The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI

Best practices to lay the foundation for digital presence:

Send updates; don’t wait. Let your team know you’re making progress, whether or not you might need course correction, and that you’re engaged

Create a sense of curiosity. Don’t be afraid to use ambiguity to pique your teammates’ interest when necessary, but don’t overdo it.

Communicate on their timeline, not yours. Keep your teammates’ schedules and time zones in mind when you reach out to them.

Best strategies to use internal social media for digital presence:

Articulate the purpose. Interactions on social media help you see how your teammates fit into the organization, what roles they play, and how they contribute.

Look to learn. Keep a lookout for helpful information. Social media platforms open up dialogues that would otherwise remain trapped in private email exchanges.

Get personal or social. Don’t be afraid to socialize with people on social media platforms, even when the subjects aren’t work-related. Casual chats with team members build natural rapport that leads to better collaboration

Focus on the right data. Keep a lookout for less visible forms of knowledge—for instance, knowledge of the organization’s politics and processes.

Remain "in mind" when "out of sight." Stay active on the platform! Let others know you’re out there.

Establishing the close, collaborative working relationships that we all need to thrive in the digital age means developing a mindset that expects the mutual knowledge problem and learns strategies to compensate. Establishing a digital presence is key!

attributed to the Scottish novelist and folklorist Andrew Lang that’s a good reminder of the perils of statistical reasoning. It goes, "Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost, for support, not illumination."1

Gonick and Smith use the analogy of smoke detectors to describe the two types of errors that you can anticipate in hypothesis testing and significant tests. They call the first a type I error, an alarm without fire (or a false positive). The second, referred to as type II error, is fire without an alarm (a false negative). "Every cook knows how to avoid a type I error: just remove the batteries. Unfortunately, this increases the incidence of type II errors! Similarly reducing the chance of a type II error, for example by making the alarm hypersensitive, can increase the number of false alarms.14

Create a learning agenda documen.This short document outlines:

The questions you’re looking to answer

The steps you’ll take in the experiment to answer those questions

A rationale for why the experiment will help to answer those questions

A description of how you’ll evaluate the experiment to know whether what you tried achieved the outcome you wanted

type I error: In hypothesis testing, the rejection of the null hypothesis when it is actually true.

type II error: In hypothesis testing, the failure to reject the null hypothesis when the alternative is true.