Over my two decades of experience, I have seen many different things and experienced many different types of people and organizations. But in the world of analytics…I have noticed that most of my customers…most of my data consumers exhibit some sort of “learned helplessness”. This learned helplessness leads to employee disengagement which leads to poor performance for the employees and the organization
Martin Seligman is an American psychologist who has done a lot of work in the field of “positive psychology”. In 1967, while studying the topic of depression, Seligman noticed that under certain conditions animals (first dogs then humans) could be conditioned to be helpless. They could be taught be helpless!
Basically…they set up two groups of dogs (A and B). Both groups were given small but noticeable electric charges. Group A were trained to press a lever to stop the shocks but Group B were not given that ability. Basically, Group B was conditioned that there was no hope to stop the charge.
Once the dogs were conditioned, the experiment moved to phase two. Below is a box with two sections. One section delivers a charge and the other section does not. One at a time, each dog was put in the box and then delivered a shock. The Group A dogs quickly figured out that they could jump into the “no shcok” side…but not the Group B dogs…they were conditioned to just “take it”…they were trained to believe there was no help so they sat in the box…
They just stayed in the box.
That’s horrible…I know. I wonder how they were able to convince Group B to give up. I wonder if they said things like;
- We don’t do that here
- Why would you want that? You don’t need it.
- If we haven’t done it before, there is probably a reason for that.
- You can’t do that.
- We don’t use that tool here.
- Why would you want that? You don’t need it.
As data people what can we do? What can we do to overcome the learned helplessness in the data consumer world?
We can implement parts of the “progress” which include
- Remove a blocker
- Education and technical development
- Ask forgiveness not permission
Remove a blocker
Maybe the blocker is a person? Maybe its technology…maybe its outdated policies …. whatever is the roadblock we have to address the problem and overcome it.
Education and technical development
Tools like PowerBI help our customers do more with data. PowerBI is a free tool available from Microsoft that can turn any spreadsheet into a robust, flexible and powerful data presentation tool.
Ask forgiveness not permission
People have to work within the ethnical and legal rules, but we have to get our data to the consumers. I have purchased my own license for the power bi service and am using it to help my customers….some of them are stuck in a place that mandates the use of another tool.
Don’t get discouraged. Communicate, collaborate, aim for consensus.
You don’t have to be perfect, but you can work to better…lets work together to get the data you need…lets work together to be better at BI.