Episode 64: Stop Being a Data Waiter and Start Stakeholder Whispering
Download MP3Doctor. And welcome to Value Driven Data Science, the podcast that helps data scientists transform their technical expertise into tangible business value, career autonomy and financial reward. I'm Doctor Genevieve Hayes and today I'm joined by Bill Shander. Bill is the founder of Beehive Media, a data visualisation and information design consultancy. He is also a keynote speaker and teaches workshops on data storytelling, information design, data visualisation and data analytics.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:In this episode you'll learn powerful techniques from Bill's new book, Stakeholder Whispering, to separate what your stakeholders truly need from what they ask for and transform you from a technical order taker to a strategic partner who creates genuine business value. So get ready to boost your impact, earn what you're worth, and rewrite your career algorithm. Bill, welcome to the show.
Bill Shander:Thank you very much, Genevieve. I'm really happy to be here.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Many years ago when I was first getting started as a data scientist, I would go around to all my stakeholders and ask them if there was anything I could do to help. If they said yes, I'd then take copious notes of exactly what it was they wanted, much like a waitress in a restaurant, and then I'd go away and try to fill their order. But no matter how hard I tried or how detailed my notes were, in many cases when I returned with the solution, my stakeholders would take one look at my work and then announce that what I'd done was completely wrong. Turned out that what they said they wanted and what they really needed were two very different things. Now this is a scenario that just about every data scientist has faced and it can be incredibly frustrating if you're trying to get ahead with your career.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Because when stakeholders struggle to articulate their true desires, it's very difficult to create results that deliver tangible business value. And this is a problem, Bill, that you set out to address in your new book, Stakeholder Whispering. Mhmm. Now your own background is in data visualization. I'm guessing that the scenario I just described is one that you'd have also experienced in your own career.
Bill Shander:Yes, 100%. And I love the metaphor, by the way, it is like ordering at a restaurant and you're trying to be a dutiful waitress and provide what they ask for. And yeah, that is 100% the wrong way to go, we now know. Yeah in my career it happens all the time and I can even go before I was in data visualization I used to design websites okay so if we go back far enough and the classic example in the design world is this client says, oh, this website looks great, but can you make the button bigger? Make it blue.
Bill Shander:And so you make a bigger blue button and then they're like, oh, I don't like that. Can you try red? And you did this like six times. You're finally like, oh wait wait what are you trying to actually do why do you want me to make the button big and blue or red or whatever but we just want the button to be noticeable so people click on it more. So that's what you actually need you need a button that captures the attention and entices people to click.
Bill Shander:Okay, let me try to solve that problem. So it's a very common issue in designers know this, but most people in other fields or other roles, maybe they don't. So I knew that this was a valuable lesson to bring beyond the design roles. And really, honestly, a lot of designers don't even really know it as well as they should either.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Was there a pivotal moment when that disconnect between what stakeholders ask for and what they need suddenly hit you? Or was it something that slowly dawned on you over time?
Bill Shander:I guess I'll say it sort of quickly dawned on me over time in that I learned it pretty early in my career. But, you know, it's funny. I've thought about doing a book for many years, and it was always going to be, should I do a data visualization book? And the answer was always, no, I don't want to do that. There are enough of those out there.
Bill Shander:But then it was like a moment where I was like, yes, stakeholder whispering. That's what the book needs to be about, because nobody talks about this. People don't give talks at conferences about it, there aren't that many books about it. If you're in like project management, sure, they talk about stakeholder engagement and things like this, but for most normal knowledge workers, it's just sort of the unspoken problem. So that came fairly quickly to me in a stroke of madness, I guess, maybe not genius.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:For me, it was something that slowly dawned on me. So as I mentioned in the intro, I experienced several situations where I was going about doing exactly what my stakeholders had asked me to do and then I'd come back and they were unhappy. And I just didn't understand. And initially I just thought it was a them problem And I thought, it's just that person. And that person is just never happy with what they want.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:And after about the third or fourth time, you know, I have this principle that I work by. If it happens once and someone doesn't like something or doesn't understand it, it's a them problem. If it happens three or four times, it's probably a me problem. And Right. Yeah, after that third or fourth time, it's like, okay there's probably something I'm doing wrong here.
Bill Shander:Yeah and I wouldn't even necessarily you know beat ourselves up about it it's not that something you're even doing wrong per se but there is an opportunity there and there is this this possibility of finding the true need, and listen, like you said, everybody's gone through this, it happens to literally everybody all the time, it's far from rare, and therefore it's the norm, right? It's literally people ask for stuff, you do it, you tweak it, you iterate it, and maybe by the sixth or seventh go, it's what they actually needed. And so stakeholder whispering will just reduce that time to get to the actual solution, reduce budgets, and all the rest of it. But, you know, it's so common that we can't beat ourselves up. It's really just like we can get a step ahead of it by taking a new point of view on the work that we do.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Why do stakeholders or people in general find it so difficult to communicate their actual needs?
Bill Shander:So what I would argue, and I do argue this in the book, is that it's not even that they have trouble articulating their needs. They don't know what their needs are. And so this comes from human psychology. A simple example in our world is I have data, I guess I need a dashboard, data dashboard, data dashboard. It's like this automated response.
Bill Shander:It's like this subconscious need, we think that we must make a dashboard. And that may be what we need, but of course, what goes on the dashboard and how it works, etcetera, is a longer conversation. But that automated, assumptive response is part of the problem. I literally don't know that maybe instead of a dashboard, maybe what I really need is a PowerPoint presentation or this, or the other. On top of that, especially for data scientists, okay, all right, I did think it through and I don't really need a dashboard, I need a presentation or whatever it is.
Bill Shander:Okay, I know I need, it's about a problem in my company around HR. So maybe it's a retention issue in my company. Okay, so I go to the data scientist and I say, hey, give me all the data on HR. Woah, what do you mean by all the, give me, I want data on retention, give me like the last ten years of retention data. And of course data scientists are gonna be like, well, that's very vague, I don't even know what you're asking me for.
Bill Shander:And in that case, it's not just the automated response, it's also, they don't know data, they don't know statistics, they don't know what data scientists can really do, they don't understand necessarily the details and the nuance of what is possible to do with that data. And so they're phrasing things in terms of, I know I need data about retention, because I know that's a problem I'm trying to solve, but they don't know how to articulate the request, because they don't understand what you do all the time. And even if you have a manager who is a former data scientist, okay, they know the technical issues, they know the statistics and all the rest of it, but maybe they get sort of hung up on their new role in management and sort of forget how to think like a data scientist. That's less often the case of the three issues automated response not understanding how to do what you're doing and then a former person who actually does know that's the least problematic in this particular context but even those kinds of people they run into issues with?
Dr Genevieve Hayes:I think subconsciously, you know, we talk about the data scientists behaving like a waitress taking orders in a restaurant, but I think the stakeholders, because we as data scientists present ourselves as being like order takers in a restaurant, the stakeholders come to believe that they should be ordering off this subconscious menu. So they know that dashboard is a menu item. So they go to the data science waiter or waitress and say, I would like a dashboard with a side dish of fries or whatever.
Bill Shander:Yeah. Yeah. %. I mean, it's literally they they are. They're they're the data scientist restaurant, and those are the five things available to them.
Bill Shander:So that that's definitely what they order. I couldn't agree more.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Yeah. And they've always had their dashboard or whatever, so they just order more of the same just with different numbers on it.
Bill Shander:Yeah. For sure.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I understand why they've got this problem, but even when I first recognised that that disconnect existed between what people ask for and what they really need, That was great, but I still didn't know what to do about it. And I suspect this is a challenge that many of our listeners also face.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:So in my case, I just started asking more questions. Your book promises to show people how to uncover what people need before doing what they ask. Could you walk us through your approach to translating stakeholder requests into underlying needs?
Bill Shander:Yeah. Well, it's funny. You essentially just described it, and it is about asking questions. And and the the the question I always get from my students when I'm teaching them data visualization, data storytelling, or I'm talking about stakeholder whispering or anything, is always like, yeah, but how? How do I convince my boss to let me do it this way?
Bill Shander:How do I actually do this thing when you're talking about stakeholder whispering? And the answer is ridiculously simple, but it's also highly nuanced. So yes, it is ask a lot of questions. All right, well, of course I know that I'm not an idiot. I knew I should ask questions like, who's the audience for this maybe dashboard thing that you've said I should maybe do?
Bill Shander:What do they need to do with this data? And the obvious questions that we know to ask when we get to sort of level two of this experience, when we acknowledge that we have to do this. But the asking questions methodology that I talk about is built on a lot of research that I did about the Socratic method and various other things. One of the most fascinating things that I found out about the Socratic method, teachers and therapists by the way, I talk about therapy in the book quite a bit, they use the Socratic method because when you ask questions you will learn the answer. So it's a method for you to learn stuff, sure, that's obvious, but guess what, when you are asking your stakeholder questions, the more important thing that's happening, or at least equally as important, is their learning.
Bill Shander:The Socratic method, what Socrates used to do is he would teach his students by asking them a million questions, and they would have to come up with the answers themselves. So stakeholder whispering is not finding out what your stakeholders need by asking them, and they'll tell you, you'll learn. It's the opposite, or it's at least both of those things. In other words, you're guiding your stakeholder, helping them figure out what they need in the process of asking them questions. So the example, stakeholder says I have a bunch of data, give me the data on HR retention blah blah blah and you say, why do you need retention data?
Bill Shander:Well we're having this problem with retention and you know with last six months people are leaving like crazy they hate it here. Okay and so you want the retention data to figure out what? Well one try to find out why it's happening. Oh why do you think it's happening? What are the issues at stake?
Bill Shander:Are there any hypotheses? Well yes it might be this, it might be this, it might be this, but it could also be that. You know, never really thought about, and so that magic moment, when they say, oh, I, you know, your questions prompted me to think about this in a way a little bit more deeper than I had before. I never thought about it that way. Suddenly now that's the state that Socrates called aporia, a state of puzzlement, it's a Greek word.
Bill Shander:That moment of, wait a second, yeah yeah yeah, the questions are helping me actually realize what I need from you. Now they can start to articulate the need themselves and or you can help do it with them as a collaborative effort, etcetera. But the key of that questioning session is not just you ask questions to get the answers, it's really to guide them to discover for themselves what they actually need.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:I think one of the things that always worried me when I started going down that path is that the person would end up feeling like they were being cross examined if I started asking question after question. How do you avoid that?
Bill Shander:You know I think I have a personality, I'm just lucky I guess, that I am a genuinely curious person and when I ask people these questions I know it doesn't come across as accusing or cross examination, etc. It comes across like, oh, tell me understand, like, you know, why are we trying to do this? And have you ever thought about doing it this way? And I think it's about tone, and it's about believing honestly in myself. They're not the enemy, my stakeholder, they can be annoying sometimes some stakeholders, but for the most part I love my clients and my stakeholders and when I'm asking them these questions I genuinely want to find out the answer and I want to help them get to the answer and that authenticity and that genuine respect and care for the project that we're working on together comes through, because I feel it.
Bill Shander:Now, if you don't really feel that way about your stakeholders, or if you're just annoyed by everything that's happening, you can't really disguise that. So it certainly helps to genuinely like what you do and like your stakeholders and really want to solve problems with them.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Yeah. So if you're bored and are just going through the motions, then they'll pick up on that vibe and it's not gonna end well.
Bill Shander:No. Absolutely. Like any other conversation. Right? You can't fake it your way through it.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Yeah. Are there any specific questions you've found to be particularly effective at uncovering stakeholders' true needs?
Bill Shander:So one of the techniques, probably the most important technique that I talk about in the book is something I call the dance of the six w's. You know, I went to journalism school, so journalists are taught to incorporate the six Ws into every article you write, and not just put them in there, but put them as close to the beginning of the article as possible. And the six Ws are who, what, when, where, why, and how. How is an honorary W word. And so the magic of that is not asking those questions because of course you're going ask those questions.
Bill Shander:When do you need this by Thursday? You know, why? Well, because they have done it. But the magic is some of those questions are convergent questions when Thursday converging on a very quick and easy answer some of the questions are divergent questions Why? Oh, why?
Bill Shander:Well, we could talk for an hour about why, right? So the magic of this method is bouncing back and forth between the divergent and the convergent questions. We know from like brainstorming research, that brainstorming sessions are really good when you have people who have divergent thoughts and ideas, divergent thinkers who can just keep coming up with creative ideas and brainstorming session can go on for eighteen hours with those kinds of people. But you also need in the room people who are more convergent in their style. In other words, they're the ones who get those people who are like all off in the clouds to finally start making some decisions that get to the actual thing we should do, not all just endless new ideas.
Bill Shander:It's the mixing of the two that makes a good brainstorming session work, and it's the same idea in a conversation like this. Easy questions like when, okay, I can answer that easily. Well now let's go into the more airy, fairy, cloudy, you know, up in the clouds questions like why? And you sort of get them to go back and forth, creates sort of moments of slight imbalance, but also it's the opportunity to get to that state of Aporia again, because a why, this is the third time you've asked me a why oriented question and I'm suddenly thinking, yeah, I don't know why I need to do it this way. Let me think about that it is like therapy let me think about that I may cry for a little bit but then eventually you come to an answer and now you've come back to okay that's the actual need.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Have you read the book Never Split the Difference? I can't remember the author's name. It's written by a former FBI negotiator, and it's about negotiating. And one of the things that the author says in it is never ask questions that begin with why because that can come across as being accusative. You know like why did you take that Tim Tam or why did you leave the gate open or whatever and so ever since I read that I've tried to avoid asking questions beginning with why and have just tried to rephrase them as, you know, what made you come to that realization?
Dr Genevieve Hayes:100%.
Bill Shander:Yeah. I I totally agree. And it's funny. I'm developing a keynote talk about stakeholder whispering, which I delivered for the first time last week twice, and in it when I describe the dance of the six Ws, the next slide says underlying all of this conversation is an infinite endless why, but why can be a hostile question. Like the boss says, give me a dashboard, you can't just say why, because that is very hard to hear.
Bill Shander:And so this technique gets you to all those other ways of saying why without saying why, but occasionally you can actually ask why, like okay, I need the HR data, you're not going to say why, but you're going to say, well, what are you trying to do with that HR data? Well, we're trying to solve this problem with the retention. How do you think this data is going to help you do that? Why do you think it is that people are leaving on Thursdays more than Tuesdays? Okay.
Bill Shander:You know, so you can use why, but not, yes, in that hostile way where it can put someone back and make them defensive.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Ever since reading that, every time I write why in an email, I stop. Yeah. And then I think, okay. How can I rewrite this? And every time I rewrite it, it does come out a lot better and a lot less open to misinterpretation.
Bill Shander:That's great. Yeah. It's a tough question. It really is.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Now the other problem that I can imagine arising if you go down this questioning approach is some stakeholders just want to be able to give their orders at the McDonald's drive through window and don't want to have to be asked why they want that dashboard. What do you do if you've got a stakeholder like that?
Bill Shander:So I talk a little bit about the kinds of trouble you're going to run into in the book, you know, the kinds of people who are more resistant to this technique than others. And I talk about some of the ways to solve it, although most of that is really comes down to, I think the phrase that I use in the book quoting somebody else is you can't reason with an irrational person. Some people will not be whisperable. Some people are yeah just do what I said, and you know in that case get a new boss. Like long term that probably maybe isn't the place you want to work.
Bill Shander:At the same time I do talk about influence without authority. There's a lot of research into persuasion and influence and how you can get people to engage with you, especially if you're a junior, right, you're like a young data scientist, you're new to the field, even getting this person to sit down with you in the first place, never mind actually having a good conversation with them, requires that they trust you, requires that you're able to persuade them that this is worth doing. And so I do talk a little bit about how to do that. But yeah, there are some people you won't be able to convince, and that's just the wall you learn not to hit your head against. I've had plenty of clients who are unwhisperable, but I've had way more who were open to having these conversations.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:I've had an absurd number of bosses because there was a period of time I went through where I basically had a new boss every four to six months because they were restructuring like crazy in one of the organizations I was in. And one thing I found was some people are really open to whispering as you would put it. Some people just won't listen to anything but there was also a third category of people that they were not bad people they were open to conversations but they just didn't have time so they were willing to have these conversations but they were so senior that they were constantly in meetings so the conversations with the data scientists just kept getting pushed aside because they had to meet with the CEO, for example.
Bill Shander:Yeah.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:What do you do when you've got someone who's not a bad person, but just doesn't have the time for this?
Bill Shander:Yeah. Know, there's a couple of answers. One is I've done many projects, and like you, you've had a million bosses. I've had a million bosses even though I'm self employed because I have clients, and so I'm constantly getting new clients. I've experienced so many people in this type of dynamic over the years, and so I've witnessed a lot of a lot of different personality types in a lot of different situations.
Bill Shander:And I'd say the two primary lessons here is number one, whispering by proxy doesn't really work, but it's better than not whispering at all. So if that super senior executive has some underling or somebody who's involved in the process who you do have access to and more time with, it'll never replace speaking directly to the source, but it's better than not talking to anybody at all. So that's one thing that's I would recommend that you do, even though I will say you can't really do it that well. And the second thing is that when you know you're gonna have limited time, but you can get a little bit of time, it's harder for sure, but you can at least do the best you can to pre prepare, I guess, for those conversations. Like, you know, we're doing this HR retention data thing.
Bill Shander:I've talked to the proxy enough to sort of know the bigger issues at hand, and I know I got to get the answers to these three questions, right? I got to get this person thinking about this one thing in this ten minutes that they've given me. And that may not be, again, a perfect situation, but it's going be better than not doing it at all.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Yes. This reminded me of a PhD supervisor I had many, many years ago, and he was never in his office, and it was almost impossible to track him down. But I knew he had lectures on, I think it was Tuesdays and Thursdays that ended at, let's say 03:00 and he would be walking from the lecture theater to his office immediately after them, I would actually stalk the band and basically make sure that I was there when he made that walk from the lecture theater to his office and that was when I would rapidly ask him questions.
Bill Shander:That's funny. I wonder if he ever picked up on it, he kept saying, Genevieve, on that path, that one spot every time.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Amazing coincidence. Yeah. So what's the single most important change our listeners could make tomorrow to become better stakeholder whisperers?
Bill Shander:I mean, honestly, I think the number one thing is to acknowledge that this has to happen. You know, if you're a waiter taking orders, that's fine. Like, if you're comfortable with being a waiter taking orders, then be a waiter and take orders. And all right, that's that's fine. But if you want to do interesting work and really solve problems and do amazing things and advance your career, then you have to acknowledge that your stakeholders don't always know what they need.
Bill Shander:And the only way to figure it out, to help them figure it out, is to have these conversations with them. And if you do that, then everything's gonna be better. It really will.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Yeah. And that's one of the things they're looking for when they're looking for people to promote to management. It's not being an order taker. It's being the doctor who prescribes the solution.
Bill Shander:Yeah. And the other term that's used all the time is critical thinking. That's what this is all about. It's all about critical thinking and how to apply that in the situation. So, yeah, it's key for your career.
Bill Shander:It's key for the success of your organization.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:So for listeners who wanna get in contact with you, Bill, what can they do?
Bill Shander:Best bet is I can always be found on my website, which is BillShander.com. And, of course, I'm also on LinkedIn where you can find me under my name.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:And where can they get stakeholder whispering?
Bill Shander:So it'll be available in I guess the phrase is everywhere you buy your books today. So I know it's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and various other online outlets. I'm sure it's gonna be available in independent, bookstores as well.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Yeah. I can tell you it's available on Amazon Australia. So if you're in Australia, you can get it there.
Bill Shander:Great.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:And there you have it. Another value packed episode to help turn your data skills into serious clout, cash, and career freedom. If you enjoyed this episode, why not make it a double? Next week, catch Bill's Value Boost, a five minute episode where he shares one powerful tip for getting real results real fast. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:Thanks for joining me today, Bill.
Bill Shander:Thank you very much. This is a lot of fun.
Dr Genevieve Hayes:And for those in the audience, thanks for listening. I'm Doctor. Genevieve Hayes, and this has been Value Driven Data Science.
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