Leadership

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:

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:

Have you been sitting through boring presentations?
Have you felt that the presenter lost the audience in seconds?
Have you found yourself after a presentation thinking – so what?

When you are presenting, you don’t want the audience to feel this way. But how can you deliver a knock-out presentation and wow the audience?

In today’s episode, Benjamin and I discuss 14 presentation tips that really work. We speak about:

As statisticians, we often need to bring terrible news to the team. We’re the first to know, that a study didn’t reach the primary endpoint, or that safety analyses showed some new signals, or that some analyses contained mistakes, that need to be corrected.

How do you deal with such situations?

In today’s episode, Benjamin and I discuss the following points: