Poetry in People Analytics

People Analytics leaders are in the business of change management. The sooner they realize this aspect of their role, the more effective they will be. In general, everyone recognizes the need for change; most support change; but few are willing to drive the change. Change agents require inspiration to sustain them through the ups and downs of their journey. They also need to paint a picture of the ideal “future state” they are trying to move their organization toward.

Growing up in India, I was inspired by a popular poem by one of the country’s most celebrated authors, Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. “Where the Mind is Without Fear” is arguably one of the most famous poems of modern India. It was referenced in Nobel Prize award speeches by two more recent Nobel laureates – Amartya Sen (Economics, 1998) and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Physics, 1983). I remember as a schoolboy being taught the power of alliteration, among other things, through this poem (see if you can locate the line).

India was a British colony in Tagore’s time and his poem envisaged a free nation that would emerge from the struggle for political independence. Today India celebrates 72 years of independence from Britain. On the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, India entered the community of nations as a sovereign, secular, democratic republic. It continues to work toward the lofty goals of its freedom fighters, such as Tagore, and the idealistic constitution they drafted promising justice, liberty, equality and fraternity for all.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high 

Where knowledge is free 

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 

By narrow domestic walls 

Where words come out from the depth of truth 

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection 

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way 

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit 

Where the mind is led forward by thee 

Into ever-widening thought and action 

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. 

Throughout my people analytics career, this poem has offered me inspiration and helped me communicate a vision for what my teams would deliver. I often allude to literature and history in my business presentations. Quoting poetry to kick off a People strategy meeting can soften the seemingly hard edge of analytics. Invoking “Where the Mind is Without Fear” has resonated well with my HR leadership and people analytics teams. 

As I coach people analytics leaders and practitioners through their own change management journey, I often think back on how the poem spoke to me as I built people analytics teams from scratch across major financial services, healthcare and technology companies. Let’s deconstruct the poem in terms of what it envisages for an HR world transformed through people analytics. I’ll offer only a brief commentary and not belabor the parallels. 

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high 

This speaks to a state of the corporate world where the often-cited but rarely-enacted “importance of people to business results” is borne out in full measure. For an organization it means that the chief human resources officer (CHRO, a.k.a. the head of the People organization) is a full-fledged member of the executive leadership team. People analytics is an independent, fully-funded center of expertise (COE) reporting directly to the CHRO. The people analytics leader is a member of the human resources leadership team (HRLT). Human resources business partners (HRBPs) are engaged in the business of talent, comfortably bringing to bear data-driven insights through analytics. HR staff are confident with numbers and no longer need to rely on Finance for credible estimates of current and planned headcount. “Full information” through analytics emboldens HR professionals to speak truth to power.

Where knowledge is free 

Typically, the first (but hopefully not the last) stop in the people analytics journey is to enable efficient, accurate, reliable, on-demand, self-service HR reporting. The next step is to move from provisioning data through reporting to insights through analytics. A secure, reliable, well-architected analytics platform with rich visualizations and slice-and-dice functionality enables the democratization of talent insights. Instead of spending 90% of their time on compiling data and 10% on analysis and communication, teams are able to flip that ratio through adept use of the analytics infrastructure. The marginal cost of any analysis shrinks over time. Knowledge sharing platforms allows teams to accelerate and scale their work by leveraging the ideas and products of their colleagues across an analytics community of practice.

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 

By narrow domestic walls 

The many advantages of the archetypical “shared services” HR organization structure are sometimes diminished by “silo” organizations and mindsets. The largest divides can occur between the business unit (BU) HRBP organization and the COEs when the latter are perceived as not being able to address specific BU challenges (“we need to build our own capability”). Divides also occur between COE organizations (e.g., “this belongs here”) and between BU HRBP organizations (e.g., “our business is unique”). Arguably, everyone is trying to address their issues in the best way they know while controlling their destiny. People analytics offers a salve for such divides in at least two ways. First, by illuminating through analytics the objective, indisputable facts that can lead to a reasonable and stable (maybe even a Nash equilibrium) solution. Second, by offering an enterprise (i.e., the whole organization) view that reveals silo-orientation to be objectively counter-productive. In the People Analytics realm, analytics teams embedded in BU HR teams and COEs need to work together and not let reporting relationships and funding disparities interfere with the bigger picture for the company.

Where words come out from the depth of truth 

This phrase relates to using analytics to extract the true signal from the noise of excessive, potentially compromised and mixed type (structured and unstructured) data; competing analytical techniques; and feuding “political” rationalizations or explanations of the current state and ideal future states. Yes, there’s a lot of non-quantitative stuff afoot in the world of people analytics; what I like to call the politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) of it all. In particular, given the importance of employee voice and HR’s obligation to represent employees, the extraction of trueemployee sentiment, opinion and behavior through sensing mechanisms (surveys, polls, organizational network analysis, etc.) and its truthful representation are critically important for people analytics. There is a growing movement around “story telling” and how people insights need to be communicated through stories. However, the danger of story-telling is that it can end up becoming an editorial rather than an objective analysis. The “story” can be influenced by the story-teller’s biases, unconscious or otherwise. 

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection 

In the context of people analytics, this phrase is perhaps the exception that proves the rule in terms of the poem’s applicability to the field. One can’t argue against relentless effort and continuous improvement. These are patently good things and are to be encouraged. However, for early-stage people analytics teams, it is very much the case that “perfection is the enemy of the good.” Analysts typically want their work to be comprehensive and watertight and will invest lots of time and energy in dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. This can lead to overcomplicating things, missing deadlines and rendering policy implications unclear and unwieldy. Where people analytics is a relatively new function, it serves all stakeholders’ interests to secure some quick wins rather than boil the ocean to address a large and complex challenge as the first gambit. Once some inroads have been made in securing actionable insights, the team gains credibility and trust to tackle more complex issues.

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way 

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit 

Yes, this is the line illustrating the literary device of alliteration: repeating a sound in a series of words for emphasis. The envisioning of a “dreary desert sandof deadhabit” is automatically accentuated (see what I did there?). People analytics emerged recently in the practice of human resources just as evidence-based medicine arose earlier in the practice of medicine and changed it completely. It became increasingly clear that just doing what had been done in the past as a matter of ongoing practice was not good enough. Lives were being negatively affected or lost in the practice of “traditional medicine” that ignored recent scientific discoveries. Money was being left on the table and employee experience was suffering because HR followed traditional practices or adopted so-called “best practices” optimized for another organization. People analytics is the “clear stream of reason” that applies math and science to improve outcomes so that decision makers no longer need to rely exclusively on tradition or hunches. 

Where the mind is led forward by thee 

This speaks to the vital importance of leadership and management in advancing people analytics within an organization. Leadership produces change and movement through vision, strategy, alignment, inspiration and inclusiveness. Management produces order and consistency through organizing, planning, budgeting, staffing, coaching and problem solving. A successful people analytics leader needs to provide all this – and more – to build a team, engage stakeholders, secure funding, produce results and elevate HR. And they also need to be an expert in one or more fields of analytics – e.g., econometrics, psychometrics, artificial intelligence – as well as an adept technologist understanding data architecture, ETL (extract, transform, load) protocols ERPs (enterprise resource planning) and talent suite applications. A well-articulated mission statement is super helpful initially to rally people toward a vision. An example is “arm decision makers with data-driven insights through analytics to make the best decisions about people – individuals, teams and organizations.” 

Into ever-widening thought and action 

There are three important ideas embedded in this line that relate directly to the practice of people analytics. The first is the notion of “full information” or multi-variate analysis. For too long people-related analyses have been limited to one or two variables easily placed in a two-by-two matrix or graphed in two dimensions. This two-dimensional view misses out on the interaction of multiple factors. “Full information” refers to taking into consideration all the factors, quantitative and qualitative, that affect an outcome. Multi-variate analysis through various types of regression or non-parametric estimation methods allows for marginal and interaction effects to be identified. The second idea is the two-step path from data to insight and from insight to action. The data to insight is the easy part. The real challenge comes in driving action based on that insight. This is truly where we need HR leaders to lead with their head held high. The third idea is related to “ever-widening” in terms of scaling solutions built for one team or business unit to be useful for more teams and hopefully the entire enterprise.

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake 

This last line is a wonderful invocation as well as a call to arms. It has served me well in mobilizing teams as an HR executive and human capital consultant, but especially as a people analytics leader. I hope the poem has spoken to you as well and that it might be useful to you in your own people analytics journey. I’m sure that you will think of other deeper associations for yourself; I’d love to hear them.

Reach out to me if you would like to explore executive coaching to accelerate your success in people analytics. Incidentally, Tagore was a contemporary of the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and they met when Tagore visited Argentina in 1924. Borges’ short story “On Exactitude in Science” was the inspiration for my eponymous post offering guidance on model-building as a foundational skill for people analysts.