Reine Escalona

People who ask take the lead

As statisticians, we work in cross-functional teams, but many people, especially junior people prefer to follow rather than to lead – and that’s okay. Ask yourself:

Do you always take the position of the follower or a leader?
Do you need to train yourself to lead?
Are you seen as an implementer?
Do you have goals for your project?

You can lead as well. According to Forbes, the best leaders lead with questions, not answers. Leading with questions works because really good questions have a direct impact on the brain. When we are challenged by a question that triggers an insight, neurons connect in new ways. This releases neurotransmitters that create the motivation to act. The net result is that the other person not only likes the idea, but they also want to do something with it.

In today’s episode, Benjamin and I will be talking about:

A lot of statisticians, especially in pharmaceutical companies but also CROs, fear outsourcing because it might make their job redundant. Think about:

What can you do about it?
How can you add value to your organisation?
What would it cost to outsource your organisation?
If you would need to compete with other organisations, would you survive?
If you think of yourself as your own organisation – can you make yourself outsourcing proof?

In this episode, Benjamin and I will be talking about these tips and tricks:

Interview with Kat Greenbrook

Storytelling allows businesses to better understand insight.

Data visualization is a great tool to help share, or tell a story, but relies on the story being written first. Improved data communication comes from combining good visualization with a well-written narrative. 

At storytelling with data, the goal is to rid the world of ineffective graphs and help people elegantly communicate with data. They aim to bring data to life and use it to tell a story to an audience, with a focus on simplicity and ease of interpretation. They believe everyone can inspire positive change through the stories they tell with data.

Forbes also discussed the importance of telling a great data-driven story and gives a good example of how to do it. Telling a great data-driven story can be useful for both stakeholders and your customers and can drive better decision making within an organization and also drive conversions with your customers. By using data visualization to make key observations about your customers and their wants, it can help with lead generation and customer retention.

There’s a lot to learn to be a good data storyteller.

Today, I’m talking with Kat about:

There is an endless list of things that can go wrong in sponsor-CRO relations. I’m pretty sure you have been in painful discussions about this. Have you felt a lot of frustrations on both ends?

If yes, this episode is for you. We’re sharing interesting insights here as Benjamin works for a CRO and I work for the sponsor side. We will be giving you a lot of insights on what to do and what not to do, and how to make the collaboration between a sponsor and a CRO successful.

Specifically, Benjamin and I will be talking about:

The 2019 PSI Conference took place at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre (QEII), London, with the theme of “Data Driven Decision Making in Medical Research”.

The sessions included early phase innovative trial design, industry best practice, statistical issues in safety drug labelling, model-based dose-finding designs, an update from Transcelerate and much more.

In this series of interviews with the speakers at the conference, we talked about different topics:

Do you agree that everybody makes mistakes?
Have you had to deal with a mistake yourself, that you were really concerned about?
Were you afraid about speaking with your supervisor or your team with it?

We are all imperfect humans making mistakes. The questions are:

• how do we deal with them,
• what we can do about them, and
• what to do to minimize them.

Processes are made to minimize mistakes and there different processes were set up to deal with mistakes and help you when mistakes occur.

In this episode Benjamin and Alexander will be talking about: