Value Driven Data Science: Boost your impact. Earn what you’re worth. Rewrite your career algorithm.

[00:00:00] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Hello 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. I'm Dr. Genevieve Hayes, and today I'm joined by Dr. Russell Walker. Russ is the principal consultant at Walker Associates, which specializes in data science, education and healthcare analytics.
[00:00:28] And he previously served as a professor at DRE University where he co-founded the University's business intelligence and analytics program. He holds a PhD in business administration. With a specialty in computer science. In this episode, you'll discover how to transform technical results into persuasive business narratives that executives can't ignore.
[00:00:54] Using battle tested frameworks from competitive debating. So get ready to boost your impact, earn what you're worth, and rewrite your career algorithm. Russ, welcome to the show.
[00:01:06] Dr Russell Walker: Thanks, Genevieve. It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
[00:01:10] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Data, storytelling and communication have become buzzwords in our field. In fact, I've spoken to multiple guests about these topics on this show. If you can't effectively communicate the results of your analysis to stakeholders, then you might as well have not bothered to do the work at all.
[00:01:28] It's like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest. If no one knows about your insights, did they really matter? But there's a crucial difference between simply communicating results and persuading decision makers to act while data storytelling might make your findings memorable. Persuasion is what gets your recommendations implemented.
[00:01:50] Now, Russ persuasion is something that you teach to your data science students and clients. When you talk about persuasion, what exactly do you mean? I.
[00:01:59] Dr Russell Walker: Basically persuasion means influence. It's presenting your ideas in the best light so that your audience can really hear, understand. And then use them appropriately in making decisions. It really is fundamentally good communication, but it's communication that's designed to lead to action rather than simply informing.
[00:02:22] Although really I had a debate coach who said, all human communication is in a way persuasion, because at a minimum you're trying to persuade people to. Pay attention to you. If you're not being persuasive, then you're really not even making it into the audience's mindset.
[00:02:41] Dr Genevieve Hayes: I think one of the problems with persuasion though. Is that thanks to aggressive salespeople and manipulative politicians, persuasion often gets a bad rap. Many see it as synonymous with manipulation or trickery. For example. When I first learned about persuasive language in high school, it was in the context of propaganda when we were studying animal farm in English.
[00:03:05] So because of that persuasion always had a lot of negative connotations for me. How do you distinguish persuasion from manipulation?
[00:03:13] Dr Russell Walker: Yes. Marketers and politicians who really have a lot to answer for yeah, to use a Star Wars analogy, since I assume we're all nerds here. You know, there's a dark side and a light side to the force. So manipulation is kind of the dark side of persuasion. The difference to me is with manipulation or unethical persuasion.
[00:03:34] You are trying to short circuit the audience's critical thinking process. That's the territory of, taking data out of context or deliberately presenting a graph in a distorting or misleading way. Using emotionally loaded language. Those kinds of things. Ethical persuasion is really, you're trying to.
[00:03:55] Augment your audience's decision making process, not circumvent it, right? You're just trying to make sure that they properly consider what you're trying to tell them and that it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. That's the real difference.
[00:04:09] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And I think from the receiving end, the difference is with ethical persuasion, you feel happy at the end, whereas with unethical persuasion, you wanna go off and have a shower.
[00:04:21] Dr Russell Walker: Yes, that's a very good way of thinking about it. And there is some ethical judgment that's needed, but, putting yourself in the position of the listener and saying, how would I feel? If I were receiving this communication is a great way to make those judgements.
[00:04:38] Dr Genevieve Hayes: What we're talking about in today's episode is ethical persuasion.
[00:04:42] Dr Russell Walker: Absolutely. We're not gonna go to the dark side,
[00:04:46] Dr Genevieve Hayes: so what are some of the biggest mistakes you've observed data scientists make when trying to persuade people to act on their findings?
[00:04:55] Dr Russell Walker: Probably the big one is not having a balance of the different rhetorical elements in persuasion. There was a guy named Aristotle you might have heard of him a few thousand years ago. Who said that there's three basic modes of persuasion. He called them logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos is what we all love to talk about as data scientists and data analysts, right?
[00:05:19] Logic facts. That's the data. Ethos is things that speak to your credibility or your authority. And pathos is the human element, the emotional element whether things kind of resonate with the audience on a human level, probably. Most data science presentations that I've heard, and especially those from fairly new data scientists who haven't kinda learned the ropes yet by, painful experience are about, 98, 90 9% logos.
[00:05:49] It's all about, here's the data, here's all the gory details of how I analyze the data. All that stuff. You need that, but you need more of a balance. You need to bring in. Some element of your ethos that shows credibility and that can be your personal qualifications. It can be the things that you did in your analysis to ensure that you got a quality result or to double check the result.
[00:06:16] And then you've gotta have that pathos, that human element so that it resonates with people on an emotional level because decision makers at the end of the day, really make decisions emotionally. And so you want more of a balance of maybe, 60, 20, 20 logos, ethos, pathos versus, the skewing toward all the data all the time that a lot of people tend to do.
[00:06:39] I.
[00:06:39] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Very interesting 'cause now I'm thinking back at the presentations that I've given earlier in my career and I can see myself making those same mistakes as well. Ethos wasn't something I had a problem with due to the PhD. That pretty much gives you the authority straight away.
[00:06:56] Dr Russell Walker: That's built in ethos, right?
[00:06:57] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah.
[00:06:58] Dr Russell Walker: Hard one.
[00:06:59] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah, and the logos part, that was easy. But I don't think I've actually used too much of the pathos elements in my presentations in the past. I.
[00:07:10] Dr Russell Walker: That's an easy one to overlook and it's almost really trained out of us in the academic process because we're taught not to make things. Personal in academic writing and speaking. And so that's a big leap to make when you go over to the business side and you really have to communicate at least somewhat on that human level.
[00:07:31] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah. Can you give us an example of what that might look like, I'm struggling to imagine this right now.
[00:07:38] Dr Russell Walker: Sure. Let's say that you're doing an analysis. On say your. Customer service responsiveness, and you've got a statistic that says that median time to wait for an answer when somebody calls the customer service line is 30 minutes. Now you can present that as a dry statistic. Or you can, and this is where we can kind of bring in some of the data storytelling aspect, but make it personal,
[00:08:11] you can tell a little story about. You know, John a typical customer who called and had an urgent question that he needed answered, and he's sitting on hold listening to our absolutely splendiferous hold music for half an hour. How is John gonna feel about that? How did you feel? The last time that you called the customer service line and had to wait for 30 minutes, you were probably about ready to, throw your phone against the wall.
[00:08:39] That's all you need to bring in. Make that emotional connection with, how does this make you feel versus just presenting the dry statistic.
[00:08:49] Dr Genevieve Hayes: That's actually what they say about writing on LinkedIn. If you wanna get a point across, tell a story. And from my observations, if you tell a story in a post, it gets exponentially larger numbers of likes than if you just say straight facts.
[00:09:05] Dr Russell Walker: Exactly. And many of the principles in writing a good LinkedIn post or, getting engagement through any kind of media are the same as you can use in a data science presentation. You just have to adapt those to the audience and the situation that you're presenting in.
[00:09:23] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah. And that's the thing. I know how to write in these two different sets of circumstances. It just never occurred to me to take what I'd learned from LinkedIn writing and apply it to business writing.
[00:09:33] Dr Russell Walker: Yeah. Most of us know how to communicate human to human in some situations. But we just don't. Do that, we don't automatically cross over to using those human skills in a different situation. And I started out compartmentalizing that, as an undergraduate I was a technical physics, computer science major.
[00:09:54] And then I spent a lot of time over in the speech and theater department doing competitive debate. And I really compartmentalize those two. Worlds in my mind. And in fact my advisor as an undergrad kind of said, how come you're spending so much time over with those, squishy speech and theater people,
[00:10:12] you should be spending more time doing hard science. And then when I got into business situations and I was just doing technical communication to my bosses and I saw their eyes glazing over. I said, wait a minute. Maybe I could draw on some of the things that I learned as a public speaker and a debater to get more attention and be more persuasive.
[00:10:37] And once I started doing that I really started having more success and having more influence, having my ideas, listened to and adopted more often.
[00:10:45] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Okay, so you've mentioned this idea of using pathos, logos, and ethos together. What are some of the other frameworks that you used in order to make your communications more persuasive?
[00:10:59] Dr Russell Walker: There's a standard framework in policy debate that establishes what we call the stock issues that you really have to address in any. Presentation. And I think they work well for data science. If you interpret them in a data context. The first one is harm. And in this context that's the business problem that you're trying to solve.
[00:11:22] And how you define that is gonna depend on your audience. I've worked with healthcare organizations a lot, and there's always a. Medical side of the house and business, financial side of the house. So to the medical side of the house, I might state a harm, as patient hospitalizations have gone up by 20% and it's obvious to those folks that that's a harm.
[00:11:45] If I'm talking to the financial side of the house. I might state that same harm as our expenses for hospitalizations have gone up 20%. Because that's the way that they're gonna view the harm. But you've always gotta lead with the harm or the problem that you're trying to solve. You've got to address is the harm significant?
[00:12:05] And this is where you quantify the harm and you put it into context. So you've gotta show that that's having a material impact on something that your business leaders care about. A tricky one is what we call in debate ancy. And that basically means the problem's not gonna fix itself. So this is where you've really got to dig into the root cause of the problem.
[00:12:30] And identify, what's creating this issue and that it's not going to go away unless we do something about it. And then finally, you've gotta have what we call a debate solvency, which is you need to have a plan or a recommendation for how to fix the problem. And you've got to connect the dots for your audience as to exactly how following your recommendation is going to fix, or at least mitigate.
[00:13:00] The harm that you identified. So that kind of loops it back to the beginning as to we started out with, here's this big hairy harm. Now we're going to show you how to fix that. And that's a pattern that you can use very effectively to make a persuasive data presentation.
[00:13:19] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Oh wow. So we've just had an election in Australia and I've just, heard a lot of politicians doing policy debates and talking about their policies. You've just made it transparent to me exactly what they were doing.
[00:13:33] Dr Russell Walker: Yeah, it's, you know, when, when you dress it up. And the rhetorical flourishes. You can't always see the skeleton underneath, but that if people are doing the right thing in any kind of a policy debate that's the bones that are underlying what they're doing.
[00:13:49] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And you can see very clearly how you can use this if you're communicating your data science results. Start with the business problem, quantify the business problem, which any data scientist should be able to do.
[00:14:01] Dr Russell Walker: Right. I.
[00:14:01] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And put it in context, which means put it in business terms. So dollars and cents,
[00:14:06] Dr Russell Walker: Right,
[00:14:07] Dr Genevieve Hayes: identify the root cause, which is what your data science analysis should be able to do.
[00:14:13] Dr Russell Walker: right.
[00:14:14] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And then you have your plan to fix it, which will be, use this model or do the action that is implied by the analysis. And this will lead to dollar amount reduction in harm and the problem will reduce or go away.
[00:14:34] Dr Russell Walker: You've got it exactly.
[00:14:36] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah. And you can literally use that for every single data science presentation you have.
[00:14:40] Dr Russell Walker: Right. It's a very flexible, adaptable framework. And if you've done debate for years, then it becomes almost instinctive to use that. If you haven't, then you have to kind of force yourself to walk through the points until it does become natural to structure your communications in that way.
[00:15:00] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And when you pair this with the logos, ethos, pathos framework, you can see how they interes because, leading with harm, that'd be a perfect place to put in the pathos.
[00:15:12] Dr Russell Walker: Exactly. Typically you can use pathos at the very beginning to make a human connection to the harm. How does the harm make you feel? And then you can use pathos at the end. When you get your audience to envision how much better they're going to feel once the problem is solved or reduced.
[00:15:31] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Ah, and then you go to logos in the middle.
[00:15:33] Dr Russell Walker: That's right. Logos in the middle. The things that you talk about as you're establishing the significance and the root cause. You are establishing that you have the authority and credibility, if you've been able to quantify the problem, you've done the things necessary to do the root cause analysis, then you are leading your audience to believe that you have the credibility to propose a solution that's going to work.
[00:15:57] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So even if you don't happen to have a PhD, if you can demonstrate the credibility of your analysis and that you know what you're doing with your analysis, that should be enough to. Establish the ethos element.
[00:16:10] Dr Russell Walker: Yes.
[00:16:11] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Okay, so debating's usually done verbally. You don't see too many written debates. So I would imagine these techniques would've been originally designed for verbal communication.
[00:16:24] How would they change if you were to apply them to written communications such as reports?
[00:16:30] Dr Russell Walker: Great question. It's actually considerably more challenging to use this for me at least. Right. I've always found it more challenging to use it in a written format because you can't. Read the room. You don't have the nonverbal element to the communication. You can't be interactive and so you can't be responding to what your audience is doing or how they're reacting to you, but you can still use the same basic structure.
[00:16:57] Always lead with the harm, the significance, the inherency. The recommendation and how it's gonna solve the problem. You can still incorporate your logos, ur ethos, and pathos. One tip on incorporating ethos in a written presentation is pay attention to the formatting and the appearance of the document that you're creating.
[00:17:19] Because if you've got a professional looking written report or slide deck, that goes a long way toward establishing your. Ethos, your credibility, if you've got typos, if you've got sloppy formatting, if you're cramming, 27 different things onto one page that detracts from your ethos because it just doesn't look like an expert professional document in a written report.
[00:17:44] Always have an executive summary and make sure that it covers the harm, the recommendation. And the solution all in a very brief format right at the top. Something that I see people doing a lot unfortunately, is writing an executive summary. Like it's just an introduction and they don't cover all those main points, but that may be all of your written document that a busy executive is ever gonna see.
[00:18:12] And so you've really got to establish all those main points. Write up in the executive summary, and then if you've engaged them enough with that, then hopefully they'll still go on and dig into more of the details in the document. And your headlines have a lot to do with. Being persuasive in a written document again, because somebody scanning the document is probably just gonna see the headlines and not necessarily read all the text.
[00:18:41] And so you want to make strong, conclusive, persuasive statements in the headings of each section and then provide the details and qualifications in. The text below that. But I think as data scientists, we sometimes tend to over qualify things or put in too many caveats, this might under certain circumstances be a problem.
[00:19:06] And you don't wanna go beyond what the data actually shows you, but you also don't wanna over qualify and be so. Squishy in your language that you don't convince anybody. So you need to kind of lead with as strong a statement as the data actually supports. And then maybe provide, some qualifying details elsewhere if you really need to do that.
[00:19:32] But make sure that you are making appropriately strong, persuasive statements in your headings so that people will actually be convinced.
[00:19:43] Dr Genevieve Hayes: With the headings, I can understand how you can use persuasive headings in, say, a PowerPoint deck because that was one of the things that I was taught. Don't just have generic headings like introduction, analysis, et cetera. Have headings that are sort of like newspaper headlines for the content of each slide.
[00:20:05] Dr Russell Walker: Right.
[00:20:06] Dr Genevieve Hayes: But. With a lot of reports I've written, there's been a standard organizational format, so we have had to have headlines like executive summary, introduction, discussion, conclusion, et cetera.
[00:20:22] What do you do if you're forced into a format like that?
[00:20:25] Dr Russell Walker: If you are forced into using a standard format with fixed headings then at least you can make the first sentence under each of those headings be a strong statement of your thesis or the overall conclusion that you want people to get out of that. Section it's not as good as being able to put it in the heading itself.
[00:20:51] But the worst thing to do is to bury the lead and have the main point be at the bottom of four or five paragraphs of small text, so at least move that strong statement up to the top if you can't actually get it into the heading itself.
[00:21:09] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So. If there's something like, my brilliant solution can save us a hundred million dollars. Put that as the first sentence. Yeah,
[00:21:18] Dr Russell Walker: And maybe see what you can get away with in terms of, tweaking that standard format a little bit too.
[00:21:24] Dr Genevieve Hayes: yeah. Possibly have subheadings. Under the standard headings.
[00:21:28] Dr Russell Walker: Yes, yes.
[00:21:30] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Can you give us some examples of some persuasive headlines that you've used in your work?
[00:21:35] Dr Russell Walker: Sure. For an analysis of how patients react after getting a bone density measurement for osteoporosis I used a headline, bone density measurements, increased patient follow up by X percent. Because I knew that one of the primary goals of the organization that I was working with was to have more patients follow up and get treated for potential osteoporosis.
[00:22:01] When I was responsible for an organization's phone system and was dealing with a significant number of dropped calls and long customer wait times I headed a report reconfiguring phone system. Can reduce customer wait time by 15 minutes. So it's all about understanding what the goals of the organization or the goals of your audience are, and then putting those goals into strongly worded headline to show what your solution is and how it impacts the goals.
[00:22:38] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So if our listeners want to immediately improve their persuasive impact, what's one specific communication adjustment they should make tomorrow?
[00:22:46] Dr Russell Walker: Do something at the beginning of every presentation to show your audience that you understand their pain. Put something in there that conceptualizes, even if it's just restating to them something that they've told you already, if they believe you understand their problem, then they're already halfway to being persuaded that you can help them fix it.
[00:23:07] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So for listeners who wanna get in contact with you, Russ, what can they do?
[00:23:11] Dr Russell Walker: They can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Russell E. Walker, PhD, two Ss and two Ls in Russell. Or they can check my website@russellwalker.com. And feel free to reach out if you've got a healthcare related data science problem or if you're interested in how to communicate and persuade more effectively with data.
[00:23:32] 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 Russ's value boost, a five minute episode where he shares one powerful tip for getting real results real fast.
[00:23:54] Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it. Thanks for joining me today, Russ,
[00:23:59] Dr Russell Walker: It was a pleasure.
[00:24:01] Dr Genevieve Hayes: and for those in the audience, thanks for listening. I'm Dr. Genevieve Hayes, and this has been Value-Driven Data Science.