#192 [Radar Recap] Building a Learning Culture for Analytics Functions, with Russell Johnson, Denisse Groenendaal-Lopez and Mark Stern

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Welcome everyone to the session on building a learning culture for analytics functions. You know, as we know Data Camp, we can't stop talking about learning data skills. And this session is definitely right up our alley. As organizations continuously invest in upskilling, whether for analytics teams or not, creating a culture of continuous learning isn't just beneficial, it's essential. So how do you build the culture of continuous learning? How do you sustain it over the long haul? And how do you measure a learning culture? So while there are no better guests to answer these questions than today's panelists, I'm going to start with Russell Johnson, Chief Data Scientist at Marks and Spencer. Russell, good to see you.

Hey there though.

How are you?

Good afternoon.

Good, good. Awesome. So Russell is the Chief data scientist for MNS, one of the UK's most trusted retail brands and part of the Fortune 100 index. He leads the AI and data science team which has helped to unlock seven figure cost savings across the enterprise and eight figure incremental revenue through online personalization. Prior to joining MNS, Russell held leadership roles at Meta, including heading the data science organization for Meta's Reality Labs. He has an academic background in neuroscience and has active side interest in history, organizational behavior, sailing and surfing. He's originally from Atlanta in the US but he's joining from London. Next up is Denise Groenendal Lopez. Denise, good to have you on.

Hi everybody.

Denise manages the learning programs for technical audiences across booking.com she's an expert in using technology, data and modern HR practices to identify and solve learning needs. He's a datacom for Business administrator. She has been heavily involved in the Booking.com data training program and she was previously a Learning Manager at Dakar Solar and Phillips. Last but not least is Mark Stern, VP of BI analytics at BetMGM. Mark, good to see you. Yeah.

Hello everybody. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.

Awesome. So mark has over 20 years building and managing business intelligence analytics teams. He is an expert in Building data and machine learning capabilities to inform decision making and deliver profit and cost saving. He previously ran BI departments at Entain Gala, Coral Group and bet. Frank, Fred. So I'm going to set the stage for today's conversation by deep diving maybe into the why behind building a learning culture. You know, you're all actively engaged in the upskilling agenda of your organizations, so maybe help us set the stage behind the motivation of why a learning culture. So what does a strong learning culture within an analytics function looks like or even broader within the organization? And why is it important? Russell, I'll start with you.

You know, when we talk about a lot of the stuff that's been happening in the last year or so, especially around AI, people won't adopt what they don't understand. Right. So I mean, we always talk about how the first sort of AI use case that we launched at MNS was an educational use case. Right. Bringing people up to speed with something. Right. I think it's really clear from history, right? People don't adopt new technologies if they're afraid of it. And the best way to sort of counter that fear is through a bit of education. So if you're not educating people first and foremost as your primary use case, as your initial use case in any new technology, whether it's printing presses or, you know, looms in factories or AI, then that fear is going to hold people back from driving that adoption.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And Denise, maybe let you add here as well, on top of what Russell said.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think data is just a fundamental nowadays, Right. So I cannot think of any department here@booking.com that does not have business analysts or data analysts. Right. It's just everywhere it informs our decision making. We are better at making choices because of their insights they have. Right. So it's just a new reality for us. And more and more of these data roles are just coming, right. They're proving their value every day. So it's to see even more of this coming.

Yeah. And Mark, explain maybe the motivation behind building a learning culture at betmgn.

Yeah. So in my mind, I work on a performance triangle and each point of that triangle as a word. One word is enjoyment, another is delivery, and another is learning. And all three have got to be balanced. And if they're not, then you have to address that. The fundamentals for performing at an excellent, excellent level, I think. So learning is part of one of those three points of that triangle.

That's great. And we've uncovered the why. Maybe let's dig deep into the how and the what. Right. So learning cultures are not built overnight. Right. Like any culture change program, any large scale change within the organization does not happen overnight. And many leaders today are here trying to get started maybe with building their own learning culture. So as a first step, how do you assess your current organization or team's learning culture? Denise, I'll start with you here because this is, I think, a very specific HR question probably to think about at the beginning.

Yeah, yeah. I think for booking.com, we're in a very specific situation that learning or learn forever is one of our company values. Right. So we really live up to those expectations. And also we do a great effort in upskilling our managers. So they're supportive, they understand how important development is. Right. But this is just development that gets us to get the objectives that we are doing. Right. On top of that, we have a very fostering community of learning from each other. Like, we have a great pool of internal trainers. Right. That's also how you get recognized for your expertise because you get to share it with others. Right. But also we incorporate mentoring portals. Right. So you really get to know more people in your role in other areas that are having similar challenges.

Right.

So you can also increase your network but solve stuff at the same time. Right. So we're very rich. And on top of that, we're a tech company, so we have a great culture of experimentation from failing, from learning from your failures, but also quite open communications. Right. There's a lot of stories and testimonials shared in our internal social media channels. So it's just so organic, so embedded into our daily work that I think it's something quite unique, I would say. Right. It's just a pleasure to be part of it.

Yeah. And maybe I'll double down here and ask you an additional question, Denise. When you think about the formula, because you mentioned it's really deeply embedded in booking.com's culture. Right. What do you think are the main ingredients that make it so? And I'll jump back to you, Russell and Mark, after that.

I think that it doesn't feel like the traditional learning that you have to do or that is heavy. I think as part of the topics and as part of how engaged, specifically this data science, analytics, craft, how we call it internally, it just seems so organic, so fun. It's very collaborative. It just seems like you are achieving something together and learning from each other. It's less of a burden, so to say. Right. You're just doing it with Colleagues with like minded people.

So.

So I think that's what makes it a real success, to be honest.

Okay, great. And Russell, maybe what was the first step at MNS when, you know, building out the learning capabilities for analytics right early on in the journey, when you think about assessing the current learning culture and how you think about scaling it.

Yeah, I mean, just to what Denise just said. I mean, it's that peer to peer aspect that's really different about analytics and data science learning. I think when you take an organization as big and as sort of diverse as Marks and Spencer, I mean, we have over 70,000 employees, all but 5,000 of which are sort of frontline employees, colleagues that we have in store, obviously the training and educational needs, those colleagues are very different from what we would think about sort of data and data science, although there is a lot of overlap. So how do you do upscaling for data data science analytics for those individuals in the course of doing frontline type of work? That's important, but that's more of a traditional L and D type function for a retail organization. How it's different for what we do. People within digital and technology, for example, is a little bit more along the lines of those that peer to peer sort of aspect that Denise was referring to. So building things from the ground up, we actually have a separate L and D function within digital and technology, which is the organization that I roll up into that does all of, as the name suggests, digital and tech within M and S. And we have the Beam Academy that we built from scratch, you know, in partnership with Data Camp and yourself, Adele, having different sort of methods and motivations and outcomes that we're trying to drive with that bespoke sort of educational organization that we have in Beam Academy, I think that's helped us sort of be more successful than just a broad based generalized L and D function.

Yeah, that's great. We're definitely going to talk about the Beam Academy and yeah, maybe Mark let you expand here on what Russell and Denise said.

Every quarter we have an engagement survey in the whole organization. I think if you're not learning, you're probably not engaged. My team for the last six quarters have been in the top percentile, that organization survey. So it's keeping that. I encourage people to try new things. If I trust someone in my team and they're in their team, they're trusted, they trust them to fail. And so in order to stretch themselves and to learn, they've got to try new things and sometimes fail. So that's also important.

And A lot of you have mentioned a few things, right? Peer to peer learning, community and culture, embedding learning as part of the daily work and the culture. And Mark, you just mentioned here something really important. Encouraging people to learn and experiment. And maybe as a follow up here, I'd love to see some examples of how your teams or organizations are embedding learning in daily work. What does that look like in practice? Mark, I'll start with you.

So a number of things. So first thing that my team is when you join the team, everybody gets a complimentary Data Camp license for everybody. They're encouraged to use it, the technical skills. So they're really encouraged to make time and space for it. And we share time with Data Camp. We've been to your offices in, in the Empire State, we invite you over here in Jersey City and we've watched the game together in our bar. We're responsible at the end of the day. So part of that is again having fun and enjoyment. But also we run hackathons with you. So trying new things, stretching the minds. We also do a lot of stuff. We also brought in a whole week where we did data consultancy skills, presentation and stuff. The 20 people that went on that, we encourage that to filter down. So that happens. And today we've had everybody in the office and we have three or four presentations where people who want to share some of the work they've done. And so all of that encourages people to learn from each other and collaborate and stretch your minds.

Yeah, that's great. And maybe Denise Russell, how is learning look like in the flow of work for employees@booking.com and MNS? I'll start with you, Denise.

Thank you. Yes. I think it's building up what Mark said right here. Booking hackathons are also prominent format. Right. And I would say there's no escape because we have so much formats and platforms for them to explore that we're really catering all their preferences and really formats. Right. Of how they like to learn. So we also measure quite often engagement on different platforms. Right. We take also monthly meetings with Data Camp to understand the data. Right. What's the data telling us? We also have a lot of. This group actually creates their own internal conference. So they're super engaged. Right. On top of that we allow them to go to external conferences as well. So it's just really plenty of formats for them to explore. Like I said, they can even be mentors and internal trainers. So I would say there's no escape, right? There is everywhere a learning opportunity. We have books everywhere. So is very present, very embedded here in the physical environment here at the campus as well. Right.

I feel like a tagline for a learning culture. There is no escape, really sets the scene for the wider organization. There is no escape from learning. Russell. Yeah. Maybe share with us how does the learning and the flow of work look like for mns?

Yeah, I mean to double down on a couple of different points. Number one, the hackathon concept is great. You know, I mean I've. I've had the privilege of sort of seeing that work at a couple of different companies when I was at Facebook. Where that sort of culture comes from. I think originally and certainly do the same sort of thing over at M and S. I think it's just, it gives visibility and some time and a safe space for people to basically not just produce ideas. Right. Which is sort of the core part of the hackathon culture, but also just to meet other like minded people that are sort of movers and shakers. Those thousand points of light, those peer to peer sort of interactions that Denise was talking about earlier, I think that's, you know, really a lot of the positive value. And we also do a couple other things on the team. You know, all of my heads of gear, we all have presentation sort of parts of our KPIs, our goals, very much an each one teach one kind of mentality. Right. We're expected to be evangelists as much as we are expected to be data scientists. I think it's an important part of the role. It's no good sort of being in the back closet somewhere crunching out models and spreadsheets and dashboards. I mean, you've got to be out there educating and sort of inspiring people to get excited about not just data, but what it can do in an organization.

Yeah, and I want to touch upon that. Russell, you mentioned the term evangelizing within the organization. I think that's such an important element of any learning culture. Maybe diving a bit deeper there. You know, a big thing that we think about is how to not just get executive sponsorship for a learning program, but how do you get executive excitement for a learning program? How do you lead by example as a leader when trying to establish a learning culture within the organization? Mark, you also mentioned this. You alluded to this when you mentioned you encourage your team to learn, to experiment, to try new things. Maybe what would be the advice that you would give leaders or would be leaders here on the call on how they can set an example for the team on how to embed learning as part of Daily work or the team's culture, essentially. Mark, I'll start with you.

Yeah. So it's important to promote your team. The new work that comes out, it's important to get it surfaced, help them present it. I think, look, we talked about these hackathons. Not only just doing the hackathons, we also got, you know, in the team. Team arranged this. I. I didn't. They set it up and it just. Just encouraged it. But they even got the chief executive, the CRO, to judge it. So they're not only that there's a. There's a high bar in terms of present, they're getting good feedback from those sort of people and they're seeing people that the company who really, really show by putting their time and effort towards it. It's valued. So, yeah, it's about, as a leader is just stand at the back and try and promote. And when people have ideas, encourage it. Encourage it to happen.

Yeah, that's great. And then maybe. Russell, you know, we've worked quite a bit. We're going to touch upon the Beam Academy. But there's.

I'm.

One thing that I'm always impressed about with Marks and Spencer is just how much excitement of a culture there is around learning, how much effort there is. So maybe walk us through that bit, kind of the executive sponsorship and how leaders have set an example for a lot of different folks within the organization to approach learning.

I mean, last year, I mean, in 2023, I mean, we certainly. A lot of the technological advances in AI kind of threw us a bone here, right? A natural experiment in sort of how we can do better executive engagement. Because, you know, unless you're working for a big tech company or something like that, most CEOs were not sort of ready for that, right? It was. Suddenly, I'm on the back foot. What kind of CEO am I? Am I the CEO that's sort of has good people in place that can sort of help to inform and educate about a new technology? I myself might not understand? Or is this something sort of scary that I need help understanding, but don't have the right people in place? So putting those events together, I think is really, really important. Getting people in and saying, like, you need to be a leader as a CEO, you need to be an executive sponsor of this, even if you don't necessarily understand it. And by coming a judge at a hackathon or participating in some of these events that we run, like our AI events that we. That we did last year, Adele, that you participated in, this is a great Way to basically say to a CEO, look, you can lead on this, even if you don't really understand what it's all about, you don't have to understand what it's about. You can be a leader by simply participating and judging and then just having a curious mind about it. And it's that culture of curiosity that sort of, I mean, we talk about sort of first principles. I mean, we're talking about education here on this particular webinar. But even before that, you need to instill this culture of curiosity. And that's what we're sort of leaning into executives with. Be curious and then we can help you be educated.

Yeah, that's great. And Denise, maybe, you know, learning is a big part of the booking.com culture already. So maybe I'll reframe the question for you. How did you know the early executive team@booking.com from a, you know, leadership history perspective? How did it initially forge that as a cultural value? Like what were, what, what were the behaviors of the leadership team that got, you know, codified as part of the, of the culture that it became such a strong cultural value?

Yeah. And I think thinking about what you both said, it's also the habit of sharing, right. In qbrs, in mbrs, quarterly business reviews or monthly business reviews, the impact. Right. What are you doing better as a result of this? How is the initiatives that we are putting all these formats, how are they allowing you to do your work better or to actually reach your objectives? Right. So that sharing also brought in perspective from other teams to say, I'm going to give it a try. Right. I was quite hesitant, but after seeing the success of this team, I may give it a try. Right. So that also helps unlock the resistance and also be more open to consider. Right. Again, it's a lot of sharing of. Okay, is this really giving us the results we want? Are we also serving our customers better as a result of this intervention of this program? Right. So I think ultimately the results and the testimonials are actually doing the job. You're basically getting your job done. So then you get more prompt into what else can we try? Can we do it faster, more, I don't know, in a fun way? Right. Or more scalable. But it's always based on those results, the impact of all these programs and all these efforts.

Yeah. Russell. Mark, I'm not sure if you want to react to that as well, like maybe walk through us. How kind of a results oriented approach also feeds into the learning culture. So, Russell, maybe I'll start with you here.

Yeah, I think on some of our certification programs, I mean when we talk about things that happen in our Beam Academy like our L and D function that's specific towards digital and technology. We talk about the number of certification when we do events, we talk about the, the reach. You know, we have it's, it's very, very sort of campaign driven, metric driven. We look for outcomes. So I, I think that's sort of what distinguishes it from a lot of other L and D type programs. I mean when you got an L and D program that has, that's trying to advance the course of data, it only makes sense that you use a lot of data in order to evaluate the.

Yeah, that's great, Mark.

Maybe.

Yeah, walk us through how results factor.

In here thinking to tie this together. So one, one thing we do. So this is about just learning as part of your job and as part of the organization and does ultimately data driven, but means actually you've got a learning culture within your organization. So one of the things we have set up is a causal laboratory. And so the causal laboratory means that anybody, any customers that come on are randomly selected. So I get a small percentage of every customer. They belong to me, marketing and my team. Okay, so you don't get any marketing. And my job is to therefore experiment and understand and demonstrate lifting performance and demonstrate I can perform better than the marketing team, the CRM. So there's a big challenge. Right. It's a learning. Not only is it a nice competition, but actually we're creating value and we're all learning in the process. So coming through. And often people say that they're learning a daydream when they got a report that's not learning. You take risks and you've got to allow to give to gain something very precious.

I love that as a challenge, you know, definitely. There's no escape and challenge are both great kind of taglines and motivators here. Maybe one thing that. Sorry Russell. That you interjected.

I was gonna say Mark, by the way, I'm writing this down actually. I mean if I can yield 10% of MNS's marketing budget and divert it to data science.

Yeah, that's what I knew what they were signing up to initially. You have to give me some notes.

On how to do that.

Yeah, that's great. And there's one question actually we got in the question section that I was planning on exactly asking it myself. So I'm actually, I'm gonna let Awani ask it himself. So initial enthusiasm for learning is common. But how do you maintain momentum over time? How do you prevent learning initiatives from becoming just another checkbox? You know, I was gonna talk about how big of a challenge it is to sustain learning momentum over time over the long haul. Right. Russell, you know, you've been at the Beam Academy, at least, at least to my knowledge. It's been a few years now. Yeah, yeah. So maybe walk us through how you've built approach building and keeping momentum, for example, behind learning, what best practices you have. I'll also relay this question to Denise and Mark. So, yeah, walk us through. How do you sustain learning momentum over time?

I love the question, right? Because, I mean, I think we've all been through the little box checking exercises of taking a health and safety, you know, or an anti fraud sort of L and D type of quiz, right? These are not the things that anybody willingly signs up for and, and rebels and spending their free time doing. Right.

I love security IT training.

I love learning my security badge as much as the next 30 minutes on a, on a survey to do that. So, I mean, if we take that as sort of the example of what bad looks like and then flip that on its head, like, how do we make that a little bit more alive and make people want to do that? Nobody wants to take a health and safety test all the time, but we want people to be like, have a lifelong interest in sort of evangelizing their own learnings and helping others to learn things around data and data science. So I think, as I mentioned, we have the Beam Academy here, which is our dmt, our digital and technology learning and development function. I think from the beginning it was sort of set up to do something really different, you know, educate. We have 75,000 employees, including a lot of frontline colleagues working in stores. The digital skills necessary in order to, you know, do your work as a colleague in store, as a store manager, as a regional sales manager for Marks and Spencer. That's what Beam Academy is there to support you doing. And there's lots of certifications where people can do that and. But it also caters towards people that are interested in upskilling themselves and other things as well. You know, everything from Excel technology to data analysis. We have Quite a few L7 graduates as well, and data science. So all of these are sort of now embedded in the business. And so we have that thousand points of light kind of thing that the Beam Academy is helping to create. And then how do you fan the flames, right? How do you keep those embers going rather than just like separating all those embers and scatter them away from the fire and suddenly everything sort of dies out and stops producing light and heat. You've got to bring the embers back together in these events. And we do a lot of events with Beam Academy. Adele, you had the. You had the. Well, we had the privilege of having you into one of our. Let's Talk. You added a bit of excitement to it, so thank you again for that. Events like that, where we have a lot of people in the company that are attending remotely and in person. I mean, our let's Talk AI event, where we basically talked about here' AI technology and here's what it means for the future of Marks and Spencer. We. We did that fairly early last year and we had. I think we broke all the records in terms of internal events of any kind that we did at M and S last year. That was the big thing. And I think most of that was you were driving the attendance there.

I wouldn't say so myself, but yeah, I think a lot. A lot. A lot smarter people on that panel than. Than me, but. Yes. Okay.

But we had a really, really good time. And I think more importantly, we really got the attention of executives. Hey, what's going on? Let me understand how you're framing this. What's. How this works for the company, but also it gives everybody a chance who's really interested in it to come in and then participate. And the evangelists create future evangelists through that program.

Yeah, that's great. I love that point, the last point at the end of the ambassadorship of that effect that you see when you build up excitement. Denise, Mark. Denise, I'll start with you. Yeah. How do you sustain learning over the long haul?

Yeah.

So part of my job is to really create a monthly newsletter. Right. Of everything that is new. But also we tailor that newsletter to the audience. But also what's going on in that season. Right. What are people naturally thinking about, for example, January is all about building better habits, for example. Right. So how do you support also the personal need that this person have and then just try to leverage that? On top of that, we do a lot of communication, quarter monthly. Right. On acknowledgement as well. Who has completed what, like some sort of leaderboard in some programs. Right. But acknowledgement of the effort, because that's the behavior we want to role model. So those who are doing it, like, we're trying to celebrate it. Right. And I think we've done a very data driven approach already, so we're able to understand what are the natural peaks and what's the Natural flow. So we already know Q3 is a very strong quarter for people to learn. It's also a bit of like back to school school of what's happening outside work. So we tried really to build campaigns somewhere in September with win cool prizes, right. Or we tried to celebrate or find an excuse, depending on the audience to try to just bring that excitement and help them think also how can that relate into the work and the programs that we have. But it's really data driven, understanding the audience that we're catering. But it's a lot of communication, right? What's new, what's popular, Give it a try also hear how it's helping other people. Right. But it's constant acknowledgement as well. Even at the end of the year we saw like emails, those internal trainers that help us drive learning, how many sessions they did, right. Was it well received? So all these really makes it as part of like once you close a year, you are able to see okay here in this quarter we did this quarter two, we got that. And just sharing that with the actual learners or calling cp, they already are waiting to hear what's going to be the next event in September type of thing. Right. So yeah, we also tried to give prices or gamified in a way so that they just build up the excitement on this. But acknowledgement, acknowledging the efforts, it's also really a good effort, right. Whether it's from the L and D team or the manager itself or the team, it's something that is also part of the campaign and the communications that we run.

I couldn't agree more, especially on the acknowledgment side. Mark? Yeah. I'll let you expand on how you approach building a learning culture over the long haul at BetMGM.

I think Denise, that's a good point. The acknowledgement, I think that's important to keep the encouragement going. When we got feedback, I got feedback. It was less about acknowledgment from me or more senior leaders or people on the side. It was more the contemporaries that they want knowledge for. I think that is better. So that's a key for me for getting them to share their work with their contemporaries. But I try to hire natural, curious people.

Right.

And then your job is just to feed that curiosity as a leader and try to create new data sets. Find new data sets more difficult, interesting problems, new tech, new techniques or something we never tried before. So just encourage it and open that up.

Yeah, that's really great. And in a lot of ways, a lot of what you're Discussing here, especially Denise and Russell, when you discuss kind of the Beam Academy and what you do with the campaigns, is that the learning leader, data leader, whoever is in charge of the analytics upskilling program, needs to think a lot of times like a marketer rather than just a traditional learning and development professional or data leader. Right. Maybe walk us through what skills from that marketing hat you need to adopt to be able to succeed at building a learning culture for the long haul. Denise, I'll start with you.

Yeah.

I think it's also a lot of understanding your audience, right? Like who are they, what tools are used, what formats they use even to communicate. Because I think you need to mirror and be where they are, meet them where they are, try to speak their language, acknowledge the challenges that they have, give them some hope that we are trying to work on the same goals. That's why we're trying to expose them to different alternatives or different formats. But that's always a joint effort that we're trying to get something for. What right is it that we're trying to reach our goal? Like server customers better. Right. But jump in the same collaborative spirit by speaking their language. Right. Just posting or writing in the channels where this community is active. That's quite a good step, right, in understanding who your audience is. Just be part of it as much as you can.

And Russell, what are some great marketing tactics that have worked mns?

Yeah, I mean, like Denise mentioned, I mean, it's a lot of internal, internal marketing. You know, I think about somebody who does this really, really well. I'll just give a quick name shout out to Lindsay Marshall, who runs our B market.

Yeah.

And Adele. I know you know Lindsay really, really well, but Lindsay is like, in my mind, like an expert within a fairly siloed organization like M and S. You can just imagine different business units, all sort of contributing D and T. Digital and technology is sort of a partner to all. But he like Lindsey, in order to do that job really, really well, as she does, is you've got to tailor that message to the audience. And that means doing something somewhat different for clothing at home that you might do for foods. Right. You know, within. Within M and S. I think Lindsey does that really, really well. And then basically be able to put those different sort of marketing messages and different ways of talking tailored messages, but still be able to synthesize the whole so you can see the entire outcome.

Yeah. And Mark, marketing tactics that worked at BetMGM.

Yeah, it's a large part of my role, a huge part of my role. People don't realize that I'm an analyst at heart, but actually I spend less and less time in the data. But it's about. Look, we have, once a month we have the analytics steering group is chaired by the CEO and the C suite. My job is to present what's going on. Are we getting the right direction, the priorities, the direction of the team? We push the engagement stuff. Then more recently we've just had a roadshow with the product leaders, sharing with them for two hours everything we do. So putting together that insight and that presentation and putting it isn't a straightforward task. It takes days, it sometimes takes weeks to pull that together and take that through. So yeah, it's incredibly important part my job, incredibly important part.

Yeah. Couldn't agree more. It's an additional skill set to have as a leader that is extremely important that no one tells you you need to have. As we close, as we close out, you know, what is one single piece of advice you would give to analytics leader or a learning leader or any leader on here on the call for that matter when it comes to building an effective learning culture. Denise, I'll start with you.

Yeah. And I think it goes to understand your audience, what is burning for them, what's important for them and just really bring that awareness also not just for their unit. Right. But what are we trying to achieve as the function largely. Right. What are the challenges that we have broadly speaking, but also internally. Right. Where do you want to start? Like have some really alignment with maybe a career framework that you have. Right. Different skill sets or levels. But I think it's really about being with your audience. Understand what's top of priority for them and just stay super close to them.

Yeah, it's awesome. Mark, your single advice.

Just keep checking in with yourself that you are continually learning and continually driving forward yourself and you're continually curious and then. And share that enthusiasm with the people in your team.

Great. Russell, your final advice.

Yeah, I think just like I mentioned, just like last year, I mean sort of history kind of threw us a bone with AI suddenly becoming top of mind for everybody. I would say like for organizations that are, if you really find it, that you're struggling to create an L and D type of function, you know, that can skills in data and data science. Don't be afraid of using those pain points or that misunderstanding or things that people are worried about in order to say, hey, I'm doing something more than just creating a general L and D program, I'm solving a particular business problem or a particular business fear or a particular business pain point. And then get as specific as possible with your executives and say, this is what I'm trying to do. I'm going to solve this problem and then use that to sort of springboard and yourself and your program into a broader L and D function for data and data science.

That's great. So I'm going to have a question from Jerreen, which I think is going to be really relevant. How do you build a data literacy culture from scratch? When a large proportion of the workforce are unfamiliar with data literacy? Where do you start? Denise, I'll start with you here.

Yeah. And I think we did that a couple of years right ago with some topics. And I think this is great. When we build some foundational programs. Right. And you try to put cohorts of people. Right. Or business units, but you are really driving a lot of communications into let's build this together. We want to build this foundational level because of these. Right. Always tied to the relevance. Why now? Why this? So, but I think if you do it as part of, like, you're not alone with this. Right. You're more. You're one of those who want to build this foundational knowledge. If you do it as a group, always thinking what is going to be the benefit for yourself, but also for your team. That's how we did it. Right. And how it really paid off.

That's great. And maybe, Mark Russell, do you want to expand on that?

I mean, what do you do if a large proportion of your employees are not familiar with data literacy? I would turn that on his head and say, well, there is still a proportion of people that are familiar with data literacy within your organization. Find them. We keep talking about peer to peer over the course of this conversation we're having today. Find those people, get them together. Then you've got small embers. You push those together and you can get some light and heat from it and then use that as the foundation. These are the people that are interested. These are your future evangelists. And then look at where they are in the organization. If they're confined to one fairly specific part of the organization, that's one problem to solve. But if they're more generally spread, then you're closer to that kind of transformation than you think you are. You just need to push those embers from a common fire back out into the organization and just add oxygen.

That's great. Mark, your final note here on this one.

Yeah. There's always going to be a large portion of the company or the people you work with who aren't data literate in some ways or form. Our job is to try to get that data easily accessible for them, but also help them understand it, interpret it. That's tough. Sometimes it's tough. But you have to spend time and effort, weeks, months with people to help them. But your job is as a data analytics expert is to within a way is to build up your own credibility, your own brand so people start coming to you for help and advice. That's the best thing I do. That takes time and like most good things, it takes time.

So true.

It's well worth the effort when it happens.

And I would add one final remark right that it's also a lot of communication because this is basically a building block that is going to allow you to continue right into really becoming better and achieving what you want to achieve faster. So that's also a very powerful message to give them hope to acknowledge. It's going to take you time, it's going to take you effort. Right. But I think if you focus the communications on that level, it's also a nice powerful statement.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Another question here from Katie. It's a pretty strong question. It was mentioned in a previous session about change management. How can we encourage senior members of the team so leaders to upskill their data literacy instead of passing it off to junior members as they assume we are more tech savvy. So yeah, maybe a broader question. How do you approach the data literacy of senior leadership rather than the broader organization? Denise, I'll start with you here as well.

Yeah, it's an interesting question because I think if you got to be senior is because you've demonstrated some behaviors, that would be one. And you also are curious and you're learning and you're being part of the learning culture. So I don't think we've had that particular challenge here. But I think even if we do, like I said, there is no escape that you're going to be still involved. And whether it is your direct reports asking can I go to this conference? This is going what I'm going to get knowledge right internally. There's plenty of opportunities. So eventually you end up being part of something. Right. Even perhaps a bit of peer pressure in a way, if you want. But I think it's just so natural just to hear right at end the if someone is having the results that you also wanting to achieve. Yeah, I think it's really. You're going to give it a benefit of the doubt. Right. And at least try it so, yeah, I don't think that's a particular problem we have@booking.com but yeah, if we had, we'll tackle it that way. Right. And also, everybody understands the role in development here. Right? You as an individual, you drive it. So you're also able to push your manager for more feedback or insights. Right. But you as a manager also understand what is your role into driving and fomenting knowledge as well, right?

Yeah. That's awesome. Mark, maybe how would you approach, you know, building a learning culture when it comes to data skills, data literacy for, you know, more senior people within the organization rather than more junior folks.

So for me, we have a. We have a team philosophy. And a part of that team philosophy, and it was built by members of the team and myself, is that it is our job to change people's minds with data and analytics. That's one of our key roles. And so that includes me and includes the whole team. And so you have to. The way you present the way, you have to understand the political environment as well. So some people may firmly believe that something is right even when they don't know they've invested it. You have to know that they've invested a lot of effort and stuff. And if your analysis is going to show the opposite, then you need to be wary of that and communicate accordingly. And so today we had two pieces of analysis that was presented, one which was to do exactly that. It was such a difficult piece of analysis to do. A lot of been invested and basically said it didn't work. That piece of analysis changed the people, changed the minds of the people and changed the actions. They actually reversed what they did. And then the other thing was really nice, a piece of analysis around someone called Caitlin Hanks, who's actually changed betting behavior. And she showed that. And suddenly that sparked ideas and sparked change within the organization. So two very nice pieces of analysis that driven actual actual change. And so that happens at every levels of the organization. It's my job to help do it at the senior level, but it should ripple down. So if you learn it at the lower levels and actually it will ripple up to when you. If that's what you choose to be, if you want to be a data leader at the end of your career, then that also will be an important part of your learning process.

That's excellent. I'm going to ask one more question, but only direct at Russell, since he spoke quite a bit about hackathons. For hackathons, you need people who like to share and are good team players and are engaged within the organization. What's the best approach to encourage these individuals in the team to share their knowledge with others? So I worked with you in the past, Russell, and creating kind of engagement for hackathons.

Yeah, I mean, maybe just push back a little bit on the question actually. Because I think the presumption in the question is that you need to be an evangelist in order to even participate in a hackathon. And I think a good hackathon isn't necessarily that way. Right. You know, some people are volunteers, some people are voluntold, some people are suitably incentivized in order to participate. Call it what you will. Right. Something we did when we had a hackathon around AI. The whole thing was generative AI. That was our second hackathon from last year, I believe it was in October. We had a lot of great ideas, really broad base of support and entrance from around M and S. But because of the generative AI aspect of it, one thing I really pushed back against was we had a lot of great ideas within the data science team. We've got a team, around 45 people here and they just wanted to create their own teams. And I'm like, you know, we can't be like the, what was it, the 1988 US basketball entrant into the Olympics. Right. Where you have all athletes competing against non professional amateurs around the rest of the world. So what we did is basically say we can't have that kind of one sided evangelism. Don't just get the people who know facing off against the people who want to evangelize and have actual real business problems to solve. So we integrated the two. We asked every single person on the data science team to go out and find somebody in the business who was wanted to be part of the hackathon and then support them directly as their sort of personal data scientist for that particular team. And what we found is there's a lot of people on the data science team who probably wouldn't have been that comfortable getting out, sort of becoming that evangelist. But because of that sort of volunteering, we had a much broader base of support. Better technology on display, much more rigorous sort of measurement programs in place, and pairing the evangelist with the willing with the worthy. Right.

So that is awesome. I couldn't agree more. You know, between there's no escape and being voluntold. These are all great taglines. I want to say a huge thank you for everyone who attended this session. A huge thank you as well for Denise, Mark, Russell for joining us and sharing these insights, everyone do give our speakers a lot of love with the emojis, with the chat. As we can see, it's all blowing up. I really, really, really appreciate everyone who's joined us so far. And everyone tune in for the last session of the day on data governance, and then we're going to have an AMA with the data founders at the end. And very excited for the next session. Thank you so much, everyone.

Great. Thank you, Adele.

Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.