Metric or Meaning?

Chantel Wilson Chase - Science-based Insights Professional for the Human Experience, HX, CX, EX

If you could only choose one – which would you choose? It's not a trick question. You get the number or you get the meaning. Not both.

 I have spent a career in quantitative science. And yet, the more time I spend in the field, the more dashboards I produce, the more percentages I deliver, the more desensitized my stakeholder becomes. Their eyes glaze over, and they never go back to the dashboard I meticulously created for them.

 Why is that?

I think the answer is simple. Years ago, I worked at Tufts Health Plan. And I created this magically beautiful report (pre-dashboards, friends). I was tasked with assessing a newish treatment. I did calculation after calculation on IVF treatment. My analysis was a sight to behold. Diagrams, tables, and charts filled page after page after page. Laborious explanations of why I looked at things a certain way. Everyone wants to know my process. My 29-year old self was certain of that. 

 I sent it off to the main stakeholder.  Beyond a shadow of a doubt, she would marvel at the sheer 35-pages of brilliance. A fabulous physician turned administrator. I loved her. And so I waited for the amazement. But instead, she walked down to my space, and said, “Chantel, this is beautiful. I can tell you spent a ton of time and effort on this. What’s the bottom line to me?  What do I need to know?”

You see, she wasn’t negating or devaluing my work. To the contrary, she was respecting my expertise. And she was teaching me a valuable lesson: to respect her expertise. She wasn’t a data scientist. She wasn’t an analyst. She was an obgyn physician and administrator. By coming to me, she was telling me she understood it took a month of my time to develop this deep understanding as it relates to patients undergoing treatment. I knew the qualitative experiences and the numbers as well. But she didn’t need to know my entire process and every nuance.

 She needed clarity and simplicity - really a one-pager. Or better yet, would I be willing to have a half-hour meeting with her and download my learnings to her? Yes. Yes I was willing.

 Know your stakeholder. Bottom line, she didn’t really need the 35-pager. When we had our half hour discussion, I still printed out the 35-page report and brought it with me to the conference room. I never looked at it. I told her the women were struggling emotionally over the process itself (survey data, couple key highlights), the newly developed process was causing added confusion (specific passages in policy highlighting where confusion might lie), and the subsequent claims data. 

 Since then, the answer has been easy. Meaning. It’s all about meaning.