Beyond logic – how to convince others of your ideas

Transcript

Beyond logic – how to convince others of your ideas

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You are listening to the Effective Statistician Podcast, the weekly podcast with Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Piske designed to help you reach your potential, lead great science, and serve patients while having a great work life balance.

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Welcome to a new episode of The Effective Statistician.

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Today I wanna talk about how you can convince others, and that builds really on the episode of last Friday where we talked about increasing your influence.

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If you haven’t listened to that one, scroll back.

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I mentioned, for example, trust and a couple of other things.

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Now, if you wanna persuade someone, that is not really a new problem.

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And already in ancient Greece Philosophers have thought about this, and they came up with three things that are important if you wanna persuade someone.

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And, yes, the first one is Logos.

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Logic, data, facts, logical arguments.

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And as a decision, data scientist, or any other quantitative scientist, we are very, very good on that.

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We have studied that.

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That is our bread and butter.

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That is definitely the foundation.

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However, as human beings, we don’t make decisions based on logic.

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Welcome to reality.

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Even if you think like you’re a logical person, well, believe me, you are not.

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You are very much a creature of your emotions.

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You make most by far probably over 95%, probably over 99% of your decisions every day based on emotions, based on habit.

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We do that because this is just much more simple, and it doesn’t need so much energy in your brain.

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So this is why we make most decisions emotionally.

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And then we find the logic to convince ourselves that this is logical.

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So first, we make the emotional decision, and then we find the Excel spreadsheet or the arguments why that is completely logical.

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You need both, definitely the emotions and the logic.

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Don’t tell yourself that it’s enough that you’re right.

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It’s not enough.

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You need to convince the other person using emotional appeal.

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Don’t use that phrase, I told you so.

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That just means that you were not able to convince the other person.

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So listen to this episode and learn more about how you can use, for example, emotion to convince the other side.

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Now the third behind between logos and passwords is actually eSource, and that is your credibility.

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Do people trust you?

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Are you seen as an authority?

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Are you seen as a trustworthy business partner?

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If you don’t have that, and I talk about that in a couple of episodes from May and June 2024 and also in the episode last week, if you don’t have that, it just doesn’t work.

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If you are want to convince others, then make sure that you share reliable and high quality results, that you can have your kind of stuff together, that you can clearly explain, for example, the rationale for sample size calculation, or that you can explain in easy term what an estimate is and what are the different estimate strategies.

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Your titles and your experience, your track records, and especially what others say about you will be invaluable to build trust.

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Now, of course, from time to time, everybody makes this mistake.

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Yeah.

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So you deliver a table, and there’s a mistake in it.

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Own it.

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Don’t finger point.

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Just own it and say, I’ll correct it really, really fast.

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Everybody makes mistakes here and there.

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But if you can start the blame game, and especially if you then blame others that you want to build trust with, that’s really bad.

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Own your mistakes and correct them.

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So ESOS is absolutely the foundation.

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Now our day to day work is, of course, bloggers.

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Have good start off together, and you can use, for example, scenario planning.

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If you wanna show how different analysis will work out or how different assumptions in your sample size will lead to different probability of study success or different power.

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Yeah.

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Explain things.

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Make it easy for people.

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Show that your logic works.

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Most other people are not really good in terms of statistics or math.

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Make it easy for them to understand that.

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There’s the use, for example, an analogy to explain complex math tasks or show some diagrams so that people can understand it.

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Use plain languages.

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Use examples that will help people to understand what you’re actually talking about.

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Last but not least, pass us.

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Engage in emotions.

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What is the other side fearing, hoping, anxious about, unclear about, worries about?

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All these kind of different things you should know about.

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You should know what are their goals that they’re worried about, the challenges that they foresee.

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These kind of different things will help you convince someone if you put yourself in their shoes and see it from their perspective.

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For example, think about a clinical project manager.

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These people are usually measured on two things, timelines and budget.

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And if you wanna convince them about something, make it sound appealing from that perspective.

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Say, well, with that, we can accelerate the timelines, or we can reduce the budget, or we can ensure that we meet budget, or things like that will help so much.

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So you probably don’t care why, you know, this this fancy statistical method is appealing to you because it’s innovative and you love implementing it.

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They mostly don’t care about it.

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Yeah.

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Maybe your medic cares about it because he wants to be seen as innovative if he is such a guy.

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Yes.

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I also know lots of people that rather do the same thing again and again because they are super conservative and they don’t wanna rock the boat and do something that hasn’t been tested before.

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So if people are fearful, then talk to that.

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Release kind of help them not have that fear.

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Yeah.

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Take it away from them.

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That will also help you to persuade others.

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In the end, you really need all three, ethos, logos, and parcels to convince someone.

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You need to have established trust.

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You need to have your facts, your arguments, your data together.

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And really don’t forget the emotion.

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The emotional appeal will make things hugely different.

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So let’s go to an example.

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You wanna present a new trial methodology.

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Share your experiences in that, your past successes.

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Maybe show that the FDA or the email likes that.

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That was the kind of ethos part, the credibility part.

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Logos.

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Show how this new method will, let’s say, increase the power or the accuracy or will lead to shorter timelines or whatsoever.

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Provide the arguments and then highlight how that helps the others achieve their goals.

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For example, you can speak like, well, if we do x y z, that will decrease our timelines by two months, which means we can bring the drug earlier to patients, And that is ultimately our goal because patients are waiting, and you can talk about the patient’s experience, what exactly that will help with.

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So ethos, logos, puzzles.

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Think about these three things, and if you have that clearly established, things will become so much easier for you to convince someone.

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Now I talk about esos, logos, and parcels also quite a lot in the medical data data leaders community.

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And in the medical data leaders community, you will have the opportunity to practice these kind of things much more.

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We have lots of interactive workshops in there.

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We have assignments.

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We have group mentoring meetings.

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Depending on kind of which level you come into the Medical Data Leaders communities as an individual contributor or as a first level leader, so you’re maybe a supervisor of some people or you are responsible for a project or compound or capability area or if you come into the Medical Data Leaders community as a senior leader who, for example, is responsible for therapeutic area or is the supervisor of supervisor, we have the right format for you so that you can improve your influencing skills.

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Just head over to the effectivestatistician.com and search for the medical data leaders community.

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It would be awesome to have you in there.

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Now if you like this episode, please share it with your colleagues because here you can learn so much.

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And if you like this episode, others will likely like it as well.

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This show was created in association with PSI.

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Thanks to Reine and her team at VVS who helped with the show in the background, and thank you for listening.

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Reach your potential, lead great science, and serve patients.

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Just be an effective statistician.