Data Literacy and the Data Science Communication Challenge

I’m seeing data literacy being talked about a lot on LinkedIn. And on HBR (like here). And in lots of other places too. It’s a big deal, and as data driven decision making and data enabled services continue to grow in importance it is not going away anytime soon.

But I don’t think its a one-sided coin. For those of us more comfortable and familiar with data and the opportunities it brings, we need to ensure we are supporting the end-consumers of our data with clearer, more understandable and highly relevant content. And at the same time, we also need to address what I see a lot, which is the ‘Contextual Understanding Problem’.
Data Science teams that are willing to sit in ‘Ivory Towers’, away from the business, suffer from a lack of contextual or ‘business literacy’, the end result of which is often over-running, unfocussed and sometimes irrelevant projects.

As per the visual above, ask yourself where do you, your team and your stakeholders sit and challenge yourselves what can you do to ensure you end up in the ‘zone of value’, as opposed to the ‘zone of frustration’.

If you’re a creator of insight, are you doing all you can to ensure your communication is simple, relevant and focussed towards your audience and their problems to support those with lower levels of data literacy? And are you doing all you can to ensure you are building relationships and displaying empathy towards your stakeholders to understand their world and how your data and techniques can support them?

If you are a consumer of insight, are you doing all you can to most effectively brief your data science team on your requirements and why you need their support, giving them the context to help them succeed? And are you doing all you can to ensure you build your own confidence and familiarity with the inputs, outputs and opportunity that your data brings so you can continue to brief better and realise the value of your data science department?

As the previously mentioned article from HBR on Data Literacy says, “We are in a golden era of data”. It’s important we don’t let it pass us by.