#199 Finishing Your Data Marathon - Driving to Action from Data - Interview w/ Brent Dykes

Sign up for Data Mesh Understanding's free roundtable and introduction programs here: https://landing.datameshunderstanding.com/Please Rate and Review us on your podcast app of choice!If you want to be a guest or give feedback (suggestions for topics, comments, etc.), please see hereEpisode list and links to all available episode transcripts here.Provided as a free resource by Data Mesh Understanding / Scott Hirleman. Get in touch with Scott on LinkedIn if you want to chat data mesh.Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. See their Data Mesh Summit recordings here and their great data mesh resource center here. You can download their Data Mesh for Dummies e-book (info gated) here.Brent's website and book: https://www.effectivedatastorytelling.com/Brent's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentdykes/Brent's Data Analytics Marathon Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2022/01/12/data-analytics-marathon-why-your-organization-must-focus-on-the-finish/?sh=2af698743c3bIn this episode, Scott interviewed Brent Dykes, Chief of Data Storytelling at his own firm, AnalyticsHero. Scott asked Brent to be on after João Sousa pointed him to Brent's content.Some key takeaways/thoughts from Brent's point of view:Focus on the so-what, what should people take away and do from the insights, not the sausage making of the insights. Execs want to eat the dang cake, not hear about how you made it!!Controversial!: You want to get to a place where you remain more neutral until the data informs your view. It can cause more cognitive load to update our views instead of waiting for the data to speak first.Many organizations lose steam in actually driving action on analytics, they don't drive change with data - they fail at least one of the following: generating actual insights, communicating their insights well enough to drive action, and/or actually acting on the insights.The analytics marathon: data collection -> data processing -> data visualization/reporting -> data analysis -> insight communication -> take action.Many...