after a calamitous first televised debate with his predecessor and most-likely challenger for this November’s U.S. presidential race.
In these febrile times, we need calm heads. When I was researching my 2023 book, Asking Smarter Questions: How to be an Agent of Insight (Routledge), I was keen to determine whether the way we ask questions – the effort we put into that often-overlooked skill – can help to reduce the polarisation that so often characterises contemporary debate. Part of my research involved talking to a broad cross-section of people for whom success is predicated on their ability to ask smarter questions. Doctors, lawyers, and journalists; market researchers, coaches, and Zen Buddhists; data analysts, hostage negotiators, and conflict mediators.
I was particularly grateful to the insights on tap from seasoned conflict mediator Pip Brown, the founder and director of Conflict Insights. Pip applies her highly-effective approach to resolving conflict – honed in high-tension global conflict zones and situations – to more domestic but none-the-less keenly-felt disputes.
For the conflict negotiator looking to prompt reflection and self-reflection – to open up dialogue – Pip told me: “This means posing simple, open questions that encourage all parties to consider the issues from multiple points of view, shutting up, and actively listening. It means giving the conversation space to breathe. A frantic, frenetic interrogation is totally counter-productive, as all parties will have experienced for too long in the period of active dispute, before they start working with a conflict negotiator. It can be very powerful to hear the story from one another in a calm and controlled environment, to learn what the situation is like from the other person’s perspective; to understand what the consequences of our behaviour are on others, but in a less charged, less emotive atmosphere than the actual moment of conflict.”
For Pip, there are five principal characteristics of a successful conflict mediator, characteristics that would serve all of us well in day-to-day dialogue and debate. These are: curiosity, active listening, empathy, patience, and emotional intelligence.
In asking smarter questions – not to mention moving from data to insight and from insight to action – time and again we come back to empathy. What the lawyer-hero Atticus Finch tells his daughter Scout, in To Kill A Mockingbird, is the ability to “climb inside a person’s skin and walk around in it”. And when it comes to navigating toxic, polarised debates, this means “mind travelling” to those who hold the opposite opinion from our own. As Julia Dhar says in her TED Salon: DWEN talk called “How to have constructive conversations”, it demands that we ask questions in the spirit of a climbing wall – constantly looking for the next niche to pull yourself forward. And very definitely not in the manner of a cage fight.
It is this approach – and the question “I never really thought about it exactly that way before. What can you share that would help me see what you see?” – that enabled Dhar’s father, repeatedly, to find unexpected common ground with supporters of POTUS 45 after his 2016 election success. Eight years on, it looks like this wisdom and approach will be needed all over again, even more critically than before.
And – bringing this full circle – Asking Smarter Questions is the first module in our online training course, Using Data Smarter. Find out if it’s the course for you and your team by clicking on the image below.
D2I2A – the new measure of the role data plays in your organisation
Welcome D2I2A.
No, it’s not a hard-working droid in a new Star Wars trilogy. But it is artificially intelligent, deceptively simple, and able to help you and your teams understand the role that data plays in your organisation.
D2I2A: the new “Data to Insights to Action” scorecard from the team behind our acclaimed data storytelling course, Using Data Smarter.
Powered by the pioneering ScoreApp tool, in 13, straightforward questions, D2I2A can help you understand:
As soon as you complete the scorecard, you’ll be served with an instant report that will help you understand (and act upon) your relative state of data maturity. Just follow this link (or click on the image above), take the survey, and learn precisely where you stand. What’s more, if you can get a representative sample of your team (or whole organisation) to complete the scorecard, we’ll happily prepare a report for you summarising findings from multiple participants. We’re here to help.
The power of Plain Numbers
Can making numbers understandable be good for business? You bet it can.
Earlier this month, it was my great pleasure to attend the launch of the 2024 “Plain Numbers in Practice” report from the most-excellent Plain Numbers at the Mansion House, deep in the City’s fashionable London. In the charity’s own words, it works “with organisations in multi-year partnerships to enable them to?communicate numbers more clearly. By doing so, these partners provide their customers with the key information they need to make informed choices.”
The launch (and report) showcased brilliant case studies of great consumer data storytelling from Aviva, Nationwide, Thames Water and many more. Chaired with the lightest of touches by CEO, Mike Ellicock, the report was endorsed and supported by Claer Barrett from the Financial Times / ITV / LBC, as well as Julia Bonomo from New Day, Direct Line Group and many more.
This initiative is not just about using data smarter and simpler. It’s also about getting rid of reams of ‘jargon monoxide poisoning’ that have for generation affected and infected bills, pay slips, and financial advice. Making smarter use of data is about empathy, humanity, and a genuine understanding of the data tolerance of your audience. Those presenting at this month’s launch event exemplified this; so many examples of great data storytelling made flesh. What’s more, there was also plenty of hard evidence that making financial information more understandable also leads to better consumer engagement, happier customers, and deeper loyalty.
Bravo, Mike, Plain Numbers, and all your 30+ corporate partners.
In demand and on the road
The first half of this year has been a sometimes exhausting road-trip for we Agents of Insight, from China to Japan, Switzerland to France, and a couple of skips across the Pond to the U.S. Our feet have scarcely touched the ground.
As summer – finally – shows some signs of turning up in Europe, I’m delighted to say the next few months ahead are less dominated by travel. Particularly delighted given that I was on the road every week in June. Highlights over the past month have included:
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I stayed on for a long weekend in Dijon and was joined by my life and business partner, Saskia Gent . We had great fun in Dijon during the annual Festival de Musique, as well as making mustard, and touring wonderful Burgundy wineries on (thankfully) electric bikes. My favourite wine region and wines bar none. So good to combine hard-core business and pleasure so seamlessly. Saskia and I very rarely have the time to attend each other’s business events. But this destination – and the Eurostar x TGV travel – were too strong to resist the siren’s call.
We’ll relish the slower weeks and months of July and August, recharge, reconnect with our community in the awesome home base of Lewes, East Sussex, and be ready to hit the road again in September.
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Deep work time
Timeout is one of the most under-used tools in business. And one of the most effective.?
Earlier this spring, I ran an intensive, two-half-day training session with the insight team Energy Systems Catapult . Six weeks later, we came back together as a team (on Teams, where else?) to reflect on the impact of those sessions. One had focused on asking smarter questions to surface the right data, while the second considered how best to move from data to insight and the tools and techniques of insightful thinking. Together, they’re designed to enhance and improve the data-driven decision-making inside an organisation.
In my STEP Prism of InsightTM model – the heart of that second training session – the second step in the STEP model (the ‘T’) stands for timeout.
Insightful thinking isn’t like analytical thinking. It’s a different mode of cognition. Analytical thinking thrives on time spent and presenteeism; on blood, sweat, and tears. By contrast, creative, insightful thinking – moving from data to insight – thrives on distraction, not consciously considering the challenge, and allowing your subconscious to join old and old together to make something new.?
It thrives on timeout.
After our six-week timeout, we had a hugely focused, highly energised discussion on how to apply these principles to improving workflow. That discussion generated three critical and impactful, new ways of working for the team.
The one I found most inspiring was the institution of ‘Deep Work Time’, bringing to bear the principles of the religiously 9-to-5 Cal Newport, the most productive computer scientist at 美国麻省理工学院 . And, indeed, anywhere.?
The pandemic has changed many things in the world of work, some for the better, others for the worse. One particular hole has been the virtual disappearance of side-by-side deep work; colleagues / collaborators working on different things in a shared physical space, interrupted by occasional water-cooler moments.
The nature of our co-creation of ‘Deep Work Time’ – designed to make the new world of hybrid, phygital working actually work – is simply this:
Lockdowns made a mockery of the claim that we needed to be physically co-located to share all the talents. But paradoxically, they also made colleagues seem more distant. ‘Deep Work Time’ – an experiment that might become shorter or longer, more or less frequent – is designed to address precisely that.
And it wouldn’t have happened without taking timeout to allow the collective subconscious hive mind of this excellent team to do the brilliant recombinatorial thing – old + old = new – that characterises human, insightful thinking.
Many thanks to Danica Caiger-Smith for inviting me along.
The Data Malarkey podcast
We’re on the home straight of Season Five of the Data Malarkey podcast. Since the last issue of this newsletter, we’ve welcome city analyst Ian Whittaker , the founder of Liberty Sky Advisors, and John Hibbs , Co-Founder of CoEfficient as guests to the podcast. Two very different approaches – and two very different fields, marketing and employee happiness – but lots of dots joined as usual.
Cracking episodes, and available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Music and – a week after they drop as audio then also in beautifully-produced audio-visual glory on our YouTube channel, @Data Malarkey (thanks as per producer Joe Hickey ?? ). Particular highlights for me were Ian’s crystal-clear explanation of marketing spend as “intangible CAPEX”, and John’s demonstration that you can make any organisation perform better by listening to your staff, looking after your staff, and extracting and deploying genuinely meaningful information and data from your staff.
And as we entered Season Five, so we’re set to leave it – via the hallowed portals of the 英国剑桥大学 . Season Five opened with one of the world’s finest data storytellers, Sir David Spiegelhalter, the University’s Emeritus Professor of Statistics (and for a long-time the Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk). We’re bookending Season Five with another Cantabrigian 'Professor Sir' – this time, Simon Baron-Cohen . Simon has been a major figure in the field of autism research for the past 40 years, and today runs the brilliant, interdisciplinary Autism Research Centre at Cambridge. His episode drops next Wednesday 17 July. Be sure to head over to your favourite podcast provider, hit subscribe, and never miss another episode.
After the Greatest Hits of Season Five at the end of July, we’re taking a summer break from new episodes of Data Malarkey, allowing you to catch up on the beach. We’ll be back with some fantastic new guests from 11 September. Watch this space.
As ever, any suggestions for guests – if you think you’d make a good guest or you know or work with someone who’d tell a great story about how they make smarter use of data – drop us an email at [email protected] or complete the simple application form at https://www.usingdatasmarter.com/guest
You can get straight there by clicking the image below.
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We’ll be back with issue 15 – a bit of lighter holiday reading – on Friday 9 August. See you then.