The unTuned

In this episode, Gaurav invited Modern Monk Anshul Bafna to talk about the importance of spirituality in this always connected and always-ON digital and data driven world. The conversations focuses on what does it take to practice spirituality living a modern life. 

Anshul is a renowned spiritual coach, business psychologist and a mystic. A professionally qualified business psychologist from University of Wetmkinster, A charted marketer , a masters in communication & Entrepreneurship , Anshul is a TEDx Speaker and has received multiple prestigious awards such as India Icon -Zee News, Power Women Award and WEFT Leadership award , for her work in helping corporate and individuals on spiritualty and soul awakening , emotional intelligence and leadership.

Anshul is also the founder of Searchlight| The Soul school that offers a range of development programmes for individuals and corporate.

Storytelling is an important factor in the context that we live in, and businesses are no exception. With the deluge of data and information, while it is difficult to derive the right insights for complex business decision making, having the right way of telling story through data is a critical factor for success.

In this Episode, Gaurav invited Anjali Sharma , the Founder of "Narrative: The Business of Stories" , to talk about the importance of storytelling in business and some best practices around storytelling with data.

Anjali is one of the leading business storytelling consultants, author, global keynote speaker, and founder of Narrative: The Business of Stories. Anjali has spoken on the topic of Storytelling in New York, Russia, India, Singapore, Japan, Australia, and many other Southeast Asian countries. She helps business leaders, data analysts, sales professionals, marketers and TEDx speakers find and tell stories. Anjali has worked in corporate roles for over 18 years in Australia, Singapore, and India. Her background constantly informs her work, so that it is not just theoretical, but based on extensive experience, knowledge, and understanding of strategic issues companies face as well as issues that employees face in delivering their best work. Anjali partners with Global 1000 companies including Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Microsoft, Shell, SAP, Microsoft & Danone. She regularly publishes her ideas on business storytelling on her storytelling blog .

How to become a great problem solver in the complex word that we live in. The multitude of signals , make it difficult to separate noise. It is extremely important to learn the right approach towards problem solving to excel at your job and beyond that. Gaurav brings insights into what does it take to become a good problem solver . Enjoy this episode!

For analytics professionals, there has been a pursuit for getting more and more included in  the consumption of analytics and not only creation. The value addition and impact derivation from all the analytics and data science efforts depends on the acceptance and appreciation of the process by the stakeholders, not only results. The impact of analytics is a long term cultural evolution than making short term decisions only.

The reason creators and consumers have been debating the value of analytics and roadblocks in the maturity roadmap is because of the fact that  the consumers of analytics expect data science to be  full course meal or a gourmet cuisine. Analytic is not for one time satiation, it is to be savoured right from the time it starts cooking

Customer education is the most important part of analytics adoption in an organization. I have worked with many clients who love when they do some hands-on. Analytics is not about providing black box solutions. Make it transparent, have as many conversations as you can, right from the start of understanding the problem.

Learn, account for and explain the ingredients, and also the cooking process; which tools are you using , what hypotheses you are testing , which parts take how much time and iterations. How many other questions you are answering while answering one big question and what cannot be answered. This leads to a discovery based creation and consumption of analytics

Presentation is something you cannot ignore. Simple and intuitive. Think creative. Complex models need to be dressed with self-explanatory attires. Visualization is important. Analytics is as much as Power point as it is Python

Leave some open ended questions. Do not close everything, keep your analysis and the results open enough to hit the curiosity button of the stakeholders. It is good to have ‘Not so complete’ analysis and let people walk out of the room with some take-aways and think-aways

Just having #bigdata is not enough. Just having people to work on data, is also not enough. One needs to exhibit the human aspects with a purpose and commitment to make data do wonders for them.

#Data #Science is a #mind game. Every aspect of data science is related to some aspect of #psychology, because data is nothing but psychology baked into decisions. In this episode, Gaurav uncovers the conscious , sub-conscious and un-conscious sides of data science.

Thanks to Sigmund Fraud for all the fascinating discoveries in human Psychology. I have always been fascinated about how human psychology plays a vital role in decisions we make and how it is inevitable to be understand how human psychology works before you get into improving customer experience and talking about machines replacing human thinking.

One of the major discoveries which Fraud has is around the different states of mind, namely, conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious. From Psychology perspective, our conscious mind is responsible for interactions and decisions we make, sub-conscious is responsible for processing of recent and active information, and unconscious is the dormant state of mind. Ironically what looks the most active is only about 10% of our brain’s capabilities, sub-conscious is around 50-60% and unconscious is about 30-40%. Conscious is like a Screen, sub-conscious is like a processing unit and conscious is like a storage unit.

I see a relevant analogy to this with the way data and the science around it works.  Let’s relate the conscious part of analytics to be as ‘Output: Visualisation’, sub-conscious as ‘Analytical processing: Algorithms’ and unconscious as ‘Storage: Historical data.

Listen!