Transcript
Jess Carter: The power of data is undeniable and unharnessed. It's nothing but chaos.
Speaker 2: The amount of data, it was crazy.
Speaker 3: Can I trust it?
Speaker 4: You will waste money.
Speaker 5: Altogether with duct tape.
Speaker 6: Doomed to failure.
Jess Carter: This season, we're solving problems in real-time to reveal the art of the possible. Making data your ally. Using it to lead with confidence and clarity, helping communities and people thrive. This is Data Driven Leadership, a show by Resultant.
Welcome back to Data Driven Leadership. I'm your host, Jess Carter. On today's episode, we're talking to Chris Chin, a programmer, analyst, techie, and now entrepreneur. Chris has turned his ability to deliver engaging and informative presentations into a business, helping other data and tech enthusiasts become comfortable in the spotlight. As Chris puts it, he's helping them "bring out their hidden speaker."
I am super excited for today. If I could ask everyone in my firm to watch one episode of this season, it would be the one with Chris because it's so pragmatic. He explains calmly, as one would expect, but also passionately, why it's so important to care about not just what you're saying, but how you're delivering it or what data product you've made, but how you're going to make sure it's effective and that your listeners and audience are engaged. I took some notes here on things that I want to change about how I deliver important messages, and I am sure you will too. Let's get into it. Chris, welcome to Data Driven Leadership.
Christopher Chin: Yeah, thank you so much, Jess, for the opportunity.
Jess Carter: Absolutely. How are you doing today?
Christopher Chin: I'm doing well. How about yourself?
Jess Carter: I am good. Thank you for jumping on and hanging out with us.
Christopher Chin: Absolutely.
Jess Carter: So, Chris, I'm really excited to talk to you today for a whole bunch of reasons. The first one is you are the first person that I saw on LinkedIn, and was so overwhelmed by how great your content was that, first of all, I just sent it to like, everyone I knew, including all of our like BI Directors and most of our data leads to feel like, hey, can everyone watch his training? But I was just really impressed with the way that your posts on LinkedIn were really practical, really helpful. You could get something out of them and immediately make yourself and your work better. So that's what I know about you, is what I've seen on LinkedIn. So my curiosity, my first easy question is, can you walk me through what your background is and how you got to the point where you're at today?
Christopher Chin: I really appreciate that kind feedback, and I'd be happy to go over my very eclectic background. I actually started in a place very different from data. I started in music.
Jess Carter: Okay.
Christopher Chin: Music composition. So my original aspiration as a kid was to become a famous Hollywood film composer one day.
Jess Carter:
Awesome.
Christopher Chin: I did some work in short film scoring and advertising. And I had an extremely creative outlet back then. Of course, things took a different turn for a variety of reasons. I wanted to pivot into something that was a lot more stable, both financially and from a career perspective, and that's how I came upon data. And data, for me, was this amazing field full of possibility that also had a very quick turnaround time in between music and data. I was actually an engineer, and I worked often with architecture, and buildings can take years to develop, but in data and with programming and code, you can create solutions instantly. And that instant gratification of that ability to create results very quickly was very captivating for me. So I began my journey in data as in deep learning and data science originally. So more of the artificial intelligence route.
Jess Carter: Okay.
Christopher Chin: And I eventually transitioned into data journalism, where it was basically the greatest apprenticeship I had in terms of learning the skills I bring to the fore today. So things like data visualization and how to tell a compelling story to the public, who is, who may be non-technical in nature, how to make sure that we talk about data in a way that's interesting to them, to make them want to look more into the data we can provide. And after data journalism, I moved more into data visualization and storytelling in a more formal sense. So working at different companies, health insurance, mortgage insurance industries, trying to help them create reports, dashboards, analysis, and make better business decisions off of that.
And that brings me to where I am today, where I decided to make the leap and start my own business in coaching and training for data, storytelling, and communication. For me, what I realized working in the industry is you can do amazing technical work, but if it's not communicated well that last mile, the process where you present the data, where you talk about it verbally, then it's not going to have as much value and impact as it could. So my role is to help make sure teams and individuals have the greatest impact they can by knowing how to implement those effective visualization and storytelling principles.
Jess Carter: Amazing. Well, and you obviously found a part of the market where there was an unmet need, this idea of how do you tell the story? How do you communicate effectively? In my experience in consulting with data, we tend to spend up to the very last second working on the product, not prepping how we'll present it. So it makes so much sense to me that there's this need in the market. One question I have about your background. So when you got into the journalism piece, data journalism, that's interesting because you had to present data to people who weren't always quite as data literate. Do you have any insights or findings or something about that is just really interesting to me about maybe an example of something that would have been really meaningful but not to that audience? How did you work through that as a translator?
Christopher Chin: For me, one of the most important things that I always recommend to my clients is to know your audience, and that's something that's thrown around a lot. But I often like diving deeper into that. So what does it really mean to know your audience? For me, that means knowing three times as much as you need to know for the material you're presenting. So you may know the material itself, but to really know your audience, you need to know three levels deeper. So who is your audience, and what is their level of technical proficiency? Also, what information may they have seen in the past that would inform what they're going to perceive your material as? And lastly, the third expansion of that would be what action do they need to take in the future.
If you put all those pieces together, past, present, and future, this whole picture of who your audience is, you can present to them in a way that has an impact. So as an example, when I was working in Data Science, there was an expo at the company I was working at. I was working on a deep learning algorithm to improve classification, and it was my role to present that data in this expo to a variety of different kinds of audiences. And I made sure that I tailored the jargon and terminology I used to the people that I was speaking to. So if it was more technical audience, I had more liberty to go into detail about how the algorithm worked. What are the lost functions that it uses? What are the exact metrics that I used? But for non-technical audiences, so managers and executives that were just casually passing by and want to know more about what I did and how it could benefit them, then I would focus more on terminology that was less not that was less technical. Talking about the higher-level overview. If you were to do something similar in your team, how would it benefit you? So to get them interested and it really comes down to understanding your audience in that way. What do they need from you, and how can you best address those needs?
Jess Carter: That's amazing. That's so neat. So I'm assuming that's part of your service to your clients now, right? Is you're helping them understand their audiences, but what are some of the examples of what an engagement would look like with you, just out of curiosity?
Christopher Chin: Yeah. So I work with clients both individually and at the team level, and what I do and enjoy doing is making it very personalized. What I really feel when it comes, especially to soft skills training, is that it really needs to be personalized to the goals of the person I'm working with because every single person has different speaking goals and also different backgrounds that they come from. So for an individual client, for example, I would meet with them to figure out what kind of presentations they usually give in their workplace,
what kind of communications do they have in their workplace, where do they want to go. Do they aspire for a managerial position? Do they aspire to rise in the ranks in the organization in general? And how can I make sure that their communication is effective to get them to that place?
So I work with clients usually over 2 to 3 months, and we work on different aspects of communication. So one would be knowing your audience. Another would be how to make sure your information is conveyed concisely. So you may have tons of things you want to talk about, but how do you make sure that you synthesize it into a way that it gets to the point the audience cares about? And I talk about things like how to be convincing. So instead of just listing out a bunch of facts that you know. How do you arrange them in a way that convinces someone to do something about it? And also how to speak confidently.
What I have found is that a lot of professionals, technical professionals, tend to be on the more introverted side, myself included, and we prefer being behind the laptop, coding away, and doing our job. But what's often more scary is getting outside of that comfort zone and talking to people and being convincing and confident. So over a series of different lessons, I teach people how to speak confidently, how to feel confident, how to project that confidence in a way that makes people say, okay, that person can be a future leader. So that's the typical game plan I use for my lessons.
Jess Carter: Okay, I'm going to dig with you on one of these concepts philosophically, so we may have some wrestling. I'm curious to see if we do.
Christopher Chin: Yeah. Okay.
Jess Carter: So you are obviously an exceptional communicator. Were you always that way?
Christopher Chin: No, definitely not.
Jess Carter: Okay. That surprises me.
Christopher Chin: I would say
Jess Carter: I thought you were going to say yeah, for sure.
Christopher Chin: No, no, absolutely not. I would actually say something that might surprise you, which is that as a kid and probably going up all the way through college, I was probably the most introverted and quiet student in class.
Jess Carter: Wow.
Christopher Chin: When I say that to people, it surprises them, but what I hope to convey through that is that every single person has the ability to become a confident communicator. No matter what background you come from, no matter how long you've spent feeling unconfident about yourself, if you work on these skills, these soft skills, just as much as the technical ones, you can excel in any domain.
Jess Carter: Okay, so maybe we won't argue over this because I think that is the point I was trying to make is, yeah, so I work in data consulting, right? And what I've noticed over the last nine and a half years is we might have the most intelligent person I've ever met in my life on a client project. And I sometimes couldn't bring them to the client because the tone or approach they used sounded like they knew that. And so it wasn't aligned with the client. It wasn't partner-oriented. It was like, well, yeah, I did all the work and I'm right. And so here it is.
And so we've had this philosophical debate internally for years of, hey, are the soft skills learned? Do you need some innate baseline that makes you interested in calling Chris to see if he can help you? So, you know, the, I haven't quite landed is my belief or my hypothesis on that. But it's exciting to me to see you say between my own experience and those I coach, I can work with anybody, and you will get better. But this is a craft. It's you never reach perfection. So it's got to be about, I assume, continual learning, too. Is that right?
Christopher Chin: Exactly. I've worked with clients that—the most rewarding clients I work with are ones that were like myself, very introverted in school, perhaps, and they didn't have the confidence or at least the resources to know how to become confident as communicators. So I work with them over those two to three months' time, and I can see that transformation take place when they have that proper guidance, mentorship, feedback, and they're given the proper exercises to learn how to speak well and effectively. I can see from beginning to end how much progress we're able to make together.
There was one client I was working with who was very quiet and very shy, and they knew that it was really affecting their career progress. They said to me, yeah, I just get really nervous whenever I have to speak. When someone asks me a question, I blank out. I don't know what to say. And I know that I'm not going to progress in my career and be promoted unless I can work on this skill. And that's why they had reached out to me and I said, we can absolutely work together to make sure that you’re not necessarily overcome by your introversion. I don't believe that introversion is something that needs to be overcome. It's the shyness that needs to be overcome. Your reluctance and your fear of speaking up, not necessarily who you are in terms of your personality.
Jess Carter: Yeah.
Christopher Chin: So I work with them, and I say, if you're in a similar situation, what should you do instead? So if you're in a situation where someone asks you a question, instead of being really nervous about how to respond, take the time to pause and think. Instead of saying a lot of filler words like um and uh, take the moment to think, really think about what the main point is you want to say, and then think about how to structure that in a way that's concise. And I typically offer frameworks like the before-after framework. This is what happened before, this is what happened after, so you can logically arrange your points in an impactful way. Also, point, reason, example, point. Here's the main point I want to say. Here's a reason for that point, an example of that reason. And finally, my main point restated.
Jess Carter: Oh great.
Christopher Chin: And by framing all of your ideas into these organized frameworks, you can speak in a way that's concise and sounds confident because you make it all in an organized package. So by teaching techniques like that and working with clients, having them do recordings of themselves, watching themselves, seeing areas they can improve, they themselves feel that iterative transformation over time.
Jess Carter: And do you feel like has it been hard to break into this niche you have? So there's so much emphasis on the technical skills. Has it been hard to find people who value and understand the soft skills and their importance? Or do you feel like it's sort of been a gate opened, and people totally understand it, but they don't know where to go for help?
Christopher Chin: I think it is something that there's still a bit of a disconnect in terms of its value. There's a lot of people that I work with who will jump instantly to the idea that perhaps I can create a slide deck for them and visually present all their information meaningfully. That's a physical product they get at the end that a lot of people will hop on to, no doubt. But when it comes to working out communication, it's a little more intangible. What value do I really get out of that at the end? And what I say to that is there's so much return on investment by working on your communication in terms of the promotional opportunities you'll get, the respect you'll get from your colleagues, the recognition at your workplace, and I teach that communication is something that makes you feel better about yourself as well. And that's an invaluable increase in return on the investment eye.
The client that I mentioned before, who was very quiet and shy originally, but over the series of lessons together, became very confident about themselves. They realized that it's worth more than any money you can invest is feeling really good about the way you speak. I like to think of it like this. There's a saying that goes, eyes are the window to the soul. But I would argue that it's actually your voice that is the most intimate breath of your soul. A lot of people are hesitant to express their voice because they feel like if they express their authentic selves, it will be criticized, it'll be put down, it'll be challenged, and then they won't feel good about themselves. Not necessarily the idea that they're presenting, but about themselves. And if you're confident in yourself and your value, and your ideas, nothing can stop you from achieving what you want.
Jess Carter: I love this. This is amazing and actively helpful to me. I'm taking notes, for real, about some of your methods. What about the people who don't think they need to invest any time in this? I've done it for 40 years. I'm thinking about an executive that has a board meeting, and they're thinking it's quarterly or it's the big annual meeting, and they've got to come in and, you know, maybe there's some new board members or something. But, you know, there's almost this nervous energy of I can get through it, it'll be fine. I've done this before. I can do it again. Or are you, do you have a hypothesis that you can help even that person?
Christopher Chin: I think that every person, including myself, can continue working on these skills and getting better and better. There was one client I was working with who has a PhD in I believe it was molecular oncology, and they had gone their career not really believing in the importance of presentation and communication. They had succeeded in their career doing all this great research and printing all of these papers. And when I spoke with him, there was that initial reluctance about working together on something he didn't believe was too important. But after our conversation, he realized that he had an important presentation coming up, and he really wanted it to have an impact on the audience. He said, okay, let's give this a go, but let's try this and see and see where it takes us. And over the course of the sessions of us working together, he realized, yeah, this is something that I didn't initially see as valuable.
But now that I speak to the audiences in this new way that I've learned I can, you can feel the difference in how they receive your information. Well, initially, people would pay attention. Maybe they would occasionally look at their phone. Now, when he presents, people don't look at their phone. They pay attention to the whole way through, and they can feel that they're being taken on a journey in a story together. And that kind of transformation is exactly what I hope to achieve for each of the people that I work with.
Jess Carter: Amazing.
So if I'm spending time preparing for a report and I, you know, I want to take some of the things you've even given as examples today and work on my presentation, not just work on my work, the data, or the visualization, but how I present it. Do you advise a certain amount of time? Like, do you say, hey, spend 10% of your effort thinking about the story? How do you advise organizing your own time and energy around that too? Because people usually just burn through too. I'm walking into the room. Whoops. Well, at least everything's good and right.
Christopher Chin: Right. I usually recommend an approach that might sound counterintuitive, but what I found it to be is the most useful approach for approaching presentation is to not create the slide deck first but to actually plan out the story first. Because once you have the story in place, everything naturally falls into place very easily.
Jess Carter: That's great.
Christopher Chin: So let's say we have a bunch of analysis that we've done together in data. We want to present it in a board meeting. The most important thing to do is not just to create slides of all these visuals I want to present, but first say, what do I actually hope to gain out of this meeting? What do I hope to convince people of? What actions do I want them to take? What is the main point that I want to deliver so that if anyone leaving the room after the meeting and they recall what I said, they could summarize in one sentence? Once you understand what that main point is, then you can arrange your presentation to support that main point very easily so you can say, okay, at the beginning, I need to introduce all these ideas so that later on, when I introduce the big idea they want, I want them to remember it makes sense. And then, after that big idea that I introduce, I can push that momentum into it. This is the call to action, what I need you all to do. So I always recommend come up with a story first and then visuals to support it. Don't create a slide deck first because there's a temptation there to just put a lot of notes on the page. It's only when the story comes first that you can synthesize it a lot more easily.
Jess Carter: This is amazing because I always thought that you, I innately assumed that you worked with this kind of data professionals. But Chris, this is your teaching leadership. You’re teaching, you know, an HR person who's about to do a huge release on a new leader or somebody who just joined the company or a new program for the company. I mean, these are people that aren't even just data people or back to maybe some philosophical conversations about everybody's in data these days. I didn't, you know, I look at this and listen to what you're coaching on, and it's about it's just about great communication and leadership. Because if everyone thinks this way, I think about our data teams, too. And sometimes we're running analysis, and we have to step back and say there's a lot of effort that's existed in the last month. Was it valuable? And if you even approach analysis this way or modeling this way and think what does the client really need and how do we determine that story, then the rest of the work falls in line. You're doing the same. It's just fascinating to me to hear you explain this because it sounds so simple, but it's actually like, really hard to do in practice, I think.
Christopher Chin: Absolutely. It is very hard to do in practice. But as you said, I really believe that technical skills, let's say, can get you in the door. But communication and soft skills are what get you hired and promoted, and communication is the key to leadership. I like to think of it like this. At the individual contributor level, as data professionals, we often have this more granular view of the data and the tasks that we're working on. So these are all the processes. These are all the edge cases. This is what I have to look out for. This is what I've done. This is how I've gotten it done. But in order to be a leader, it requires you to look at it from a higher level overview, not just what have I done and how I've done it, but why does it matter? How can it help the business and leadership is about understanding, not just all of the minutiae of the detail, but understanding that bigger picture sense of, okay, I have all this data, what does it mean to the people I'm speaking to? How can I arrange it in a presentation that inspires people to do something about it?
Jess Carter: I think that's great. I hope every single person in our consulting firm listens to this, and some percentage of them reach out to you for coaching because I think it's just so invaluable. This is amazing. Okay, can I geek out about things? I don't know how comfortable you are to talk about your LinkedIn, but can we dig on it just for a second?
Christopher Chin: Sure.
Jess Carter: Okay. I am new to LinkedIn, like in a meaningful way the last six months, and I stumbled across your account, as I mentioned, in the beginning of this episode, and you had maybe two, three, 4,000 followers when I first found you. It's been like 4 to 6 months, and you have 12,000 followers. So you've been busy. I have. It doesn't shock me at all. I think you should have like 100,000 followers. But I'm curious about the guy that has a business helping people tell data stories. What's your story about your LinkedIn? Like you look at this explosion, and I'm curious how you would explain that to, I don't know, a parent or a close friend who's not engaged in any way.
Christopher Chin: Right, actually, my family did ask me about this. So I can speak to it. My brother came upon my LinkedIn profile, and he said, wow, you have that many followers. I can't imagine how much time you must have spent to get to that point. And I said, it's a big journey, and it's a lot of time investment that goes into it. And the only thing I can speak to as perhaps the reason for it is just a lot of consistent, practical advice. So what I hope to provide through each of my posts is a quick, actionable tip that someone can take away and say, okay, I can do that in my work. I want to provide value in that way. Because when I was going through my own transition into data from music, there weren't a lot of resources available to me that said, okay, this is exactly what you need to do, and this is how you, how to make it easy. So what I hope to provide for others in the community looking to do a similar transition is here are the quick and easy ways to take all this complex information you need to know and hopefully, I can put it in a concise way that will make it easier for you to understand and implement in your own work.
Jess Carter: I love it. Well, obviously, that's worked. That's been my experience. When I read through some of your posts, and I've again, I think you're maybe your first training video that I think you posted about. And so I'm going to go ahead and do this. I shared that with some of our team, and they thought it was really helpful too. So it's neat to me that it's been this pragmatic exercise of, is it helpful? Okay. I have to ask you this, too. Do you have any pet peeves? Like when you see either communication, pet peeves? I think you do have visualization pet peeves because I think you've posted about them on LinkedIn. But I'm curious about when data is presented poorly or when the story is bad, or are there unique moments where you're like, please don't do this?
Christopher Chin: I would say I was working with a client recently where they were presenting data in a presentation. It was a quarterly planning presentation, and what had happened was they had talked about a lot of facts that they had found important. It went like, this is what I found, and then I found this, and then this was the result. And then I found this as a result of that result. And what I said to that is similar to what I've said earlier in this podcast, where it's more important to not just talk about all the what and the what and the what, but what's the overarching why behind all of it. So even though you may know why you've put that graph there and why you've given that important fact, but it's, you need to make it apparent to the audience to connect all those dots together. And I like to use the analogy of a line versus a staircase. A lot of facts is just a line of fact, facts, fact. But it's when each of those facts build off of each other, going somewhere that feels important to the audience, that it can feel like a story. It can feel like there's some greater importance here that people should pay attention to. So I helped him rearrange the presentation in a way that didn't just feel like a list of facts but felt like we were going somewhere. And at the end, there would be that powerful call to action that would be make people inspired to take the next steps.
Jess Carter: That's great. Why don't you think people do that innately?
Christopher Chin: I think for us as technical professionals, it comes down to the way that we view the world and the way that we spend most of our time during the day. And recalling my time as a technical and data professional, the only thing I would care about is, is the number correct. Did I make sure that I covered all my bases? Did I check with my colleagues that it is correct that I made sure that all the processes that led to deriving that number, that they're reproducible and someone can check it and test it? So I'm thinking about all these details that the business doesn't really care about. They speak a very different language. They don't care how I got the number. They care about how they can use it, what's in it for them.
And I think the real reason why there's often this disconnect between data teams and business is we speak such different languages because we deal with such different things every day. So data teams, for example, they think about all these technical issues, the business thinks about business issues, and it's only when we can equalize that playing field by talking about that overarching why that we all care about making more money for the business. That's when we can have productive conversations.
Jess Carter: I love it. And maybe my last question, before I see if you have anything else you really want to share, is, have you, do you have a favorite moment when you've been working with like a client and you watch it click? You really watch their transformation, and you're like, I was sitting there observing this board meeting or like, I heard it, and I thought, yeah, like we did it.
Christopher Chin: I was working with a client early on, and I was just continually impressed by how much clicking was happening very, very quickly. And it was when I was trying to go over a presentation he had given, I had watched a recording of it, we were watching it together, and I was giving the advice about a lot of the things that I'm talking about with you today. So what's the overarching why? How do we make sure that we talk about not just what's happening but why it matters? How do we make sure that the slides don't just feel like a lot of notes on the page but they complement the things that you're saying? And I asked him, there was a moment where I said, here, let's watch this recording of yourself delivering this part of the presentation. I want you to think about how it feels for someone in your audience to watch it.
And I had them go through that exercise, and they said, yeah, I didn't realize that it would come off so distancing for me to read the words on my slide word for word. He felt it was an efficient way to deliver the information. It's all there. They can easily reference it afterwards, but by watching himself read every word, word for word, he said, yeah, that that was a tedious experience for me to watch back. And it clicked for him, and he said, you know, it really isn't just about giving information in these presentations. It's really about creating a good experience for the audience.
And that's my mantra when it comes to presentation. It's that it's not about giving information. It's about creating a good experience that inspires the audience to do something about it. An analogy I like to use is there are concerts out there that people pay for, but the same music is available online for free. So why would people pay to go to a concert? It's for the experience. It's not just to receive the same data, the same music. It's to actually go with people, sit in a place, and see their favorite performer perform live. It's the experience that people care about, and as presenters, that's our responsibility. It's to give a good experience.
Jess Carter: It's amazing. It's great advice. I love that. I love hearing you experience him experiencing. That's kind of little meta, but I think it's really neat. Is there anything else that you just an itch you want to scratch anything else you wanted to mention today?
Christopher Chin: I think we covered a lot of great things. There is, yeah. There's nothing else that I can think of in terms of…
Jess Carter: Yeah, I think we covered a lot of great bases. Okay. If people want to follow you, where can they do so?
Christopher Chin: So there's my LinkedIn, and that's my profile where I post during the weekdays about tips for data visualization, storytelling presentation. There's also my YouTube channel, which my handle is Hidden Speaker, The Hidden Speaker, and there's also my website, thehiddenspeaker.com, where I have more blogs and free resources
when it comes to these subjects.
Jess Carter: Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Don't forget to follow the Data Driven Leadership wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review it, letting us know how these data topics are transforming your business. We can't wait for you to join us on the next episode.
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