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What are we asking the questions for? This link gives you access to all the articles and archives for </Hello CDO> This article unpacks questions and framing as I tend to focus on the conflicts, tensions, and compromises that face any CDO in the first 100 days — ranging from the effects of a poor job description to how a company’s culture means that data-led decisions are not decisions. I love this TED talk from Dana Kanze at LSE.  Dana’s talk builds on the research of Tory Higgins who is credited with creating the social theory “ Regulatory Focus ”  This is a good summary if you have not run into it before. Essentially the idea behind “Regulatory Focus” is to explore motivations and routes to getting the outcome you want. The context in this article is to explore how a framed approach to questions creates biased outcomes. One framing in Regulatory Focus centres on a “Promotion Focus” which looks for “ gain ” which can be translated as finding or seeking hope, adva...

The last article was about being railroaded in the first 100 days, recognising that you are forced into a decision.  In this one I wanted to unpack that “data” shows that using science in an argument (say to defend against railroading) just makes the members of the team more partisan (aligned to their own confirmation bias and opinions).  As the #CDO, your job is to use data and science, therefore in the first 100 days, with this insight, you are more likely to lose more people than win friends, lose more arguments than win and create bigger hurdles?   What I suggest, based on this work is that to overcome “proof by science” is to use curiosity to bring us together. Image source: from a good article by Douglas Longenecker --- Dan Kahan , a Yale behavioural economist, has spent the last decade studying whether the use of reason aggravates or reduces “partisan” beliefs. His research papers are here . His research shows that aggravation and alienation easily win, irrespec...

Whilst our ongoing agile iteration into information beings is never-ending, there are the first 100 days. But what to focus on? Well, that rose-tinted period of conflicting optimisation is what </Hello, CDO!> is all about. Maintaining sanity when all else has been lost to untested data assumptions is a different problem entirely. On Day zero of being a #CDO, you have to be ready and prepared as a translator, interpreter and go-between. Yes, the essential “translation” of business needs into information requires identifying the appropriate data, the relevant analysis, and the correct interpretations, but that is not what I am talking about. There is a different translation to the appropriately modelled, described and analysed, data that offers the language to enable siloed departments in organisations to talk to each other. The CDO must have translation skills to help other executives talk about what data means to them and that each party leaves with a common understanding. Excep...

In commercial land, the axis of power has tended to rest with the CEO/ CFO relationship.   There is always a myriad of other political triangles that lobby and wrestle for power and sway decisions.  Given that decisions are increasingly reliant on evidence which is data, the CDO gets dragged into everyone's battles, which are not always in the best interest of the business, customer, ecosystem or society - such are incentive scheme. Everyone else in the senior team does not want to recognise is that the data they use as evidence and proof is equally supportive or detrimental to everyone else's cause.  Whilst everyone else on the leadership team gets to pick and bias what they foreground and promote, the CDO has to keep their mind open and judge all data with the same level of critical thinking.  This tends to mean the CDO becomes the punch bag when data either supports or otherwise a decision, which in reality is a political lobby for power which the data may not fu...