How I Learnt The Importance Of Language Skills

Craig Rude, Chief Data Officer, ALSOWISE^®, reflects:

When I first started my career as a data scientist, I was naïve enough to believe that everyone in business would make decisions based upon what was in the best interest (within ethical boundaries) of the bottom line, and that empirical data would cause all parties to quickly coalesce behind the best-known solution.

I was sorely mistaken.

I quickly realised that everyone came to the table with their own set of assumptions, preconceived notions and business goals – things that are at times in direct conflict with making the best financial decision for the business.

I recall one instance where I joined a product team that was tasked with managing sales growth for a profitable product.  In order to make the team members responsible for marketing expenditure, they were informed that they would receive additional incentives if they could reduce the average cost of customer acquisition. Until that time, the marketing team believed that any lead was fair game, and that the more responsive the potential customer turned out to be, the better the quality of the lead.  To this end, the data scientists that had preceded me had created a lead generating model based entirely upon the expected response rate of a marketing campaign.

When I was assigned to the project, I started to look at the problem through a different lens: I wanted to select leads based upon expected profitability.  I realised that some customers, though highly responsive, would generate little to no profit while other customers, with far lower response rates (sometimes less that half the average recorded response rate) would be 20-35 times more profitable.  Thus, it was apparent to me that eliminating the non-profitable leads and focusing on the highly profitable leads would improve the bottom line by over 50%.

After sharing these facts with the team, I was surprised by the amount of resistance that I faced while trying to implement the new proposal.  It took well over three months of constant communication with senior managers in order to convince them to try the new concept.  But things did not end there. Even when the results started trickling in and profitability improved consistently for over six months, I still had to spend considerable time constantly convincing the marketing team not to go back to the old strategy.

All to no avail.

After 18 months, in which profits grew at a consistent pace, a new marketing head took over who, after weighing all the evidence and the emotions around him, chose to revert to the old strategy.

This was a failure not of logical reasoning, but of communication skills. It was an abject lesson that taught me three important aspects of workplace dynamics:

• Persuasion is the outcome of patient dialogue rather than a monologue of indisputable facts
• Successful collaboration never results from the cooperation of experts working in silos, but from the consensus of equals working in teams
• A well-crafted and credible story is far more effective in the final stages of negotiation than any data-driven analysis

This is how I realised that those who ignore the power of the written and spoken word do so at their own peril. Everything else being equal, it is language that makes us succeed. Nothing else.