Hugely important insight here for analysts and data scientists. It isn't enough to know the right answer: you have to persuade people to pay attention to it...
https://twitter.com/kurtstat/status/1625798624427888640
This is a big problem since the group of people who have the insights (the analysts) are often the least effective at persuading decision makers to pay attention and actually make different decisions...
Analysts are often introverts and often focus on the art of analysis (getting the right answer) rather than the much wider job of persuading the people in power to make the right decisions...
The skill set required to persuade is very different to the skill set required to do analysis. But to achieve significant improvement, both are needed...
Nightingale's contemporary, the great John Snow (the father of epidemiology, not the GoT character) also knew this, luckily for the population of cities as he led to the elimination of cholera epidemics...
Current analysts need to learn the skills of persuasion if they are to have any impact on the world. Fixing the NHS isn't just about knowing the right answers, it is about persuading people to pay attention to them...
Interestingly, one of Nightingale's key skills was #dataviz. She knew that pictures were often far more persuasive than numbers and deployed very original visualisations in her campaigns to persuade the powerful to change policy...
Modern analysts frequently undervalue the importance of #dataviz . "I've got the right numbers, why waste effort on pictures" they seem to assume...
But, as Nightingale realised, a persuasive graphic is vital. In my experience designing that picture requires even more effort than getting the right numbers...
But the overall message is that learning #dataviz and the arts of persuasion should be more than half the job of all analysts if they really want to change the world...
Knowing the right answer is useless if nobody pays attention to it.
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