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Data is an omnipresent facet of modern existence, yet the current discourse around it is often too technical, academic, and inaccessible to the average person. Speak Data, the book I’ve just published with my coauthor Phillip Cox, emerges from more than 15 years of living and working with data, both as designers and as human beings.Instead of a textbook or how-to manual for designers, we imagined a more accessible exploration of the human side of data, enlivened by the perspectives of experts and practitioners from many disciplinesfrom medicine and science to art, culture, and advocacy. In an era when we are all talking about AI, the climate crisis, surveillance and privacy, and how technology shapes our choices, we wanted to reframe data not as something cold or distant, but as something deeply personal: a tool we (as human beings) can wield to understand ourselves and the world better. The book explores what we call Data Humanism, an approach that brings context, nuance, narrative, and imperfection back to the center of how we collect, design, and communicate data. In this excerpt, organizational psychologist and best-selling author Adam Grant reflects on how we interpret and communicate data, especially in moments of uncertainty, and why stories and emotions are just as essential to understanding information as statistics themselves. Adam Grant is the Saul P. Steinberg Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Yet that impressive title barely covers the full breadth of his activities. Adam is an academic researcher, an award-winning teacher, a best-selling author, a podcaster, and a public intellectual. Hes interested in big human topics like motivation, generosity, rethinking, and potential. Hes also the author of six books, including the best-selling Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Dont Know. In this conversation, Adam talks about learning lessons from the pandemic; datum versus data; and how abstract numbers can lead to very real human outcomes. [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] As a psychologist studying organizational behavior, data is a tool that you use every day. What do you think people get wrong about data the most? People often have a very hard time accepting data that challenge their intuition or experience. I always want to tell them that if the evidence disagrees with your experience, you shouldnt immediately say the data are wrong. It might be that youre an outlier, that your experience is not representative, and the data are actually revealing a trend that you simply dont fit. A lot of my work relates to how people interpret social science research, because thats where I confront the general public. One thing I see a lot is people reading a study and then figuring, well, that study was done with a sample of only a few thousand people in this industry or that country, and dismissing the results because of that. This is basic confirmation bias and desirability bias. You shouldnt trust your personal opinion over rigorous evidence gathered across many people. [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] In an article you wrote for The Guardian, you describe arguing with a friend on the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine. You wrote, I had fallen victim to what psychologists call binary bias. Its when we take a complex spectrum and oversimplify it into two categories. If we want to have better arguments, we need to look for the shades of grey. This is more or less what youre talking about. With all that in mind, what is the utility of data? The analogy I use is medicine. Today we have evidence-based medicine, but once upon a time, medical professionals tried to solve problems via bloodletting and lobotomies. Thanks to randomized controlled trials and careful longitudinal studies, we now have much safer and more reliable treatments. With evidence-based medicine, people are living longer and are healthier. So now look at how we interpret data from medicine. If you were to summarize all the randomized controlled trials of the average effect of ibuprofen on pain reduction and express the findings in the form of a correlation from -1 to +1, most people would think the correlation would be 0.7 or 0.8. After all, we have a lot of Advil in the world. But in actuality, an analysis showed that the average correlation was 0.14. Thats shockingly low to a lot of people, but the fact that its a small effect doesnt mean its insignificant. Thats the first lesson: Patterns in data do not have to be large to be consequential. You play that effect out over millions and millions of people, and a lot of people will benefit. And that benefit will be widely distributed. Secondly, the treatment doesnt have the same effect on everyone. There are contingencies. So instead of asking whether Advil is effective, we want to ask: For whom is it effective? When is it effective? This question of when and for whom allows us to look at the data and say: This is real, but only under certain circumstances. Now we need to know how widespread those circumstances are. This is real for some people. What are the commonalities of those people? The last lesson from medicine is that whats effective evolves over time. The problems were trying to treat can change. We need to update our evidence and ask: What are the best available data on any given question or for solving a given problem? Is there a reason why what was true 10, 20, 30 years ago may not apply today? I would still rather base my opinions on strong evidence thats old than no evidence at all, but we need to keep an eye on how things evolve as our contexts change. Exactly. Whats the context? What are the nuances? Data is a snapshot in time. Tomorrow, or in a month, things might be different. Espcially when we see data represented in a very definite and defined way, we assume it has absolute power to always represent a situation. This became a problem during the pandemic, of course. I think the biggest pandemic takeaway regarding the role of data is that experts and public officials did a remarkably terrible job communicating about uncertainty and contingency. I should have known it was going to happen. Chapter 8 in my book Think Again, which I wrote before the pandemic, was about how you dont lose trust when you say, More research needs to be done, or Here are the initial conclusions, but there are conditions under which they may not hold, or Here is what our initial trials suggest. Once weve done more trials, well update our conclusions. And let people know what that process looks like and how the scientific research is not only done, but accumulated. This is probably the most useful thing Ive said to a friend of mine who is very skeptical about vaccines after three-plus years of debate. He would say to me, One study says this and one study says the opposite! My response is that you shouldnt weigh both sides equally. You should weigh strong evidence more heavily than weak evidence. We need to be much more nuanced in how we communicate. We need to clarify where theres uncertainty. We need to highlight where there are contingencies. We need to be as open about what we dont know as about what we do know. One of the things we saw during COVID-19 is that source credibility dominates message credibility. People will believe a weak argument from someone they trust much more readily than a strong argument from someone they dont trust. One of the ways you become a trusted source is by very clearly admitting your uncertainty, showing intellectual humility, and expressing doubt where appropriate. I hope we dont have to keep relearning that lesson over and over again. Whats your personal definition of data? Data are information gathered through systematic and rigorous observation. We love that you say data are. To us as well, data is plural. A datum, or a data point, is one piece of information. Data are the collections of those observations. [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] To change the subject slightly, youve spoken in the past about the relative power of data versus stories to influence people and change minds. This is also something we think a lot about in our work. When do you think a really powerful statistic is appropriate, versus when a human story is going to be more effective? And when can they be combined? Its a false dichotomy to say they cant be combined. My point of view on the responsible use of stories is that we should start with the data and then find stories that illuminate the data. Stories are often more effective at evoking emotion. They allow us to distance ourselves from our own perspectives a bit. In addition to immersing ourselves in the narrative, they immerse us in a character. We get transported into stories, and we tend to experience them more than we evaluate them. Sometimes that can make people less rigorous in scrutinizing data, and that becomes a problem when the stories arent guided by data. The more surprising data are, the more likely they are to capture attention. If you have data that challenge peoples intuition, youre much more likely to pique their curiosity. But you have to be careful, because, as the sociologist Murray Davis wrote in his classic paper Thats Interesting!, people are intrigued when you challenge their weakly held intuitions, whereas they get defensive when you question their strongly held intuitions. So theres nuance there. From a visual perspective, we try to anchor stories in more aggregated data, but then disaggregate them by pulling out a couple of data points that can explain the context. By doing this in a narrative way, it can become more accessible, like a plot of a book. Thats really fascinating. Another way to tell a story about data is to start with what people would expect, then lead them to overturning their assumptions. People often find that journey revealing and enlightening, and it can become an emotional arc. Yet another thing Ive learned is to present a surprising result and then ask people how they would explain it. It opens their minds quite a bit: they generate reasons they find persuasive, and thus become active participants in the dialogue. Instead of preaching your view or prosecuting theirs, you engage them in the process of thinking like a scientist and generating hypotheses. I quite enjoy that.
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Motivation comes and go, but consistency is what will get you the results. That’s a principle I’ve tried to live by for as long as I can remember. For the most part, it has served me pretty well. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that being consistent while being unmotivated can be energy draining. And when mental and physical energy is lacking, it can be difficult to be consistent. Earlier this year, I found myself in a bit of a motivation rut. I’d had a very busy six months of work. As a freelancer, this is something that I’m definitely grateful for and don’t take for granted. When things started to slow down for a little bit, I figured that I would finally have the headspace to get started on some side projects and goals that had been brewing in my head. Yet despite being excited about them all, I struggled to find the energy (and motivation) to take consistent action. Identifying the source After a little bit of introspection, I suspected that two things were getting in my way. First, my emotional attachment to the goals gave me too many excuses not to start. I wanted my side projects to succeed, so I could find all sorts of reasons as to why it just wasn’t quite the right time to start. And this led to the second point: I struggled to break down the goals into smaller steps, because I couldn’t stop ruminating on what might happen if the first step didn’t work out. The solution was simple. I needed to be less emotionally invested in the outcome, and take those small steps consistently. But what’s simple isn’t always easy. After years of writing and editing about productivity, I’ve learned that sometimes you need to take the long way to get somewhere. In the past, I experienced many flow-on benefits from taking on a challenging and scary physical goal. So I committed to training for my first boxing fight. Establishing a routine and confidence The fight I signed for required me to commit to a 12-week training camp, where I trained alongside other fighters of similar level (which in my case, is extremely novice as I’d only started boxing seriously for about six months prior). For the first four weeks, I didn’t have the energy to do anything else beyond training and my freelance work. It took a little bit of time to get my body and mind to adapt to the physical load, dial in my nutrition, and understand how to recover. All so I can do it all over again the next day. But halfway through the training camp, my mind and body started to adapt. I noticed that I started to have more mental energy to work towards the side projects I’d been putting off. First, I was able to break down my goals into tiny, little, doable steps. Once I did that, I could finally start to take small actions. I also stopped overthinking about what would happen. The flow-on effects of setting a low-stakes goal I was familiar with the concept of habit-stacking, a term that means stacking new behaviors to existing habits. For example, say you have a habit of eating dinner at 6 p.m. You can “stack” going for a walk after your meal if you wanted to add some more physical activity to your day. But I wondered whether there was a similar rationale when it comes to goal-stacking. I was especially curious about the impact that setting a low-stakes goal can have on working towards a higher stakes one. Dr. Gina Cleo, habit researcher and author of The Habit Revolution, said that there is. “When we take on a low-stakes goal, like training for a boxing match or learning a new skill just for fun, it can reignite our sense of agency,” she says. “We experience progress, mastery, and momentum in one domain, which spills over into others.” “This happens because success triggers a release of dopamine, the brains motivation and reward chemical. Once that circuit is active, it improves focus, confidence, and willingness to take on challenges elsewhere. So a seemingly small or playful goal can become a catalyst for renewed energy and drive in the areas that feel ‘heavier’ or higher-pressure,” she goes on to say. The power of taking small actions The idea of mastery in boxing feels a long, long way away. But as a novice fighter, I’m acutely aware of every incremental and tiny progress. I’m still a few weeks away from my fight, but stacking a series of small improvements week by week has triggered a sense of momentum. I could then leverage that to take action in other parts of my life, like starting my side projects. Dr. Cleo explains, “Progress creates what psychologists call a ‘success loop.’ As you start ticking off small wins, your brain registers that youre capable, and that confidence fuels motivation for other goals.” It was a powerful reminder that sometimes, all it takes is a series of small actions to trigger bigger ones. This is a practice that Leo Shen, engineering graduate turned elite amateur boxer (and my boxing coach), implements in his own life. For him, the foundational goal is finding small ways to control your environment. That might mean putting your running shoes and socks by your bed so that it’s easier to go for a run. Or it could look like eating a nutritious breakfast that nourishes you so you’ll continue to do the same for lunch and dinner. He says, “You create the environment where youre more likely to be disciplined, and then everything falls into place. Once you control the environment, then it becomes a habit. You have to stack the dominoes before you can push them over.” Building a strong foundation Pursuing a challenging physical goal has forced me to do exactly thatcontrol my environment so that I can train and recover to the best of my ability. In turn, those healthy practices have given me the mental and physical energy to make small progress on my professional goals. I know that regardless of what happens on fight night, I’ve built a foundation and a routine that I can rely on. And as a result, I’ll have the energy (and motivation) to take consistent action towards something that once felt too overwhelming to start.
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Delegation is supposed to get easier the higher you rise. In reality, it becomes challenging in a different way, Common delegation advice is helpful for first-time managers, who typically have trouble letting go. But for senior leaders, effective delegation looks different. Its not about handing off tasks. Its about leading through a paradox. They need to stay close enough to align and coach, but they also need to step back enough to empower and grow others. At this level, for many, the risk isnt micromanagement, but over-detachment. When youre too removed, you miss chances to align strategy, spot risks, or coach your leaders. Delegation is about managing a polarity These risks dont happen by chance. Theyre likely to happen when we dont see what delegation really is: a polarity to manage. Its a continuous balancing act of two interdependent poles, involvement and autonomy. Both are valuable. And there are downsides to doing too much of both. That is the essence of polarity management, which Barry Johnson first described in his 1992 book, Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems. Yet it remains more relevant than ever for leaders today. Polarities are paradoxes and tensions you cant solve, but only manage, over time. Think speed and quality; short-term and long-term; stability and change. Two poles of a polarity are interdependent, so you cannot choose one as a solution and neglect the other, just like involvement and autonomy. To get the benefits of one, you need to attend to the other. Senior leaders live in this paradox every day, but few think about delegation as the polarity it actually is. Its not about choosing between involvement and autonomy, control or letting go, but about continuously managing the tension between the two. The trap of the pendulum effect Most leaders have a natural preference. Some stay deeply involved, others pride themselves on giving their people wide latitude. Both preferences workuntil they dont. When theres too much autonomy, it can lead to organizational misalignment, missed risks, and late-stage pivots. But when theres too much involvement, that creates decision bottlenecks at the top, and team members can feel micromanaged and disempowered. The actual trap is the pendulum effectleaders swinging from one pole to the other. If too much autonomy leads to drift, they jump back in and get more involved, potentially exerting too much control. When that frustrates and disempowers their team members, they swing back to being hands-off. And the cycle repeats. Breaking the cycle requires a different mindset. Leaders need to see delegation as a polarity to balance. That means recognizing the pattern, anticipating the shifts, and proactively balancing the upsides of both poles before the downsides start to emerge. The art of high-impact delegation at senior levels, therefore, lies in cycling between involvement and autonomy. You need to be able to switch between the two depending on the stakes and context of the work, and trust in the relationships and capabilities of your team members. There is no perfect and stable point of balance. Its a continuous practice of adjustment. How to show up differently A tech company Ive worked with trained all its senior leaders to look at delegation through a polarity lens, while emphasizing that involvement was an integral part of their culture. Leaders mapped out their tendencies, learned to recognize early warning signs of leaning too much into one pole, and experimented with new ways of showing up. A few big shifts stood out: Where they showed up changed They realized involvement wasnt about hovering everywhere. It was about leaning in with more focus and attention when the stakes were highest. This means critical work like high-stakes or unusually complex projects, when they need to coach, support, or provide people with stretch opportunities. This was also crucial during strategic moments when they needed perspective to align across the organization. How they showed up changed Instead of inserting themselves or taking over, leaders leaned on dialogue. They were: Asking big-picture questions about context, impact, or purpose, like Why are we doing this? or Who else will be impacted? Helping teams zoom out to see risks, interdependencies, and strategic connections. Clarifying expectations and roles upfront, and using check-ins for alignment, problem-solving, and coachingnot just updates. The result? Leaders werent doing more of the work themselves, as many had feared. They were actually influencing the work, bringing perspective, context, and coaching in ways that elevated their teams. Through modeling deeper thinking and strategizing, their teams started internalizing those behaviors and applied them independently, even when the leader wasnt present. And once leaders got comfortable with polarity thinking, they started applying it elsewherecandor and care, stability and change, results, and relationships. They stopped asking which side was right and started asking how to get the best of both. That development shiftfrom either/or choices to both/and leadershipis what unlocks deeper effectiveness, not just in delegation but in leading in complexity. Leading with the paradox So how can you put this into practice? You can start by doing the following: Reflect on your patterns. Notice when you overdo autonomy or involvement. Watch for the early warning signs: drift, misalignment, bottlenecks, and disengagement. Ask yourself the following questions: How do you intentionally cycle between the two poles, depending on context and capability? How do you ensure your involvement adds value without disempowering? How do you ensure autonomy doesnt become detachment? Align expectations upfront. Be clear on outcomes, roles, responsibilities, and decision boundaries. You should also discuss and align around your work styles and preferences for updating and keeping each other informed. Continuously calibrate. Contexts shift. Projects evolve. People grow. Ask yourself: What requires my attention right now? Where will involvement matter most? Where can I step back to create space? Trust your intuition and check in with your teams. This cycle of reflection, alignment, and calibration allows you to balance both poles of the delegation paradox over time without getting stuck in either. Delegation at senior levels isnt about handing off tasks and hoping for the best. Treating delegation as a polarityrather than a skill to masterhelps leaders embrace it as an ongoing practice. Leaders who do this well dont ask, Am I delegating enough? They ask, Am I balancing involvement and autonomy in a way that serves the whole organization, my teams, and the individuals I lead?
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E-Commerce
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