WAYNE BROWN: Hello, I’m your host, Wayne Brown, and welcome to the ET project. We’re delighted to be delivering this podcast for executive talent all over the world, whom we’re affectionately referring to as Team ET. Today we’re flying into New Mexico in the US and connecting with our guest, Mr. Bill Shander. Bill is a seasoned information designer and educator with 30 years of experience in data storytelling, information design, and data visualization. As the founder of Beehive Media, he collaborates with a wide range of organizations, including government agencies, international institutions, Fortune 500 companies and nonprofits, to create both interactive and static visual projects. His work transforms complex data into compelling narratives that engage audiences, inspire action and deliver meaningful insights. Bill’s dedication to teaching is reflected in his role as a LinkedIn Learning Instructor where his 10 high rated courses on data visualization, storytelling and information design have been viewed by millions of learners worldwide. At the University of Vermont, he teaches data visualization and communication, guiding students in graduate, undergraduate and continuing education programs to effectively communicate through data. In addition to his work with clients and teaching, Bill is an active member of the global data visualization community and as an informal advisor and volunteer contributor to the Data Visualization Society, where he supports initiatives that advance the field, foster collaboration and promote best practices. His contributions to the society, coupled with his hands on workshops for analytics, marketing, PR and other departments, underscore his commitment to sharing knowledge and empowering professionals to improve data storytelling capabilities. Bill’s work blends creativity and clarity, helping organizations communicate their most important messages through impactful visual experiences. Team, this is a hugely powerful conversation and one that I’m excited for you to hear. Let’s get straight underway.

INTRO: Welcome to the ET project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.

WAYNE BROWN: Hello, team, a quick show of hands, how many of you have ever been asked what you want for your birthday? And then when somebody actually got it for you, you realized, hey, wait, that’s not really what I wanted at all. You said you wanted maybe a new phone, but what you actually wanted was to feel connected, maybe take better photos and not be the only person in the group that still loads their messages, the phone was just the thing that you thought would get you there. It turns out we all do this all the time and especially at work; someone walks in and says, “hey, I need a dashboard, build me a dashboard.” So, you build it and then they never look at it. Why? Because what they actually needed wasn’t a dashboard, they needed to understand something, maybe why sales were dropping, where to focus their team next, they just didn’t know how to ask for it. So, what they asked for was the thing that they could name. And this is where it gets interesting, because my guest today has spent 30 odd years helping people solve exactly that problem; he’s an information designer, a data visualization expert, storyteller, if you like and he literally wrote a book on how to help people figure out what they actually need, particularly when they can’t articulate it to themselves, he refers to it as Stakeholder Whispering. Bill Shander, welcome to the ET project, great to have you here, looking forward to our conversation. 

BILL SHANDER: Yeah, thank you so much for having me and I love the way you set it up, both of those examples are perfect. 

WAYNE BROWN: Thanks. As I said, you write the book with this title, Stakeholder Whispering, and much of our conversation today is going to come from that or around that. But let’s go back to the beginning, if you don’t mind, English Literature and Journalism degrees and then you dropped out of computer programming and now 30 odd years later, you’re teaching data professionals how to communicate. What was it that the English major saw that the programmers and the statisticians might be missing? 

BILL SHANDER: Yeah, and I think it is both ironic and an interesting sort of twist of fate, inevitable place to end up here, my career makes sense in reverse. Like, now, it kind of all makes sense to me, although I never could have planned it. But yeah, the English major in me and a journalist, by the way, you parse information, you sort of package it all up and you present it to people so that they can understand it, that’s definitely a journalist’s job. 

[00:05:00] 

BILL SHANDER: And reading a great novel is a similar experience, although there may be a little bit more artistry to that. But it really comes down to exactly that, that when you’re a computer programmer, and when you’re a data analyst, you’re buried in the technology, it’s all about accomplishing X, engineering tasks and whatnot and you sort of forget that other side. What do people really need to understand? Your example is perfect, right? Like, I need a data dashboard, give me a dashboard because I need data, I need data. No, wait, do you need data? Or do you need insights? Do you need understanding? Do you need to make decisions? And so, yeah, the English major in me sort of always had that and knew that. I think that’s why I was always good at the more technical stuff that I did, because that was deep inside me all along the way, and especially the journalism, I would say the journalism even more so than the English major. 

WAYNE BROWN: I want to jump into the book for a moment, if you don’t mind, Stakeholder Whispering, what was the purpose behind this? 

BILL SHANDER: It was exactly as you set it up at the very beginning, people are always, especially in work, they’re asking you to do things and… we can talk about the reason why, but the outcome is exactly as you described it, I have data, give me a dashboard, I have data, give me a dashboard. And so, okay, so I’ll make you a dashboard, here you go, and then literally no one looks at it. And in my world, before I started doing all the data work, like I said, I did website design and development. And the classic example there is my clients would say, “hey, can we make this really cool website?” “Sure. What do you want?” “Can you make sure the buttons are blue?” “Do you want all the buttons blue? Okay, sure. Why?” And they would say, “well, we want to make sure that they’re noticeable, we want people to click on them.” Oh, okay, so what you need are not blue buttons, what you need are noticeable buttons that make people want to click, that’s the real need. Now, the answer may be blue, we’ll get there, but let’s define the need. And so that was my job, that was my primary job. Really, all 30 of my years has been to really understand what my clients were asking of me because it was never what they started off with, blue buttons. And the fact is, we know why, there are decades and decades of human research or psychology research that tell us that humans are driven by their subconscious at all times. Literally, everything we do is our subconscious acting. And we do the best we can sometimes to override that with reason but it turns out we’re terrible at reasoning. Like you said it before, our brains are lazy. Daniel Kahneman, who wrote the book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ one of the best books of the 21st century so far, describes this idea that we have two modes of thought; there’s fast thinking, which is the instinctive intuitive response, if someone yells, “duck!” You duck, and that’s how you move on, your genes pass on because you survive, and we’re really good at that. Now, there’s slow thinking, which is reasoning, which we’re really not so good at. And you said it before, our brains are lazy, when we try to slow things down and reason, what we end up doing is we don’t really reason. The example that Kahneman gives is that we’ll swap out an easy question rather than trying to answer the hard question. So, if I said to you, “hey, how do you feel today? Happy or sad?” What you’re going to do instead… or not, sorry, if I phrased it this way, if I said, “generally, are you a happy or sad person?” That’s a hard question to answer. So instead, you’ll swap out, “how do I feel right now?” And you’ll answer that. So, if you’re sad today, you’re going to say, “I’m generally kind of a sad person.” So, the slow thinking, we don’t do so well and in fact, most of the time, what we’re doing is our subconscious is answering the question for us. And then we spend time, we think we’re reasoning, but we’re actually convincing ourselves that what our subconscious already decided was correct. So, in work, I have data, give me a dashboard, it’s so fast, it’s so automatic and we have to pause and ask ourselves, well, is that what’s really needed? And investigate it. So, Stakeholder Whispering is required for all the things we do. And in my world of design, of course, in the world of technology, 100% for sure, but it’s all knowledge work. The HR worker who’s asked to create a report about X, Y, Z, they need to slow down and really ask themselves, is that what we need? Or maybe we do need that report, but is it, should it be the way we always do it? Or should we do it this way or this way or this way? We should be constantly questioning everything. 

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. The topic of the book, Stakeholder Whispering, a very interesting title, was there a purpose behind the name or did it just fit the whole subject you were trying to bring to the title? 

BILL SHANDER: I would love to say that the title is perfect, but it’s not, and the reason I say that is that I really don’t like the word stakeholder. I was desperately trying to find another way of saying the same idea because stakeholder is such a project managery kind of a word. 

[00:10:00] 

BILL SHANDER: Only certain types of people can love the word stakeholder. And this is such a broad topic, everybody needs to do this, so, that’s the reason the stakeholder is there. And by the way, I was stuck with it because there’s just no other word that captures the idea because basically this book is about anybody who has a stake in what you’re doing. So, the definition of stakeholder is someone who can affect or is affected by what you’re doing. So that’s your boss, your client, your investors, the media, the end users of the product you’re making, the public who is going to be affected by the factory that you put in their neighborhood, everybody, there are so many stakeholders, and there’s really no other word that captures it. And then of course the whispering part, yeah, you know, the horse whisperer, right? Like the basic idea that somebody can like walk up to a wild animal and rather than having to beat it into submission, can just talk to it secretly, whisper in its ear, learn what it needs and maybe influence how it does what it does. And so, it was just the perfect way of capturing the idea, but I just wish there was another word other than stakeholder. But it is like an art, it’s a magical process, even though it’s very simple, it’s very learnable, but it’s sort of that mystique to it, kind of like horse whispering. 

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. And so therefore it’s, it’s really around the whole communication topic. So, I’m a coach, a mentor, and this whole premise is what resonates so badly with me and I love nothing more than to be able to watch my clients sit back, sort of look up in reflection and you see their inner workings, you can almost hear the churning as they’re starting to think back through some of the things that they were talking about or the actions or whatever happened that, you know, this topic. And through that questioning technique, you’re able to achieve that and I guess that’s a lot about what you’re doing, right? 

BILL SHANDER: Yeah. I mean, you’re in that world, coaching is like therapy, it’s business therapy, I’m sure there are many ways of talking about it. So, yeah, you do this all the time, people who aren’t in our world doing this all the time should recognize that this is what they should be doing all the time because yeah, you know, the Socratic method, for those who aren’t familiar with it, I’m sure most people are like, oh yeah, it’s about questions, right? But the key thing about the Socratic method that most people don’t remember or never learned it possibly is that you’re asking questions not to learn the answers yourself. When I ask my clients about, oh, you say you want blue buttons, tell me why you want blue buttons. What are they for? What’s the goal? Da, da, da. I’m not asking them so I can find out the answer, this is not a needs’ assessment, this is not requirements gathering, although that will happen, I will learn things from them when they tell me stuff. But my goal in asking those questions more so is to be the therapist, to be the coach, to guide them, to have that moment. Oh wait, hold on. Yeah. Oh wait. Oh yeah. Wait, I never thought about it that way. I’m guiding them towards an insight and yes, I will learn along the way. But that’s the key, it’s exactly like therapy, it’s like coaching, you’re there to help them figure it out, you’re not there to learn the answers to do a better job. But like I keep saying, that will also happen. But you got to think about it the other way around, because if you think about yourself as a guide to help them achieve insight, man, it’s really powerful. 

WAYNE BROWN: It is. And I was coming to that point, I think that being in that environment is so powerful for both of us. So, for myself as the person who has been curious and inquisitive, trying to find out the root cause of where I really want to go and for that counterpart who is having that aha moment, when you’re in that situation, how do you see that? How do you… I mean, they don’t say aha necessarily, how do you know that they’ve had that breakthrough? 

BILL SHANDER: It can be very obvious, maybe not quite aha, but usually it will involve the physical act of literally going like this, they literally like look up at the sky, they’ll scratch their chin, so, there’s that literal, like that moment of clearly they’re thinking and they’re in a new space and often they will literally say the words, “Oh wait, yeah, I never thought about it like that, I never saw it that way before.” So, you’ll hear some of this transitional moment. Now, this is what’s interesting about the Socratic method, the goal of the Socratic method, according to Socrates himself, he was a teacher and students would come and he would pepper them with questions in order to get them to learn something, so, the same idea. And his goal, his stated goal, he said this, was to push those students into a state of what he called aporia. Aporia is a Greek word and it means puzzlement. So, his goal was literally to confuse his students. 

[00:15:00] 

BILL SHANDER: Now, my goal, your goal when you’re working with your clients is not to literally confuse them, but there will be that moment where there’s that glimmer of confusion, tension, discomfort, huh! Wait! Huh! And you’ll recognize, you will see it either in those words or in that physical response, that is that moment, that magical moment, you’ll recognize it, because as a human you know that when you see it, even though it’s not always clearly like literally the words that I just said.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah, so true. Unfortunately, we see all the time that people are not always ready to go down this path and I’m wondering when you encounter resistance to try to uncover the real thing, many people are in a hurry, they want it quick, they want it to happen. Are you able to navigate that successfully? Like, can you get them to pause and really explore what is the real meaning behind what they’re asking for?

BILL SHANDER: Yeah, it’s so hard. And listen, I’m old, I’ve been around the block a million times and I’m perceived as an expert in what I do, so, when I walk in the room, people usually give me the benefit of the doubt and they’ll go exploring with me. That’s usually why they even hire me, right? So, I’m super lucky. But in my memory, not that long ago, I remember being 25 years old, young, inexperienced, and literally like first job, whatever and yeah, clients would give me the time of day. And so, the way you progress, because it will be an iterative progression, is you start with that one question. Okay, make me dashboard, okay, I can’t ask why for an hour, I’m not going to get this incredible therapeutic dialogue going. But what I can do is at a minimum, I can say, tell me more. If the initial request is vague or even if it’s not vague, but if I think that there might be something to it beyond what they’ve asked me for, tell me more, maybe if I’m lucky, I can ask a question, “how are we going to measure success when this thing is done?” Which is such a classic question, everybody says you should ask it, but here’s the thing, that’s a good question because it starts to put meat on the bones of what the real need is, because if they say, “give me a blue button on the website,” and if you say, “how are we going to measure success?” They’re going to say, “clicks should go up by at least 50%.” Oh, so you want a button that’s more clickable, let’s solve for that. The other thing I would say is that if you can get your foot in the door with that one or two questions and you start to gain trust, et cetera, then it gets into the field of persuasion. And one of the things I talk about in the book is that one of the best ways to be persuasive and influential, even when you lack real authority is to bring expertise to the table. So, if I could say to my client, “oh, you asked for blue buttons, what you really want is clickable buttons. Hey, you know, there was a study last year that found that yellow buttons are way more clickable than blue buttons, Harvard said so.” I’m bringing Harvard expertise to the table, I’m not an expert, but I’m quoting Harvard. Oh, all right, that’s actually interesting to me, maybe I should listen to this guy, it’s really powerful. So, lean on the expertise of others, but, you know, start off with one or two questions, you’ll build that trust and then before you know it, you’re like a master Jedi coach and people are ringing your phone off the hook trying to get in touch with you to help them do their thinking.

WAYNE BROWN: Questioning is a beautiful thing but it’s also an apple and there’s a spectrum of questioning techniques. Now, Socratic questioning, curious inquiry, however you want to find it, is at one end of the spectrum and it’s a beautiful process. At the other end there, you’ve got leading questions, funneling methodologies, and I see so many people go out with good intent, they say, “we’re going to explore more, we’re going to have that curious conversation,” but really they’re trying to get to an end result and they’re trying to… guide is a nice word, but what they’re trying to really do is direct them to that result that they want. Sometimes, quite difficult, when the client doesn’t really know what they want and you mentioned the word persuasion. So, I’m just wondering, how you deal with this? Because there will be times, I’m sure, where you do have to give some guidance and you have to lead them to a point. How do you deal with that type of situation?

BILL SHANDER: Yeah, it’s a great question. And I want to start off by saying that, yes, Stakeholder Whispering is all in the more idealistic context of you really want to help, you want to help them figure out what they need, and you’re not trying to serve your own agenda, which of course you can do, you can be persuasive in that way too, but I’m definitely talking about the other end to your point. Yes, and then at times either the client is so clueless that they really need my help. 

[00:20:00] 

BILL SHANDER: And I am an expert in data storytelling and data visualization, so, if it’s that kind of a project, I should be helping them make these decisions based on what again? Oh yeah, research. Like, it’s not just my opinion, research has shown that this works better, so, maybe we should consider this as an option. But even a client who doesn’t know what they need, you can have a really open-ended, curiosity-driven conversation even though they may be completely clueless about the technical issues, about the data itself, about all these things, but you can always get to, what are you trying to achieve? You asked me to make this thing for you. Why? Why do you want me to do this? Now, if the answer is, “well, because my boss told me to do it.” All right. Well, you know what? You and I should go stakeholder whisper your boss together. They may not be able to answer the question because they truly are unable to, so, now you have to think about the other stakeholders you have to deal with and there’s always multiple stakeholders. But even if they’re not technically equipped, like I used to do very complicated database-driven websites for people and they didn’t know the underlying reasons for half the technical decisions we had to make, but my job was to translate that into here’s how you can make this decision. Should we use this arcane technology or that arcane technology? You don’t know, you don’t have a clue what this even means. But let me tell you the risks of this one versus that one, so, I translate into a language, like if we do this one, your risk is low, like the odds are low it’s going to happen, but boy, if it does the entire world is going to explode. This one, the odds are high that we’re going to have lots of problems, but they’re going to be tiny and no one cares. Oh, okay, I can weigh those two things, even though I don’t have a clue about the technology. So, my job as a whisperer is to equip them to help them make decisions, even though that they’re… on the surface it’s not the kinds of things they should be able to decide. I can’t think of a single instance in my entire career where I had a client who literally I couldn’t help them think intelligently about the issue at hand, except maybe in a case where I described at the very beginning of this answer, they just asked me to do it because their boss told them to do it. All right, well, then I’m talking to the wrong person, I got to talk to the boss, you can’t whisper by proxy, let’s talk to the decision maker, bring him to the table.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. I was wondering that is there a stakeholder, let’s use your word, where Socratic questioning or this type of approach is simply the wrong tool. And you mentioned already about maybe the team member who doesn’t know the full answer, why their boss is asking for it. Is there any other scenario comes to mind where this may not be the best tool?

BILL SHANDER: Yeah. I mean, so I have a whole chapter in the book about the trouble you’ll run into stakeholder whispering and there’s a million examples. So, like one of the biggest failures in my entire professional career was a project where what I just described was part of the issue, where I was trying to whisper by proxy, the middle men were telling me what I should do, they didn’t really know what the boss guy needed and so the project was a disaster, we ended up getting fired. But I also think because that boss guy, the ultimate decision maker, even if I had had his ear, he was one of the most famous professors in the world, an expert beyond expert kind of a person. And I think with him, because of his own certainty in how he did things, that almost no matter what I asked him of, I think he would have come back to, “I know what I’m doing, dude, just do what I say.” And so, there are personality issues at play, there’s ego and all kinds of other things that might make it next to impossible to do this work sometimes, but yeah, you do the best you can, you’re going to fail a certain percentage of the time and I guess that’s part of the whispering process, it is to know when to stop trying, and sometimes it’s going to come earlier and sometimes later in the process. 

WAYNE BROWN: And to that point, is there a common mistake that people make when they’re first trying to use this approach? Like, do you see people first starting out with questioning and they’re doing it all wrong? Is there a reason why that happens? 

BILL SHANDER: That’s a good question. I think that there probably are a bunch of reasons; one is that, if you’re a people-pleaser, you’re going to be too quick to say, “oh, good answer, good answer. Sure, sure, sure.” And not push hard enough. Or you’re going to take it too much to heart and be like, okay, boss says, get me a cup of coffee, oh, let me ask you 20 questions about whether I should get you a cup of coffee. Wait, do you really want a coffee? Like, it’s all contextual, whether you should really do this or how far you should push the line. In addition to that, I think one of the most common mistakes is the whole recognizing the entire suite of stakeholders at play and remembering to prioritize them, because your job is to serve your boss, but your boss is serving somebody else and somebody else and somebody else. And maybe the most important stakeholder is like the end user of your product, who isn’t even in that chain of command. If we all take our eye off the ball and don’t serve the end user of the product, it’s going to be a failure no matter what we think we do. 

[00:25:00] 

BILL SHANDER: So, keeping an eye on who the stakeholders really are, yeah, you have to please this person over here, but that’s the actual one whose opinion really matters, managing that can be complex. And by the way, sometimes these stakeholders are in conflict; your boss says this, your boss’s boss says that, how do you manage that? You got to facilitate their conversations with each other, which is a whole another ball of wax, but those are some of the issues you’ll definitely see.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. Can I come back to… something that I’ve been curious about myself while I prepared for our conversation was information design versus data visualization, they’re not exactly the same animal if I understand it correctly.

BILL SHANDER: Yeah. The way I look at it, and some people say it differently, but the way I look at it, information design is a parent category that data visualization lives within. So, information design is kind of… like data visualization, the definition is so simple, it’s information that you design. So, you take any information that you have and you create a way of packaging it for people. And so, like an example of information design that has nothing to do with data visualization is signage. Think about the last time you were in an airport, I bet if you needed to use the restroom, you looked up and probably within your line of sight, no matter which way you looked, there was a restroom indicator. And if you followed that sign, even if it was like a little bit of aways, you never lost track of that restroom indicator and it took you right to the bathroom.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. 

BILL SHANDER: Now, if you’re in an airport or some other location like that, and I’m sure you’ve had the experience also, first of all, I don’t even see the sign, I got to go wander around to even find it and then I find it and then I follow it and then it disappears on me and suddenly like I’ve ended up nowhere; that’s bad information design, the other one is good information design. So, data visualization is within that, it’s a particular kind of information specifically made into a visual… design usually implies visual, but not always, but yeah, info design is the parent category that data visualization lives inside of.

WAYNE BROWN: Where does the topic infographics sit between the two or at one end of that spectrum? 

BILL SHANDER: Some people would say infographics is not data visualization, I say infographics usually often include data visualization. So, an infographic is definitely information designed in a way that makes it easier to understand. Oftentimes, infographics include charts and graphs and other visualizations of data specifically. So, yeah, infographics don’t necessarily include data visualization but they do the vast majority of the time from my experience. But sometimes infographics, if you look at like, I mentioned National Geographic, they might have an infographic that is simply a flow diagram describing the migration process of wildebeests, or it might be an actual cartographic map. So, sometimes it is not literally data, like quantitative data, but I still consider that data visualization because it’s still process data, not necessarily numerical quantitative data. 

WAYNE BROWN: I read, it must have been in the book, I guess, but they spend 10 seconds ignoring the message, is there a myth that we should be aware of that audience attention around data and visualization that many professionals still believe? Is there something that we’re getting wrong when we look at how do we make this a visual journey that people are going to actually buy into versus one that just seems like many infographics as an example, part of the reason I asked that question, there are many infographics I see that are so complicated that I still have to sit there for half an hour to follow through the path to understand the actual message. Is there a myth around this whole visualization that many professionals are still missing?

BILL SHANDER: Honestly, I think it largely comes back to Stakeholder Whispering. The fact is we have some data, let’s make it fun, make an infographic, it’s such an automated response, and so people aren’t thinking deeply enough when they go to make that infographic, well, why are we making this? Who’s going to look at it? What do we want them to do with it? All those Stakeholder Whispering questions that will get to a well-done infographic for the purpose. So, if we just say data infographic and just throw it at people, it’s going to fail. So, it’s a more thoughtful design process that is always the case. I would add on top of that that, answer to your question about myths, some people would say, and they think that things like tables of numbers, my audience is accountants, they love tables of numbers, let’s give them table of numbers, they don’t want to see charts and graphs or my audience is doctors, they don’t like charts and graphs. And this is like a literal myth that has been studied by the way, with doctors. 

WAYNE BROWN: Right.

[00:30:00]

BILL SHANDER: In fact, let me tell you about the study. They did a great research project where they took a bunch of doctors who preferred tables of numbers, as opposed to charts and graphs, which most of them do, and they gave them both and they said, perform this task, whatever it was. And they performed better with the charts and graphs, as opposed to the table of numbers, that is not a surprise, we are better at looking at data in visuals as opposed to tables. And then they asked them, “which do you prefer?” And yes, they preferred the opposite, they preferred the table of numbers. So, in other words, the myth is that, oh, some people, they want the data, give them a spreadsheet, don’t give them a visual, it’s dumbing it down for them, that is a myth. All humans, all of us are visual creatures and we will learn and understand the data better and as you said earlier, it will also be more engaging, but we will understand it better if it’s visual, so, make it visual. But like in the example of an infographic, how do you make it more visual? How do I make it visual? How do I design it in a way that’s going to be impactful? Well, now I have to be more thoughtful. I can’t just throw a pie chart at you and hope that the pie chart is the right chart for this need, for this task. I can’t label every data point because I’m afraid that if I miss one data point, you’re going to like not have enough detail. Well, you know what? An infographic is not for the detail, an infographic is just supposed to explain the idea in general, I can send a link to the source data. So, what is the infographic for? What purpose does it serve? What’s the goal? Stakeholder Whispering, then you’ll design the right solution for that need. 

WAYNE BROWN: Is there a rule of thumb around the combination between a graphic versus component of text, like should you stick with, I don’t know, 70-30, is there a general rule of thumb or is it literally down to what the client is really looking for and that’s how you design it?

BILL SHANDER: Yeah. I don’t think there’s a rule of thumb like that, like a ratio or anything like that, I think what I would say though, is it comes down to less is always more. Like, if you were to tell me, Bill, tell me the story of the universe, I could give you a PhD thesis, I couldn’t, someone could give you a PhD thesis, a 10,000 page-long explaining the universe, right? Or you could say there was nothing and then there was this giant bang and then there was everything and it’s expanding and I think it’s… they now say it’s not accelerating, it’s decelerating. Like, I could sum it up in a sentence and depending on the context and maybe that picture, right? Depending on the context, if I only had 20 seconds with you, that approach would be the right approach. If you were a student in astronomy, I’d probably would go with the 10,000-page book approach because that’s probably what you need from me. So, yeah, no rules of thumb, it’s highly contextual, but in general, it’s always a little bit less than you think people need, is usually my only rule of thumb.

WAYNE BROWN: Is there any guidance you give your clients around, should everything be visual, you know, to your point just a moment ago, if people are trying to do a thesis and you know, the beginning of the world, maybe the visuals are going to be too elementary and you guide people.

BILL SHANDER: I would say everything should be more visual than you think it should be because visuals are really impactful, they work. I would also say however much information you think is needed, cut it in half, it’s probably literally that easy to like do less. And by the way, every visual you create should be way simpler than you think it should be. You don’t need to label every data point ever, I don’t care who this is being delivered to, you should not be labeling every data point in that visualization. Now, the appendix maybe has a version with every data point labeled, you may give someone the entire spreadsheet or a server full of data, but if you’re creating a visual experience for probably a presentation or something like that, simplify it, shoot a little lower because the odds are you’re way less likely to disappoint people with less detail than you are to overwhelm people with too much detail. So that’s one sort of broad guidance I would give whether you’re a leader or a junior person day one in your career, everyone needs that guidance, I would say.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. I’m curious Bill, 30 odd years now in this field, what have you learned about your own subconscious drivers, your biases, your assumptions, and have you been able to make any inroads to addressing those yourself?

BILL SHANDER: Yeah. I think the most important inroad that I’ve made is to really acknowledge it on really a minute-by-minute basis. I know I am driven by my own unconscious biases. In fact, I’ll give you an example, we just talked about it a second ago. 

[00:35:00] 

BILL SHANDER: I’ve always preferred minimal design; I like minimal design. So, when I say do less and simplify and reduce and eliminate, that’s my bias talking, 100%, but it is also backed up by research. So, I still say it knowing that it’s my bias, but I 100% stand by it, even using the little bit of reasoning that I can do as a flawed human. And I would say this, like one of the most important lessons I learned that I put in the book about how to do Stakeholder Whispering is to engage what I call your useful paranoia. So, the first way to mitigate bias is to acknowledge that you have bias and question everything. My boss says, “give me blue buttons,” I should be immediately asking myself, “I wonder if that’s really what we need.”  And sometimes I can quickly say, yeah, it’s a simple question, you know, you need coffee, I’ll get you coffee, not even go down the road, but I should always ask myself the question, I should question everything, it’s also referred to as critical thinking. So, just engage your useful paranoia at all times. But it’s useful paranoia, I’m not going off the rails questioning everything forever, you know, paralysis by analysis or analysis paralysis. It’s useful, probe it, question it, investigate it, and then move on and do what you need to do.

WAYNE BROWN: To that point, I’m always curious myself, but I’m wondering, is curiosity something that can be taught? Can you actually help people to make this transition?

BILL SHANDER: You definitely can. And so, I read a book and I quoted it a bunch of times in my book, a book called ‘Curious’ by Ian Leslie. And one of the most fascinating things I read in that book is that curiosity is learnable. And by the way, it’s also contagious. So, this is a good lesson for leaders; if you really want your organization to be a curious organization and you want your people to be good stakeholder whisperers, in addition to you being better at whispering with your stakeholders, be open to your stakeholders whispering with you. But to the point about curiosity, if you want to create a curiosity-driven organization where everybody is really doing this, therefore getting the best work out of each other, model that behavior yourself boss, be curious, because when you’re surrounded by curious people, you are more likely to be curious. So, yes, it is learnable also. I can’t remember some of the research into the learning aspect of curiosity, but curiosity… and empathy, by the way, is also learnable. So, these key human attributes you think of it as just being attributes, I am, or I am not curious, they’re both learnable. So, I definitely encourage people to encourage those attributes within their culture because it’ll pay dividends.

WAYNE BROWN: Many of our listeners will be thinking, I’m not a curious person, I’m action-oriented, I want to solve problems, I want to deliver, is there a first step that people can do? I mean, you’ve mentioned things but what can they… a single step they can take after this conversation to help them move more in that direction?

BILL SHANDER: That’s a good question. I think that it comes down to engaging their useful paranoia again, because, okay, you’re action-oriented, you want to accomplish, I get it, you want to get ahead in your career, you like movement, you like doing things, I’m the same way, I’m like a put my head down and get it done kind of a person. Like, I used to live in Boston, it snowed a lot, when it would snow like a foot and I had to go out there and shovel snow, I loved it. I was like, “give me a shovel!” And I’d shovel all day long, I love working hard. If you’re that kind of person, you’re really driven, you want to accomplish, the next time you’re given a task, you can just go head down, dive in and start doing. But if you just pause, even if it’s not your natural state, to be curious, if you just pause and say, yeah, I was assigned this task, but is this where I should be putting all energy? Should I be shoveling that pile of snow at the end of my driveway? The one on the edge or should I be shoveling the snow on the part of the driveway where people drive? Probably it’s better put my energy where it’s actually needed. So just pause, even ask that one question, how are we going to measure success? Now you know where to shovel. So, you can still work just as hard, be just as driven, but you’re pointing your energies in the right way. So, engage your useful paranoia, probe that request and ask that one question or two questions to sort of get the ball rolling.

[00:40:00]

WAYNE BROWN: As we think about AI and the shift that we’re moving into with this whole technology acceleration, how do you see that impacting data visualization information? I mean, the whole data and information sector has exploded because of technology, but how do you see that being impacted now from a visualization angle? Do you see AI being a proponent of visualization or is it going to create so much additional data that we just become overwhelmed and we stop focusing entirely on all of its…

BILL SHANDER: Yeah, I think that AI is… It’s going to overwhelm us first, for sure. But I think long-term, I think about AI; it’s kind of like… as much a stakeholder whispering questions as anything else, if you ask AI to do something, it’s going to do it, it’s going to do exactly what you asked it to do. And so, our differentiation is those human attributes, curiosity, empathy, and communication, really figuring out what should be done so that we get AI or humans to do what should actually be done. And so, in the world of data visualization, I can go into Gen AI tools or like right into Power BI or Tableau and say, “Hey, Power BI, look at this dataset and tell me what you find interesting in it, and by the way, give me three charts to demonstrate it.” And Power BI is going to do a pretty darn good job of bubbling up insights and visualizing those insights. Okay, but those insights may be very relevant to my company this quarter or they can be completely irrelevant, interesting, but not actually useful. And so, my job as the human is to, of course, hone my prompts so that they’re not quite so wide open and willy-nilly so I don’t waste my time looking at a bazillion things, but also when I get those three or four or five insights back from AI to discern which ones are going to be relevant and useful today. And then maybe ask AI to finesse it and make my presentation for me. So, we’ll just be better at using AI ourselves when we have honed our own stakeholder whispering skills, because we can whisper ourselves in a way. Like, what am I really asking here? Why am I asking? What’s my real goal? AI delivered me X, does that accomplish what I needed to accomplish? Or is that completely useless and irrelevant and I can ignore it? So, these very human attributes will help us work with AI more effectively in the world of data visualization, but also just sort of general knowledge work, I would say.

WAYNE BROWN: Right. If people are reading the book, what’s one thing that you hope they take away?

BILL SHANDER: Honestly, I think the most important thing is what we said at the very beginning, the fact is every request that comes in from every stakeholder you’re dealing with is being driven by their subconscious. And listen, your stakeholders are very experienced sometimes and they do know what they need sort of kind of, for the most part, maybe a certain percentage of those requests are exactly what should be done, great. But some of them will not be, and so, it’s your job. If you want to succeed in your life, if you want your organization to succeed… you want your boss to succeed, right? If you want to get promoted, all of these things will be improved if the first thing you do is acknowledge that request may or may not be what’s needed, pause for a second, engage your useful paranoia, probe it with the Socratic method and figure it out, because if you shovel the right part of the snow, you’re going to be able to get out of your driveway, if you don’t, you’re wasting energy. So, acknowledge it and try to do your best to find a true underlying need.

WAYNE BROWN: Where is the best place people can connect with you, if you wish them to, and follow more on what you’re doing?

BILL SHANDER: Yeah, sure, there’s always my website, billshander.com. And of course, I’m on LinkedIn, where people can follow me or connect with me, I’m always happy to talk to people there or anywhere these days.

WAYNE BROWN: And the book available where? Amazon?

BILL SHANDER: Amazon, everywhere where books are sold these days, but Amazon for sure is immediate gratification, always a good option.

WAYNE BROWN: Well, Bill, a fascinating topic, we literally scratched the surface, but I enjoyed… I didn’t get to read the whole book, but I enjoyed the parts I read and I highly encourage everyone to get out there and learn more about it. As you’ve mentioned, it’s one of the fundamentals that we all need to be able to do and do well and you covered the topic beautifully. So, great connecting with you and having this conversation.

BILL SHANDER: Me too. Thank you so much for having me, it has been fun.

OUTRO: Thank you for joining us on the ET project, a show for executive talent development, until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars, and blogs at ‘coaching4companies.com.’

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