 Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Executive Editor of DataVercity. We would like to thank you for joining this month's Salma to the Monthly Game International Webinar Series. This Webinar Series is designed to give our Enterprise Data World Conference attendees education year-round. This month, Alan Duncan will be discussing influencing with data. Facts don't matter much. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, he will be muted during the Webinar. For questions, we will be collecting them via the Q&A in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. Or if you like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag DEMA. If you'd like to chat with us or with each other, we certainly encourage you to do so. Just click the chat icon in the top right for that feature. And as always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days containing links to the slides, the recording of the session, and additional information requested throughout the Webinar. Now, let me formally introduce today's speaker, Alan D. Duncan. Alan is a Research Director for Gartner's Analysts and Business Intelligence Research Team. We're very excited to have him today. An evangelist for information and analytics as enablers of better business outcomes. He has over 23 years of international business experience working with blue chip companies in a range of industry sectors and was formerly Director of Data Governance at the University of New South Wales. Originally from Aberdeen in Scotland, Alan has worked extensively across the UK and Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. A popular and sought-provoking speaker and tutor on the International Conference Circuit, he has been recognized by InformationManagement.com as one of the top 12 data governance gurus you should follow on Twitter. And with that, I will turn over the presentation to Alan to get us started. Hello and welcome. Hello. Thank you. Hi there, folks. I was about to say good evening, but that's because I'm speaking to you from the UK. It's probably afternoon or even morning where you folks are. I hope you're having a good day. I'm delighted to be here for this webinar event to represent some of the point of view that we are collecting in our research at Gartner. Most of you will be, I guess, familiar with Gartner, but for those of you who may be a little less, so Gartner is the world's leading technology market analysis and research firm, providing research advisory services worldwide with over 1,000 research analysts covering every aspect of technology for business. And I am one of a team of about 40 analysts covering the market in respect to all things related to data analytics. The session we have for you today will not talk about technology much. I'm going to be looking much more at some of the human and behavioral aspects of how do we succeed using data and analytics to try and move forward the data-driven culture. And what I hope to show you over the next hour or so is that as we're trying to influence with data and analytics, the facts actually don't matter much, not at least until we've dealt with the human factors. So it would be nice to think that Carl Sagan had it right that we can all be rational creatures that thinking with our brain is the right thing to do and that not using our gut is the advisable approach because it's not really what it was designed for. But unfortunately, I'm not sure Carl was right. I'm not sure that we are actually rational creatures, and I think perhaps that Albert Einstein was closer in thinking that two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and then not being so sure about the universe. When we look at behavior of people every day, our colleagues, our friends, politicians, folks in social media, and not forgetting ourselves, we actually do things that ain't so smart. It takes a lot of energy to get to doing things in a rational way and sometimes we struggle. However, if we understand that and recognize the nature of folks in terms of the fact that they are actually emotional creatures before they are rational creatures, then we can start to think about how are we going to approach situations so that we can actually start to present the data and the evidence and the analytics in a slightly different way that gives us the opportunity to engage with people and then perhaps convince them. The first part of that is to prepare and make sure that we construct our argument in a way that connects emotionally with the stakeholders because unless we actually engage with them at an emotional level, they're not even going to be interested in the data, in the facts. So what can we do to make that emotional connection? Well, I guess we've got to help folks fall in love with us. We've got to think about what are we hoping to achieve, what are those people that we're engaging with hope to achieve and then try to find ways of connecting with those aspirations in such a way that they want to participate and that they feel good about what we're trying to bring to their attention. So we've got to consider what their values are. If these are really, really conservative folks, then presenting them with radical new ideas about engaging with different customer segments or bringing new products to market or offering new services isn't going to hit buttons for them. Conservative folks like things to stay as they are. If we're coming with radical options, that's going to scare them. Likewise, if we've got folks that are really enthusiastic, entrepreneurial, engaged, then coming with a risk-based story, one that concentrates on compliance, regulatory impacts and so on, risk mitigation isn't going to connect either. So we've got to think strongly about where our audience is coming from in terms of the things that they hold to be valuable, both at a business level and at a personal level. We've got to think about their belief systems. How do they approach things? How have they formed a view of where they fit within the world? If you've got a marketing director, they really, really think that they're the most important person in the company because they're the one that's influencing the way that the customers are interacting with us. Going to that marketing director and showing them information that shows that their approach has been flawed is going to challenge their sense of self, is going to challenge their beliefs about themselves, and that's not going to end well. If we've got folks that are highly religious, for example, bringing them information that actually challenges their view of the world in terms of how religion influences the choices they make in their lives, similarly, is not going to go far. So we've got to take those beliefs into account as well when we're starting to frame up the way that we want to engage. And we need to think about what outcomes folks want to achieve. What are the benefits, the value that we can deliver? And that comes in two flavors. We can present corporate benefits, the collective benefits, the outcomes that are in it for the organization and the whole. And unfortunately, even at that level, most organizations that Gartner comes across don't position their data and analytics in the point of view that presents where the benefits are expected to come from. In fact, our latest research shows that only 15% of data and analytics strategies have any form of identified business benefits stated within the data strategy. The data strategies that we see, what do we want to do and how do we want to deliver it? We're not asking and answering the question, why are we planning to do this? But even if we can articulate those collective ways, actually go and do things. What gets people up in the morning and motivated to act is what... because ultimately, we're all pretty self-creatures. So we're trying to change the way things operate by bringing that evidence into the scene. We're taking into account... Ellen, I need to interrupt you for a quick bit. Here, we're getting about every other word. We're starting to get some feedback there. That's okay. Can you hear me? If you speak a little more, let me... I'm not sure if it's coming through clear. Oh, no, I can't. We've lost time for just a moment. The challenge is of overseas. Ellen is speaking from the UK today. We'll get this Ellen back on and running for here in just a few minutes. Yes, cancer is the most common question there. We will be sending a follow-up email by end of day Thursday. Hi there. Sorry, Shannon. It's Ellen back. The line dropped out completely. So apologies for that. And hopefully we're now... Much better. Can you hear me better? Yeah, yeah. Very clear. There we go. Perfect. Thanks, Ellen. Apologies for that, everybody. So just framing up there the fact that we need to be able to look at not only the benefits to the organization or the benefits to the company, but also the benefits to the individual. Because it's the benefits to me as an individual that actually influence whether I will choose to act on the analysis, act on the data or not. So some examples here that help put that in a little bit more detail, perhaps. So if the benefit to the company is being able to increase revenue from sales penetration of new products, motivates the sales guys to actually do something is the prospect of being able to participate in the end-of-year sales incentive or winner circle. Project managers motivated not by just achieving on-time and on-budget, but that becomes a personal benefit in terms of getting promoters to a more senior job grade and so on. We can frame any organizational outcome in terms of the individual outcome that potentially acts as a motivator to the individual that we're dealing with. Now that means, of course, that we have to think very carefully about who our audience is. Ellen, I'm going to interrupt you again. We're running into all kinds of issues. I just lost you in your screen. Let me try resharing again. You're no longer... I'm afraid... I apologize, everyone. I don't know what I can do here. Share my screen. Monitor two. No, it's... I'm going to... I'm afraid you may need to log back into WebEx. You want me to log out and log back in again? Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, folks. I'm on today. Okay, I'm sorry, everybody. I'll do that. I'll drop off and I'll come straight back in, Shannon. And apologies to everybody for the technical glitch. No worries. Thanks. Be able to stay on the line, so at least everybody can hear me, yeah? Yeah, I can hear you, yeah. Okay, so I'll give this a try again. Well, you know, that sometimes works perfectly in rehearsal, but... What can you do? Yeah, you know, technology is great when it works. Okay, so if I... There, you have privileges again. Go with that. There we go. All right. Thank you, everybody. All right. Take three. Finger crossed. Okay. Having framed the idea that we need to identify the narrative and the outcomes that are appropriate for each individual stakeholder, I also want to raise the fact that one of the biggest inhibitors to having a productive conversation with folks is the fact that we say no all the time. So if there's any folks out there who are project managers or who deal with project managers, you'll typically hear, whenever you come with a new requirement, no, I can't do it. No, it's not in scope. No, we don't have budget. No, we don't have resources, et cetera. Yeah. And that really, really turns folk off when they're trying to engage with you. If we spin that around and instead say yes, and the impact is going to be more budget is required or yes, and the impact is going to be we need more resources. Yes. And the impact is going to be it'll take another three months. Then what we do is we give the requester more power, more influence on how they feel about what is important to them rather than taking power away. So when we are trying to engage and when we're trying to get people's participation, it's really, really important that when we frame up the requirements in a way that delivers on those business benefits at a corporate level and at a personal level, we also use the language of yes and... Alan, I'm so sorry. We lost your screen again. Can you reshare? I've got you still here. I don't know what's going on with them. It's seriously misbehaving. Oh, my. I really don't know what to say. Yeah, I still got you as presenter still, so that's good. I think, yeah, there we go. Back again? Yeah. Oh, boy. So don't say no, folks. You'll upset people. Say yes and... So that was sharing a little love when we're trying to engage with folk. The next thing that we need to think about is the fact that the way our brains are wired at the new psychological level or the neuroscience level kind of gets in the way of listening to the facts. So even if the narrative is good and we like the outcomes we're targeting, we don't like to think too hard. So we've got to push on and we've got to bring them in a way that bypasses the amygdala, which is the fear, fight, and flight response, which triggers about a thousand times faster than any other part of the brain. We've got to overcome that because if we don't recognize that the first brain activity is the amygdala, the fear response, then we don't get the opportunity to engage the more intellectual part of the brain. To cut that all short, we've got to make folks feel safe. So we position things in a way that are non-threatening. We don't come with just the blunt facts. We've got to do some work to think about what threats folks are going to experience, how they might feel about things and where their fears might lie and frame the discussion presenting the information that we want to present them in a way that doesn't trigger that amygdala response, doesn't trigger that fear, fight, and flight response. If only at that point we get to have the opportunity to have the discussion about what are the information telling us how do we approach this at a more rational level and can we start to make some decisions. So some examples of that, presenting the facts and data in a feel safe manner, the blunt statement might be that, hey, the sales figures are down by 20% from last quarter. When you present that in that form, that bluntly to the sales director, what he or she hears subconsciously is you're not doing good enough job in managing the sales pipeline. That's a threat. So we have to position the discussion in a way that bypasses the threat response along the lines of, hey, can you help me understand what these sales figures means? What could we do about this and how can I help you? Non-threatening, feel safe. One, you can see the examples here on the screen and I'm sure you can imagine situations in your own environments where the data, the analytics you've performed kind of indicate that something different needs to be done, presenting the facts in a blunt manner is going to upset folks and actually make them resistant to the change that you want to bring. So go back to your own situations and think about how you can structure the way you engage with folks in a less fronting manner and make them feel safe. Now this sounds like a lot of work, right? And I'm afraid to say it is, but if we want to have influence, if we want to have effect, then we've kind of got to do the thinking on behalf of our audience and take them where we want them to go. That's what influencing is about. It's not just about being the data factory and presenting the content and saying, hey, now your job, if we actually want to influence with those analytics, we've got to work out what the narrative is that connects to what the folks want to do and make sure that they don't feel threatened in the way. Now going a stage further, we actually have a whole bunch of brain functions in terms of cognitive biases that get in the way of us being able to deal with the truth. Our brain has been programmed over years to be done. We have a whole range of presumptions of predispositions that get in the way of our ability to deal with the facts. And if we come with facts that challenge those mental models, we actually feel bad about ourselves in terms of our sense of identity. So when we're presenting difficult information, difficult data that goes against the current point of view, we've got them real hard work to do. And folks will resist what you're telling them even if the benefits of the change we want to make are in their own best interests. So some examples of that, the Chevy Cobalt incident where Chevrolet ignored for almost 10 years the fact that they had faulty ignition switches in their Cobalt motor cars. For 10 years they ignored that data. They suppressed it. They just couldn't get on with the fact that this was a problem because of the potential impact they thought to their reputation, the cost of recall. Unfortunately, in leaving it for 10 years, 124 folks died as a result of these faulty Chevrolet cars. Class action lawsuit for hundreds of millions of dollars together with having to go and recall 30 million cars. If they had confronted the facts early enough and recognized that there was a problem here that they needed to deal with early, they would have avoided a huge situation. Folks down in North Carolina where the climate forecasts are predicting that there's going to be significant coastal erosion. Now that clearly is a benefit to folks in terms of warning them what's coming so that they can start to take action. But the community in North Carolina has actually tried to get the climate forecast suppressed because it's having an impact on house prices. We've got the situation coming almost U.S. wide now where there is a resurgence in preventable diseases because of the misinformation around vaccinations and the mistaken belief that there is a connection between vaccine and autism. Indeed, the only report that drew that conclusion by British doctor Andrew Wakefield has been completely discredited and he has been shown in court to be a liar and a charlatan and a fraud yet the misinformation persists around vaccinations because it's an easier thing to look for in terms of the causes of autism. It's a seductive lie. And so on, misinformation on AIDS programs in South Africa is indeed in almost any situation. Nine out of ten executives will ignore the data if it contradicts their current existing point of view. So what all this means is that we are trying to influence with analytics and influence with data we've got a huge amount of work to do to overcome all those biases that get in the way. And here I'm just presenting a list of potential cognitive biases, the model that forms in the brain in terms of the way that somebody will approach a situation and some examples of how we can overcome those biases by approaching the presentation of information in a particular way. We don't have time here today to go through these in detail but of course as Shannon is saying we'll be sending out the pack or the links to the pack later so you'll be able to pick these up and examine them after the fact. The final thing I want to talk about today is the fact that really we as data professionals and as analytics professionals needs to be taking the lead in bringing more critical thinking in bringing more skeptical scrutiny to the way that our organisations operate. In some respects we are the coach in data-driven thinking we've got to go beyond just presenting the data and saying there it is, it's your choice now we've actually got to really bring an attitude that is introducing and coaching and enabling and facilitating more critical thinking into our organisations. We've got to watch out for a few traps. I've started out today by talking about appealing to folks emotions and actually thinking about their emotional response as a means of getting their attention and a means of getting their engagement. However, if we're trying to bring particular information to the organisation we've got to be careful that our audience isn't refuting our ideas using an emotional engagement approach as their counter argument. So let's be careful that folks aren't using that emotional response to counter the way that they're receiving what we're presenting to them. There's the burden of proof challenge that when you go to someone and you say that they are wrong they'll immediately flip that back on you and say you've got to prove that they are wrong rather than them saying that they have to prove that they are right. So this is where, for example, the folks who struggle with evolution would use the burden of proof, fallacy, to say, hey, I'm sure in my non-belief of evolution it's up to you to prove that evolution exists rather than presenting evidence and information that proves it doesn't. So let's watch out for the burden of proof, fallacy. And the last bastion of someone who is losing an argument, the ad hominem attack. So there are no facts, there are no details, there's no other way of engaging to counteract your argument. So they start to attack you as an individual, they start to attack your credibility as a person, not actually anything to do with the topic at hand. And we see this one an awful lot in politics where it's the character of the opponent that is attacked rather than what the opponent is actually saying. So let's be aware of the fact that folks will use these kind of fallacious arguments in trying to refute what we are presenting and we've got to watch out for those and then be in a position to counter them if they appear. And again, a range of other fallacies here, what impact they can have in terms of misdirecting the discussion and some examples of how we can manage the discussion in a way that presents the data to overcome those logical fallacies. Like I said earlier, we're really championing the need for critical thinking within our organizations. We're bringing together the skills and the facilitation to have a different sort of conversation based around thinking clearly, trying to bring some rationality on the situation, like bringing the facts, but also being reflective and looking at the situation and looking to see where new information is coming to light that maybe needs to change the way we think. So critical thinking is about bypassing or overcoming entrenched views, looking for connections between ideas, being able to understand and construct good arguments that are fact-based, but that also engage with the stakeholder points of view. Identifying where there are challenges to not just the reasoning of our audience, but our own reasoning and what can we do to overcome that. Systematic approach to problem-solving, understand the materiality and importance of ideas. This is a really, really big one. I see a lot of organizations, for example, arguing about the fact that the sales director's situation says we've sold $100,000 worth of products this month, and the finance director saying, oh, no, you've only sold $98,000 worth of products this month. And then we get into an argument about trying to reconcile why there's a $2,000 difference between the sales director's point of view and the finance director's point of view. That $2,000 discrepancy may not be material, though, if you then compare the fact that six months ago, we were selling $150,000 worth of products. It's up to us as the critical thinkers to call out things like, is there actually a material difference here in terms of the decision we're trying to take and what's actually important in terms of the things that we need to act upon. We can be the arbiter and the broker and the facilitator of bringing some of that relevance to bear so that we're not just focusing on the details, but we're actually focusing on the right parts of the details. And I guess, finally, critical thinking means that we've got to be absolutely ready to challenge ourselves. If somebody brings additional data to the table that changes the position that we've taken up to now, then we've got to be pragmatic enough to be able to recognize that and adapt accordingly. So there is no room for dogma here. If we are really trying to influence with data and analytics, then we've got to make sure that we apply that to our own situations first and foremost before we ask it of other people. The last thing I'm going to suggest is that all of this wraps up in our ability to tell stories. And if we learn to tell more effective stories that engage the audience, then that's really what makes information stick and gets folks on board to actually do something about it. So here we've got a billboard in Times Square for Inception, the Christopher Nolan film. That film cost $100 million to make and it was all about the idea of implanting ideas in the people's subconscious, using a machine to do so so that we can tap into people's dreams at various levels of subconscious and then being able to plant ideas that we can then take advantage of later. Telling stories does the same thing, but it does it for free. Stories are important for two reasons. The first is that if we create the narrative, then what that does is it creates a framework in our audience's brain for us to then hang our information from. Effectively, we're constructing the foundations that our stakeholders can then tap into. So a good story builds that narrative that allows us to connect with the underlying data. The second thing that a good story does is that it engages emotionally again with our audience and makes them feel the things we want them to feel, whether that's joy or fear or hope. But a story connects emotionally and it's the connecting emotionally that then embeds the information that we're trying to convey into our mental model. And I just ask you all for a moment to think about some of the most vivid memories that you have from any time in your life. What has cemented those memories in your mind is the fact that there was an emotional response at the time. So whether that's the joy of your first child, whether that's the happiness you felt when you got married or the joy you felt when you got divorced, your first promotion, graduating from university, all of these different events that you remember most vividly will have had some kind of emotional response and that's what has cemented that thought, that memory and all of the information associated with that memory in your mind. So just to cement the idea of storytelling and the power of storytelling to embed ideas in our brain, what I'm going to say to you is that forevermore, whenever you hear about the idea of storytelling, the idea of using stories to engage an audience in your subconscious, the idea of storytelling will come back to this webinar and the fact that you had a Scottish guy talking to you about storytelling and that subconscious memory will trigger in each and every one of your minds every time the idea of storytelling now comes up. I am now going to be stuck and embedded in your subconscious memories for the rest of your lives so I hope you enjoy that little gift. All of this comes together in terms of leading transformation, leading change, leading the way that we get success from our data and analytics initiatives and our research shows that it is, in order to be successful with transformations, 60% of our efforts, the budget, the work being involved, the time needs to be spent on change activities and managing the change process, managing the engagement, dealing with communication and so on. 60% and unfortunately, all too many projects and programs fall far short of that and that's, I guess, why we see so many technical projects struggling to realize the value and outcomes that they're seeking. So in summary, emotional connection, tugging on the heartstrings, helping folks to love us is absolutely vital as a first step to ensure that they start to want to engage. We've got to be careful to position our language and the way that we are framing our dialogue to bypass the amygdala, bypass the fear, fight, and flight response and allow us to engage with the more intellectual parts of the brain. We are the champions of critical thinking. Our role is to ensure that we facilitate good discussions, good interactions that allow us to bring more critical thinking to ourselves and to our colleagues and the storytelling and building narratives around the data that we have and the analysis that we've done is the way to make those connections and get folks on board with what we've got to offer. For those of you who are Gartner clients, there are a number of research papers that you may find of value in terms of following up with further detail on this whole topic of engagement and influencing. For those of you who are not Gartner clients and indeed anyone else, I've got some recommended reading here that all these books are available from your local online book retailer of choice. And again, you may find these helpful in following up and framing up some of these ideas in ways that become useful to you. With that, I'll turn back to Shannon and say I hope that's been helpful to everybody. And if there are any questions or things that folks want to say, then I'd be delighted to take some of those from you. Ellen, thank you so much for this great presentation, and you are. The Scottish Voice is embedded in my brain now for storytelling. I love it. You know, the most popular question we always get is people inquiring about the slides and the recording. Just a reminder, I will be setting up a follow-up email within two business days, so by end of day Thursday with links to both and anything else requested. And the first question coming in, Ellen, a question from Barry in IBM. Do you have any insight on what these mean for organizational structure? Who owns analytics? Who delivers insight? Who is best placed to drive any data-driven transformation given what you've outlined? That's a really, really good question. And I guess you can probably infer from a lot of what I said that actually organizational structure doesn't really help you. Because this is not about having big power, big budgets, it's not about who reports to whom. It's much, much more about the way that we engage to have an influence. So if we look at our research, then what we're seeing is that certainly the pervasiveness and data and analytics is becoming more and more prevalent. That we're seeing, I guess, a democratization of the use of these kind of capabilities in terms of doing the analysis out in lines of business. The IT department's role, the traditional IT department's role, is somewhat diminished as we go forward. But you know what I would say is that that actually doesn't matter. Because what's important is the capability to ingest, understand, decide upon the data that we have and then take action at a business level. And to me it doesn't really matter where that happens in the organization as long as it's happening. So what we're talking about here is not a hierarchical or organizational construct. It's about capability. And I think that's the thing to look for here is do the capabilities to pull data together, to do analysis, and then to present that information in an engaging way that actually stimulates folks to do something different. That's what's important. Love it, sure. The next question coming in is if you get these recommendations wrong, is it recoverable or not? Can there be successes over with someone using these guidance or is the bridge burned? Well, I guess like any form of relationship, you know, it's much, much easier to destroy trust than to gain it. I don't think anything is ever irrecoverable. But if you've created a situation where you've rubbed somebody up the wrong way, that becomes harder to recover. So I guess there is always, and I guess this is why I frame up this whole session on influencing in the way that I do, because what I'm trying to get us all to think about is what's the impact going to be on the audience and how are the audience thinking and feeling before I go to them so that I've got a fighting chance of framing up the discussions that I want to have with them in a way that brings them into the discussion. You know, if you turn folks off, it's a long way back. And I do see a lot of folks and I don't know how many of the balance of folks out there today, but a lot of technology-oriented folks and a numerate kind of folks, the guys who are comfortable in a quantified type role, the statisticians and so on, they don't take into account the emotional side of telling the story. It can all be a little bit blunt. And that's probably why we sometimes struggle to see technology projects proceed, is because the technical folks and the analytical folks haven't taken into account the human factors. Very nice. Everyone's quiet right now. There's no additional questions coming in. I'll give everyone just a quick moment. Ellen in the rehearsal, you and I were talking about an article that Gartner put out very relevant and points to even further research. Go ahead and send that over to me. We'll get that out to everyone as well. We love as much, or I know our audience loves as much resources as possible in diving into the education of these things. Again, I don't see anything else coming in. Everyone's very quiet today. Very unusual for our audience. I appreciate you. I'm sorry for the technical difficulties today. I'm not sure what's going on. Okay. But, oh, here we have one coming in. How do you deal with people that attack the person instead of the facts? Well, the Scottish approach would be to invite them out to the car park for a fight. That's probably not going to be a winning position in the long term, though it might be tempting at times. I think my advice there would be to start out by trying to diffuse the whole discussion and say something along the lines of hey, if you don't feel like talking about this right now, let's leave it to later. If we buy folks a bit of time to calm down, then that's an immediate way of at least allowing us to regroup. I think we then want to look and say, I understand how you feel about me or I understand how you feel about the situation, but let's then say, okay, can we look at the information we've got and what does that tell us? I think trying to take head on and add hominem type attack where they're attacking you as an individual rather than what you've got to say, it's always going to escalate quite quickly. I think diffuse it as you can, which might even mean a tactical withdrawal and then coming back and saying, okay, for sure. You've got to have a thick skin and if somebody wants to get emotional at you in an attacking way, remain in calm and understanding that the reason they're doing that is because they are scared, you know, is part to play here. Once you've, again, made them feel safe, then we can start to reposition the discussion around the data and around the facts again. Sure, that actually makes a lot of sense and certainly a good practice. You know, in the modern world where enterprises are scattered around the world, those virtual environments, how do you tell a good story if people are in different locations, especially when the stakeholders are not in the same physical location? It's, again, a really, really great question and I think it's not even just about same physical location, it might be just how do you tell a story to two different departments that have got different points of view and it comes all the way back to understanding who your stakeholders are. I see a lot of attempts to try and position a decision or position some fact-finding and try and have a view that says one story fits everybody and actually if you go all the way back to the questions about how do we engage to get folks to love us, then the motivations that folks have, the outcomes that they desire, both at a team or organizational level and at a personal level are actually very different or can be. So what we've got to do here is actually recognize that there are different points of view. Teams and individuals with different motivations, maybe different speeds of adoption and we've got to tailor our message, tailor our thinking, tailor the story for that audience. If I can use an analogy for a moment, if I'm trying to read a bedtime story to my 14-year-old son, I'll tell a very different story to the story that I'll read to my 12-year-old daughter but the ambition is the same, to get them both off, settled for the night to shut up and go to sleep. So we've got our outcomes that we want. The audience has different outcomes that they want. We've got to find a narrative that connects with each individual audience on a tailored basis rather than trying to present a homogenous view, one-size-fits-all view and expect everybody to get on board. Sure, and this next question, kind of goes back to that rebuilding of trust but from a slightly different angle, how do you try to influence someone with data who already have their minds set negatively due to being burnt financially from a similar endeavor? Maybe it's not you per se who lost the trust but somebody, some other experience that person has. Yeah, and I guess that goes into the whole questions of nine out of ten executives will ignore the data if it contradicts their current point of view. Yeah, the phrase that's going around the internet and Facebook at the moment, you know, haters are gonna hate. At some point, I think you have to recognize that there's a degree of realism involved as well and sometimes you've got somebody who's just not interested and are never going to be. So you've got one of two options there, I think. Certainly, there's no point in wasting your time and energy on trying to bring those folks with you when they're just never going to come. So rather than trying to find a way of convincing them if you've made that assessment, there's only, I think, two options now available to you. Either you can try to quarantine them in some way, get them away from the initiative that you're trying to run and find a place for them that diminishes their negative influence or if you're in a position to do so, you actually get them out of the organization altogether. Now, I know sometimes that's difficult and it depends on whether it's a unionized environment, how the culture is as to whether that's seen to be acceptable or not. But, you know, if you've got a bad apple, then the negative influence that they can have can be very, very overwhelming and very, very quickly. So rather than trying to spend too much money, so too much time and effort and your own emotional engagement, trying to bring, you know, the haters with you, then sometimes it's, I think, more, you know, discretion being the better part of valor is to kind of, like I say, either quarantine them or get them all, you know, get them out altogether. Now, that's easy to say, you know, sometimes harder to do, but if at least we understand that, then we've got a fighting chance. I'll give you a quote here from a chap called Scott Stratton. Now, don't try to win over the haters. You're not the jackass whisperer. I think sometimes it's good advice. I think that's great advice. I think we have time here for one last question. Any suggestions on how to pull together the one-off success stories into some coherent plan that gets the attention of some of the suits? Are situations the flat-out distrust of anything smelling of data governance, data stewardship, automated data quality? Okay. Cool. So this is an interesting one because, again, we have a lot of conversations with our clients around the questions of data governance and our data quality and so on. And I think data quality and data governance professionals often come at it from a point of view of thinking about control. This data for the sake of the data. What have we got? How do we deliver it? And that's not really the mindset that the suits have. They're not interested in how we do stuff. They're not interested in the disciplines. What they want to see are business outcomes. So in terms of collecting the stories, the stories are not going to be about how do we do data governance? How do we organize? What policies do we need? Those are all enabling factors for sure. But the stories to get folks on board are going to be about here's an extra 20% in margin that we made through identifying more clearly who our key customers are. Here's 10% of savings that we made in the supply chain by knowing more about which products and services were actually costing us money and so on. Now, you can collect those success stories at a business value level in one or two ways. There will be success stories from inside the organization. We identified where there were data quality issues that were preventing us delivering to customers in a timely manner. We addressed those and the upshot was 5% better customer attention and so on. Sometimes you can use external case studies, the war stories of what other organizations have done, either in your industry if those exist, or things that have enough connection from a parallel industry to also be relevant. I think it's a combination of the stories and narratives, the benefit case from internal examples and external that can kind of grease the wheels of the conversation. And in terms of creating internal studies, internal examples, don't wait to be asked. Get a hold of your data, kickstart something, a bit of skunk work if necessary, and I know the folks out there who are coming from a governance point of view will almost say, Alan, that's a heresy. You can't be serious to encourage us to be doing skunk works. Where's the control? Well, sometimes we need to sacrifice control for the sake of engagement and the sake of time to value and the sake of benefit. Control discipline can come after the fact once we've got some momentum. So engage with the stakeholders, engage with enthusiasts, and start engaging with getting some value out of your data. That then buys you the time and the reputation to then start to optimize and get organized. Alan, thank you so much for this great presentation today and for the Q&A. I'm afraid that's all we have time for. However, just to remind everyone again, I will be posting the recording of the webinar on the slides to DataRocie.net within two business days, and I will send a follow-up email to let you know the links and the additional information requested throughout. Alan, again, thank you so much, especially being in the UK and thanks to all of our attendees for being so engaged in everything we do. We just really appreciate your engagement with our webinars and I hope everyone has a day. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for your time and I hope and trust that that will help you going back to your own situations. Have a great day. Cheers.