Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organization?
One of the most valuable skills I learned during my career is how to communicate complicated concepts in a way that prioritizes listener comprehension and drives impactful decision-making. When I was working on Wall Street and learning tons of new and complicated concepts, I used to call my mother in the evening and try to explain to her what I had learned that day. My reasoning was that if I could explain to my mother why mortgages had negative convexity, then I truly understood it myself. This skill has been immensely valuable as my career has continued in the data and analytics space.
It is unfair to expect people with very different backgrounds to all speak the same language of data; quite the contrary – those of us in this space must translate our findings into the end–user’s language to push them towards the optimal data–driven solution.
At the end of the day, nobody cares how accurate or complicated your model is if you cannot push adoption of the results. The art of communication becomes the key agent that allows for the marriage of quantitative and qualitative decision-making in the business world.