Dan Erwin

What Can the Use of Statistics Do For You?

For many the question about statistics may be whether there is any real reason to fully understand how to use statistics. After all, you may have only so much time in the day. But the answer to the question is a strong, absolute yes. Using statistics strategically can be an unusually powerful game plan in many personal and work situations.

But let’s begin with some very basic statistic examples, the kind Harper’s magazine publishes on a single page in every issue. To a significant degree they are more fun than relevant. Here are a few from the recent issue:

-Amount spent on the average U.S. date: $73

-Percentage by which Democrats are more likely to trust the Wall Street Journal than Republicans: 36

-Percentage increase last year in the amount of credit card debt held by Gen Z adults: 40

-Percentage of U.S. adults 50 or older who play video games at least once a month: 45
-Portion of U.S. adults who consider Michelangelo’s David to be pornographic: 1/5

-Percentage of Americans who currently own an electric vehicle: 4

-Percentage of Americans who say they’d never buy an electric vehicle: 41

-Minimum annual number of fortune cookies produced worldwide: 3,000,000,000

Well, so much for that highly relevant information!

These are the simplest kind of statistics. What really brought this post into existence was a recent episode with a colleague who was obviously distressed over what I considered an ordinary, flawed statistic. It became clear at that very moment that most people have little understanding of how evidence in the form of statistics works—what it does rhetorically. That’s especially true since very few have ever engaged in high school or college, or had college course in statistics.

So I thought, based on my own expertise, it just might be helpful for some of my readers to understand just how and why statistics often serve as powerful proof. And hopefully then, my readers will be able to make better decisions around statistics. . .

and most importantly, be able to use statistics for their own personal and career advantage.

The Irrational Fears About AI Just Keep Piling Up

You don’t have to look beyond today’s newspaper, the latest popular or business magazines or just about any news program, much less endless websites. Even a recent issue of AARP, the magazine for elderly and retired people, has scary ideas about artificial intelligence. AI may be more all-present than Trump.

Among the latest attention-getting issues and headlines are the following: how could AI take over elections—and undermine democracy; does regulating artificial intelligence save humanity or just stifle innovation; how can congress regulate AI; and not least—does regulating AI save humanity or just stifle innovation?

But the biggest fears for many surround the issue of jobs.
Two of MIT’s most knowledgeable guys on artificial intelligence, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, will tell you to cool it about jobs and AI. They argue, for example, that asking how many jobs will be killed by AI is the wrong question. Sure, Frey and Osborne’s analysis from early 2015 found that nearly 50% of current jobs are susceptible to AI. But by no stretch of the imagination is that the whole picture.

Why Do Business Chameleons Get Ahead?

That's not a trick question. Chameleons have developed a number of important qualities and competencies. The chameleon's success is built on their ability to self-monitor for the sake of impression management. It’s not that they’re manipulative, but that they’re superb at assessing situations and exceptionally astute in adapting to organizational needs.

Most employees make getting ahead a very high objective. Promotions can drastically change the lives of both those who stay in a company and those who move to another company. Promotions do more than provide different job duties and better rewards. They can also change where you live and who you get to interact with. In today’s high-pressured workplace, gaining new skills and working with different and more capable people can help keep you on the learning curve—and provide for job security.

Recently, studies have assessed the power of personality traits to impact promotion and rewards. The studies have ignored the actual performance of individuals and focused, for example, on the Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism. Systematic studies have found that personality can predict job performance fairly well—but only under certain conditions. In fact, you may have lots of job relevant talent and personality traits, like conscientiousness and extraversion, but nevertheless fail to gain power or get promoted. . .

Conversation Is Not Talk

Knowing how to actually converse, not just talk, is an absolute necessity in the digital world.

MIT’s well known digital psychologist, Sherry Turkle, argues in one of her recent books, “Reclaiming Conversation,” that we have sacrificed mere connection for conversation. She goes on to write that conversation is the “cornerstone for empathy and as well as for democracy; it sustains the best in education and in business it is good for the bottom line.” I agree with her fully.

But I found it appalling that Turkle has practically nothing to say of how to resolve our conversational problem. She provides approximately 20 out of 350 pages to recommend that we turn off our digital devices and put ourselves in situations where we have to “talk,” assuming falsely that talk and conversation are identical and that conversation is a natural competency. Conversation, however, is not natural, but a learned competency—a fact of which Turkle and her over-credentialed, high-IQ colleagues inevitably fail to understand. Furthermore, conversation is not just talk. Nor is it aimless. In today’s world, conversation is both purposeful and highly necessary. One of the most significant reasons is that diversity in the workforce seemingly promotes misunderstanding. But it takes conversational competency to break down these misunderstandings.

Misunderstanding
Misunderstanding in organizations is the norm: not the exception. For the millions who labor in organizations, that should be no surprise. The people who study current organizations find six “major” reasons for interpersonal misunderstandings in nearly all organizations, especially the big ones.

                *More levels of hierarchy or more work teams with more members.
                *Cultural, age, gender, sex, religious, and value differences.
                *Struggles for power.
                *Growth of subcultures and anti-organizational cultures.
                *Competition among peers for scarce resources.
                *Increased use of interactional media.

Nothing new here, except the new insights that these “misunderstandings” are true everywhere in the digital world--and that most professionals have a great deal of difficulty dealing with them. There is also a list of reasons why most stumble in trying to deal with them. The reasons are not immediately obvious. What actually makes misunderstandings ever more difficult to deal with is that very few of us have the interactional background, education and experience models for turning misunderstanding into conversational successes. Significantly, it is especially difficult to unlearn the past. And the past includes a strong orientation to deferring to power resulting in both an inability and a clear resistance to asking questions—one of the most basic strategies for resolving misunderstanding. Even amongst the youngest generations, deference and ignorance typically result in debilitating caution and multiple misunderstanding.

Surprise!
There’s one fact about misunderstandings that few understand: they are one of the best options for turning your career into success. The surprising impact of working through a breakdown is not merely a fix.