While emotions are effective for persuasion, data and facts can also be persuasive if presented correctly. Both logic and emotions are important. It is best to leverage emotions first to gain acceptance, then introduce logic and data to improve and measure progress over time. The relationship between analytics teams and stakeholders should be symbiotic - analytics teams need business questions and context from stakeholders, while stakeholders depend on analytics teams for insights that help them achieve goals.

1. Logic or Emotions
What works best when trying to
persuade with analytics data?
Alban Gérôme
@albangerome
MeasureCamp Copenhagen
9 June 2018

3. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
• Physiological: food, water, warmth, rest
• Safety: security, shelter
• Love and belonging: friends, family, intimacy
• Esteem: respect, status, recognition, freedom
• Self-actualisation: full potential achieved
People are social and strive to get into an ever smaller inner group of
higher status people once their basic needs are covered
Everybody wants to rule the world
ESa

5. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief:
• Denial – It’s no big deal, I’ll be fine!
• Bargaining – I’m a celebrity! Get me out of here!
• Anger – It’s all your fault!
• Depression – How am I going to get through this?
• Acceptance – I can’t go back to the way things were but that’s ok
Once integrated, the biggest threat is loss of status and in the worst
case, becoming an outcast. When threatened, people will stop trying to
rise up the ranks and do anything they can to defend their position
I’m a celebrity! Get me out of here!

7. Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and research on loss aversion with Amos
Tversky
• You must present your request in a manner that will make sense immediately
without requiring much thinking
• People are twice as sensitive to a loss than to a gain
A threat of losing status or becoming an outcast is twice as important
than getting higher up the hierarchy
A tennis racquet and ball costs…

9. Robert Cialdini’s 6 principles of persuasion
• Reciprocity – You will not take advantage of the social group
• Scarcity – You will pull your weight like us
• Consistency – Your future decisions will be aligned with your previous ones
• Social Proof – Your behaviour will be aligned with the behaviour of the group
• Authority – You will respect the hierarchy of the group and obey the leaders
• Likeability – You have charisma
Violating these rules results in loss of status and influence in the group
Limited availability! Only a few left!

11. When so many effective
persuasion techniques leverage
emotions, can we persuade using
data and facts too?

13. New order
Peter Drucker wrote:
“If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.“
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.“
With the cost of data storage continuously going down, we are now
measuring plenty. What we need is support from the senior
management and the rest of the organisation will align or lose status

15. Not so fast…
• You can improve something without measuring it
• Just because you can measure it does not mean it’s important
• There are important things we cannot measure

16. Not so fast…
When people’s jobs and salaries
depend on metrics rather than
informed judgment, people will find
ways to manipulate the metrics and
this will have unintended effects

18. People make decisions based on
emotions and then justify them
with logic

20. Coming together
Emotions first
• Leverages ancestral tribal rules
• Copying the competition
• Implementing ideas from respected
thought leaders
• KPIs dictated from the top down
• Heaps of data collected and
extracted but most never used
• Cherry-picking the data leads to
data-justified analytics
Logic first
• Frame insights as a potential loss of
status if not implemented
• Use storytelling to infuse emotions
• Needs a steer from the business to
define the business questions
• KPIs emerge from the bottom
• Rotating hub and spoke model
• Restraint in data capture as a
competitive advantage

22. The stakeholders depend on the analytics
team for their standing and rise up the
hierarchy…
A symbiotic relationship

23. But without their domain knowledge and
steer the analytics department would
face analysis paralysis and not know
where to start
A symbiotic relationship

24. The stakeholders know best what will get
them a notch up the hierarchy and what
threatens their position…
A symbiotic relationship

25. The stakeholders know best what will get
them a notch up the hierarchy and what
threatens their position
Ask them what their bonuses depend on
and what their pain points are
A symbiotic relationship

26. Eventually the gap between the analytics
team and the stakeholders will shrink
A symbiotic relationship

27. We should see the emergence of the
data-informed manager and the
business-savvy data analyst
A symbiotic relationship

28. Eventually, both might just be the same
person
A symbiotic relationship

30. Mange tak!
http://www.albangerome.com
@albangerome