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Archives for January 2021

5 steps to present successfully to upper management about complex stats (and everything else)!

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Should we oversimplify statistics, or should managers learn more about statistics?

If you’ve been working as a statistician for a while, you know that you have to keep it simple if you want managers to understand you. Of course, I speak about those managers not being statisticians themselves.

There are a lot of ways to explain statistical concepts to them, but this adds time to the presentation. Sometimes there won’t even be a presentation, and all you have is sending the report via email.

From reading, from my experience, and from talking to other experienced statisticians, I have distilled the knowledge about this challenge into 5 steps.

Listen to this episode and learn about the 5 steps to present successfully to your upper management:

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Do you want to think and act more strategically?

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Interview with Swarna Khare

Outside of statistics departments, we are often seen as tactical and operational implementers. This branding makes it hard for statisticians to be included in strategic discussions. This limits our ability to influence the organizations and projects. It can even lead to entire departments being outsourced or not appropriately funded because of this terrible reputation. I’m long on a journey to fight against this branding. This journey also requires us statisticians to learn about thinking and acting strategically.

Thus, I’m thrilled to talk with Swarna Khare about this topic. Swarna is a long-term listener of the effective statistician and today, it is a great opportunity for her to share with us the ways to think and act more strategic.

We answer the following important points:

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How to best visualize uncertainty

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Interview with Paolo Eusebi

Our job as statisticians focuses primarily on the analysis and communication of uncertainty in its many aspects. For this episode, I think of uncertainty as the variability in the population we are studying, the uncertainty around estimates, or the model uncertainty, which we might capture via looking into various models.

Interestingly, the visualization of uncertainty – one of the primary forms we use to communicate it – is a rather unknown field. In this episode, I’m very excited to speak with Paolo Eusebi, who has done research in this field to answer the following questions:

  • What can we learn from examples outside of medical research? How is it explained to the general public?
  • What’s the current status in medical research?
  • How can we become better in communication of uncertainty?
  • What are further excellent resources regarding the display uncertainty?

Listen to this episode and learn more:

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What you should know about change management

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Interview with Beth Manning

What is change management? Is it only something for big corporate initiatives or does it also apply to smaller changes?
Why does it require so much consideration?
What’s hard about change?

Change management is something I never thought about being interesting for statisticians, but recently, I needed to dive in to this frequently. I learned that this helps me when creating new designs or processes as it answers lots of questions about getting from an idea to an implementation.

So today, I’m glad I have a great colleague with me who is an expert on change management and has helped me a lot to drive changes within a big organization.

Listen to this episode and learn the following points:

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