How often do you encounter leaders who are more inclined to make decisions based on instinct rather than data? What's your go-to approach for getting these leaders more comfortable with shifting to data-driven decision making?

When presenting a report to top management, simplicity matters a lot. I've seen that many reports going to the top management are pretty complex. In my opinion, your report should be so simple that anybody in the organization should be able to understand it. If the presentation is not good or simple, people will not be ready to accept it.

I always like using analogies. When dealing with a difficult person, I use the ESSOP fable. E is for empathy, S is for sharing successes, 2nd S for support, O is for providing support and observation, and P is for passion. It's really important to understand where they're coming from, give them the support they need, allow them to learn at their own pace, observe how they are reacting to whatever you're doing, and be passionate about what they're passionate about.

I don't think this has been as big of an issue lately. Ten years ago, data science was just starting to become popular and people weren't really doing cloud compute or machine learning on a regular basis, so it was much more difficult to prove out the need. When I was experiencing those challenges, it was more about approaching it with humility and intellectual curiosity. You have to have a use case or something where you can show them how this data could help them. If you show them that you're passionate about what they're passionate about and you approach it with a sense of humility, you'll get much better adoption.

I've found that a lot of it is about building relationships. In my organization, we're about helping people when they're in hard spaces. We're driven by a bigger mission and we build a lot of relationships along the way. We have to be sensitive to the specific reactions of different people. People have different insecurities and goals, so we have to try to understand what they need from us to be able to understand or adopt data-driven decision making without feeling threatened. We offer training on this subject for leaders and executives, and we also try to guide them on how to read and interpret data. We try to be sensitive to their specific needs and help them understand how data could help them.