Hi, everyone. I'm Vla Sarathi and I um welcome you to this session. I hope you're all having a great time at the Women Tech conference today.I'm going to share my own conviction that in order to position your organization as a cutting edge, an innovative company, you need to build into the DNA of your organization. What I call data curiosity. I will share examples from my own experience at the graduate School of Business here at Stanford University. And what I would like to share with you today are three dimensions to think about as you build a data driven culture within your organization. I will also share with you a very simple but really powerful framework that we can all use in various situations to use data curiosity from across the organization. So let's dive in. And before we talk about data curiosity, let's look at curiosity. What is curiosity? Albert Einstein famously said,

I have no special

talent. I am only passionately curious and of course, the most curious of us, all our kids and they have the most insatiable sense of wonder with everything happening around them. We are all born curious. So can you guess how many questions a four year old would ask? Typically in a given day, research tells us that typically a four year old would ask 200 to 300 questions a day. Now, let's take this child fast forward a couple of decades and let's think about how many questions an adult might ask in a given day. It's about 20. So what happened? Although we all have the capacity to be curious somehow along the way from childhood to adulthood, we lose

the

sense of curiosity. And this not only spills into our lives, but also our work and our organizations. So today, I'm going to share with you something that actually did happen in um in my own organization. And as you know, at the GSB, I'm part of a group called Executive Education. And what we do at executive education is we um run programs for senior executives from across the world. Our programs are extensive and they're really well regarded. We have faculty who teach these programs and they are um um that and that is what we do. That's our business within executive education. So in 2019, we were all sitting around the table, the leadership team and we um were strategizing for the future. We were thinking about the competition and uh about our long term strategy, we sent out a survey to all our staff and asked a bunch of questions. And the one thing that came back from most people is that we are flying blind and we heard that loud and clear and we started thinking about it and we said, what is going on here, what, what is happening and how can we fix it? And there was a lot of truth to it. It's not that they were lying or they were just making up an excuse. We had several small homegrown systems and databases, information was spread and dispersed.

No one really knew where to get the information and how to make sense of it. And what one person got as data was very different from what another person might get depending on where they looked and who they asked. So we made a huge decision to move all our systems and consolidate them into a sales force platform. It seemed to be the right thing to do at the time. It gave us a lot of advantages. It was a long journey. We ended up doing it. At the end of the day, we felt like we had better data hygiene. We had better governance, we had better information, single source of truth and we felt good about ourselves. And the best thing was we stopped hearing this complaint. We are flying blind. So we thought, hey, this is great successful. So then fast forward to 2023 we are in the situation where I call this place that we are in data rich and insights poor. What does this mean? And what might have happened. This means that we have a lot of data, but we don't have insights. And my theory is that by centralizing the collection of the data, we also probably took away the curiosity of the folks who were used to pulling the data on their own and examining the data and trying to make sense of it.

We took hygiene and governance so seriously that maybe we tied the hands of our staff. We took away their freedom to get their hands dirty to play with the data, to learn from the data. And today people feel that they have to depend on it, not only to get the data, but also to get the insights. So today, we are at a place where we are asking ourselves, how do we build a data rich and a data, curious organization. And towards that end, we came up with three dimensions. The first dimension is people and that's kind of obvious because we need to create an environment that thrives with people who are inquisitive and curious, willing to take risks think differently because ideas after all do come from people, we'll talk about people. But the next dimension is process because once you have curious people, you have to create and so we have to create structures that nurture and support the curiosity in these people. How do we produce and consume data? How can we make that streamlined and easy? Because at the end of the day.

If it is too much of a

lift,

even the most curious person will not be incentivized. So we'll talk about how to think about processes when we are building a data curious organization. And finally, and I think this is probably most critical and also the hardest of the three dimensions is learning how to take the data and the processes and synthesize all of this come up with actionable solutions and ideas. And I will share with you a really simple framework for that. So let's go into each of these a little bit more in detail. And with people, I want to talk about two or three things here. Hiring is the most important thing when you're thinking about having the right people in the right um chairs and doing the right kind of work, you have to think about what are the questions you're asking when you hire people? We talk about hard skills and soft skills. Do we also ask questions that look at a person as a whole? What are their hobbies? What are their, what do they think outside the box for? What are the things that they do beside work? Because all of this comes together when, when somebody is getting creative. So remember to add curiosity questions in your interviews in addition to your hard skills and soft skills evaluation. So now you have fired curious people.

One thing that you should think about doing is to allow them to be creative because you have these really good people who are willing to take risks and do things differently. Give them the space to do that allow them to take risks because curiosity and fear cannot survive together. And here I want to tell you a story that really happened a few years ago within our own department. So we had a sales team that was recently bidding for a multimillion dollar engagement with a large company. So we the team spent months and months putting together a very unique and creative puppet and they didn't want to do something that was always done. They wanted to be creative and different with a lot of cool stuff and put, put into the package things that we had never done before. We ended up becoming one of the two finalists. But sadly, at the end of the day, we lost that sale. So as we were thinking about what happened and how this happened, we also as a leadership team decided to award um the sales team, what we call the Stanford No Award, which is a tradition that we have to reward people for doing extraordinary things. And it is the highest award that we give within our own organization. And we know that sales teams get bonuses and awards for winning business. But here our sales team was awarded the nome for actually losing a crucial sale.

So the thing to remember is let them experiment as long as we can learn something from it. And it was something that we wanted to share with the rest of the organization also that it was ok, you know, to try new things. And if it doesn't work out, we learn from it. And the last thing when you're thinking about people is to encourage or give them time and space to, I call this catching wandering ideas, give them time and space to think and to not always do the same tasks that they've been doing, but just allowed allowing them to think beyond their immediate role and thinking big picture thinking differently.

And I want to just give an example of how I do it in my own work. So this is a calendar from last year, but this is how my calendar usually looks. Um And I have times when I blog on my calendar for catching wandering ideas and I don't know what I would do during this time um on a given day, but I might take a walk. I might talk to friends. I might do some networking. I might listen to a podcast. I might read a book, but usually at the end of this time slot, I'm energized. I come up with ideas and somehow, you know, things fall in place and um you know, my mind comes up with things that are unusual and creative. I also allow my team to do the same and this is something that's a staple on my calendar and my calendar is visible to my boss, to everybody and they all encourage it. So I think the three things to think about as you are thinking about your own people and your own organization is how do you hire better? How do you allow people the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them? And how do you give them the space and block time? As somebody said to catch wandering ideas. Now let's go to process again. This is something that you might be wondering how can curiosity benefit from, from processes. But every creative endeavor needs structure.

Even if you look at the fine arts like music or painting, there are structures and rules and guidelines and parameters within which you know, everybody gets creative. So that is what we have to build within our organization. You'll be really surprised that having good interfaces, clean data.

And most importantly, a common data language can actually make people feel empowered to play with the data, ask questions and experiment with ideas because it should be easy for them to do this. It should be easy for them to know where to go for, to look for data, to pull that data, to think about it and come up with solutions. And the common data language is the most important thing that will help your process become streamlined. It should be simple intuitive and everybody should have the same understanding of the data. And for that we, in technical terms, we call this metadata system, having that metadata system in a systematic way and communicating that to the rest of the staff is really important.

And I have this image of the sales funnel to remind me that this is what happened um some time ago where we had a 20 minute long ferocious discussion from leaders of four different teams. You know, we had the uh product or programs team, we had the sales team, the marketing team, the finance and technology teams. And we were talking about how to better close the funnel, the sales funnel. And at the end of 20 minutes, we realized that closing the sales funnel meant different things to each of us. The four of us that were sitting around the table and we are part of the leadership team. And if it means different things to us, one person thought, you know, get the payment, one person thought just get the leads and one person thought finish the program. Um And if we are so confused and don't have clarity when we talk about simple terms, like closing the sales funnel, imagine what happens downstream. So we decided at that point that we were not doing a good job of communicate, having a good, you know, metadata system and communicating that that is the lesson we learned about clarity.

So I encourage you to think about processes um in terms of hygiene, in terms of single source of truth, but also keep it simple and communicate often. And now lastly, um let's talk about insights and I love this quote by Sam Samuel Taylor Coleridge Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink. And it's the same with data. You can have all the data in the world and not have insights. So what do we do? The two things I want to share with you about data to remember are the first one is data can be

diverse.

It is not just numbers, it's not even just qualitative and quantitative data, but it is all kinds of data. It can be things that we observe. It can be anecdotes. It can be um you know, polls and surveys, it can be by talking to people one on one by um or in a group, it can come from anywhere. So remembering that if you have diversity of data and you have a method and a process for collecting and using this, then you'll have diversity of ideas as well. And the second thing to think about are metrics and Kpis, if you don't have the right metrics and the right proxy to measure those metrics, no matter what data you have, you're chasing the wrong thing. So I would say have a healthy skeptic, skeptic, sorry, skepticism for not only just the results, but I would say question the question, question the process, question the results as well and trust your gut because when you have such diverse data. Say your quantitative data is not jiving with your anecdotal data. And your gut is saying, why is there a difference? They should be aligned.

You stop and you ask and don't be afraid to ask even if it's your colleague who is coming up with something to say, I have a question. I'm not sure why you know how, how this is happening and the more we all are encouraged to do this, I think we can get to better insights. And lastly, I want to share with you um really cool framework and it's not my framework. We have seen it everywhere before, but we use it more often in my own work. It's called the what we call it the what? So what now what framework? And again, I'm going to share a good example from my own experience. I hope that will translate to something that you can apply as well. So we have been running this one flagship program called Stanford Executive Program for 72 years. Now. It's the most expensive program and it is for the most senior executives in the world, usually CEO S of big companies across the world. And we always believe that because the program is so expensive, the companies will have to sponsor their executives to attend this program.

And that was what was happening for a long time. But recently, one of our back office staff members noticed something and she's not in marketing or sales, she doesn't even meet the participants. She just collects the revenue, she just, you know, processes the invoices and gets payments.

So she noticed something, this is observed data again and she comes to us and she says, I noticed something and I have um a hypothesis that companies are no longer sponsoring. So, so we asked, so what, so we have to change our marketing strategy. And that meant that we had to all our participants find out if it is true that they were not being sponsored completely by um the, the their companies and it turned out to be true. And then we took our marketing budget into two different parts. One part was targeting the companies and the other part was targeting the individuals because we realize companies are not paying in full for their employees to attend this program and that is the power of the war. So what now what uh framework where ideas come from everywhere?

And if you ask these questions and take actions, you will come up with good insights. So we have to create this environment within our organizations to help our employees be creative. And to do that, we have to make it cool and fun to be data curious and it should start from the top and go all the way to the bottom. So let me leave you with some questions and, and a couple of um um I'm gonna

skip this and a couple

of um final thought. If you're thinking of a 10% growth in your organization, you're just fine, you know, being having conformity. But if you're looking at a 10

X growth, you

must infuse data curiosity into every fiber of your organization. Um I hope this is useful and I hope my examples can translate into something that you can do in your own work and think about small things you can do. Um uh And I'm trying to look at some of some of the questions. I don't know if you have time. Would you mind giving some advice to recent graduates seeking an entry level data? Um No. Um I think if you're thinking about data of curiosity um in today's job market, I think to, to show that you have cur curiosity in the work that you do, you just have to be able to talk about your hobbies and your interests and, and also some examples of what you have done that's creative.

Even if you're a new graduate, you might have done something new school or in your internship, think about all of that and be able to um get some um uh you know, uh some way into a large organization that uh that actually infuses data curiosity and encourages data curiosity.

I hope this was useful. And thank you again. I'm going to stop sharing and connect with me on linkedin if you can. Thanks again,

I'm gonna at the meeting now. If you're done. Y yes, thank you.