Tag: consulting

How to Be A Good or Bad Interviewer

The job interview process has been written about extensively, and some people even receive specialized training from their jobs on how to properly conduct an interview. Everyone has ideas about the best way to provide interviews, and large companies tend to have specific motifs or methods of interviewing which can take on an undeservedly mythical reputation. There’s a lot of debate over whether the interview is an effective way of selecting talent, but the median is settled: if you are looking for a job, you will have to have an interview. If you are looking to fill a job, you will have to interview someone. This article is an analysis of common mistakes that I’ve seen interviewers make. I can’t help but propose a few better ways of conducting interviews alongside my analysis.

The best parts of job interviewing are getting to find out interesting things about companies while meeting the potentially cool people who populate those companies. The worst parts of job interviewing are finding out exactly how bad people can be at providing an interview. I am not an expert on interviewing people by any means, nor am I an expert at being interviewed– I’ve made quite a few awful mistakes in both camps, to be sure. I think that I have a few good ideas on what not to do as an interviewer, though. The anecdotes that I’ll provide here are not embellished. I will state that this experience is mostly from interviewing for scientific jobs, and that it may be that the personality of scientists precludes them from being good interviewers, but I don’t believe that this is the case.

Everyone is behooved to be good at acing job interviews because jobs are desirable, but few are so inclined to be perfectionistic about the opposite half. Companies want good talent, but of course they can always provide a job offer to someone they like and at least have a chance of getting them to agree, even if they have performed their interviewing of the candidate poorly and the candidate performed poorly.

Because of this inherent inequality of the process, the process of interviewing candidates is typically far weaker than it should be in a few different dimensions. To clarify this concept: attending the job interview and presenting a good face to potential employers is always a high priority of the job seeker, but preparing to interview a candidate and interviewing a candidate properly is very rarely a high priority for the people providing the interview. This mainstream habit of interviewing carelessness shows like a deep facial scar. The consequence of low-prioritization of interviewer preparation is sloppiness in execution and wasted time for all parties.

First, in all interviews that I have ever been on either side of, there will be at least one person who has not read the resume or given any premeditation about the candidate. Do not be this person, because this person has little to contribute to the investigation into whether the candidate is suitable. Pre-reading the candidate’s resume is a must if the aim of the interview is to determine whether the person is qualified technically and qualified socially.  The purpose of the job interview is not to spend time checking whether the candidate can recapitulate their resume without forgetting their own accomplishments but rather to assess if the candidate will improve a team’s capability to execute work. This fact seems self evident, yet I have been interviewed by several unrelated people who explicitly stated that they would see whether what I was saying was the same as what was reflected on my resume.

Aside from pre-reading the candidate’s resume, interviewers should also pre-think about the candidate. Practically no interviewers I have interacted with have attended to pre-thought about the candidate in any meaningful way. Writing a job description or giving the candidate’s resume a once-over does not count as pre-thinking. If you want to find the perfect person for a position, it is a disservice to your company not to prioritize premeditation about the candidate. Without premeditation, there can be no intelligent questioning of the interviewee. Is the person’s previous experience going to give them unique insights on the job they are hoping to fill? Is this candidate going to be socially successful at this position? Set time aside to write down these questions when there is nothing else competing for your attention.

Frank consideration of whether the person will fit in with the others on the team or not should be broached ruthlessly at this early step. Social conformity is a strong force which applies to people, and an inability to fit in can cause disruption among less flexible teams. To be clear, I think that heterogeneous teams have many advantages, but I also think that most interviewers are largely engaged in an exercise of finding the roughly qualified candidate that conforms most unindependently to the already-established majority. Biases about what kind of person the candidate is are going to the warp judgment of the interviewer no matter what, so it’s better to air them out explicitly such that they may be compensated for or investigated further when the candidate comes in. The objective here is not to find things to dislike about the candidate, but rather identify where the biases of the interviewer may interfere with collecting good data from the candidate when they arrive.

Remember that this critical step is rarely as simple as it seems. What kind of positive job-related things does the interviewer think about themselves? These positive self-thoughts will surely be used as a hidden rubric to asses the candidate, unfortunately. The interviewer identifying with the candidate is one of the strongest guarantors of a job offer.  The other takeaway here is that once the candidate comes in for the interview, be sure to explicitly note points of personal and professional identification between the interviewer and the candidate! Identifying with the candidate is great for the candidate’s prospects of getting the job, but it may not be the correct choice for the team to have to accommodate a new person who isn’t qualified.

Consider doubts about the candidate based on the information available, then write down questions to ask the candidate which will help to address those doubts– being tactful and canny at this step is an absolute must, so if there’s any doubt at being able to execute such questioning gracefully, defer to someone else who is more skilled. Is the candidate too young or old to fit in with the team, or are there concerns about the candidate’s maturity? Is the candidate visibly of any kind of grouping of people which isn’t the majority? Is the candidate going to rock the boat when stability is desired? It’s better to clarify why the candidate may not be socially qualified rather than to hem and haw without explicit criterion.

Winging it simply will not provide the best possible results here, because really the interviewer is interviewing their own thoughts on the candidate who is still unseen. Honesty regarding the team’s tolerance for difference is critical. To be clear, I do not think that the heavily conformity-based social vetting of candidates is good or desirable whatsoever. In fact, I think the subconscious drive toward a similar person rather than a different one is a detrimental habit of humans that results in fragile and boring social monocultures. I am merely trying to describe the process by which candidates are evaluated in reality whether or not the interviewers realize it or not. The social qualification of the candidate is probably the largest single factor in deciding whether the candidate gets the job or not, so it’s important to pay attention rather than let it fall unspoken. Interviewing a candidate is a full but small project that lives within the larger project of finding the right person for the open position.

We’ve reached our conclusion about things to do during to the period before the candidate arrives. But what about once the candidate is sitting in the interview room? In situations where there are multiple interviewers, successive interviewers nearly always duplicate the efforts of previous interviewers. They ask the same questions, get the same answers, and perhaps have a couple of different follow ups– but largely they are wasting everyone’s time by treading and re-treading the same ground.

Have a chat with the team before interviewing the candidate and discuss who is going to ask what questions. The questions should be specific to the candidate and resulting from the individual premeditation that the members of the interviewing team performed before the meeting and before interviewing the candidate. The same concerns may crop up in different candidates, which is fine. Examine popular trends of concern, and figure out how to inquire about them. Assign the most difficult or probing questions to the most socially skilled teammate. If there’s no clear winner in terms of social skill, reconsider whether it’s going to be feasible to ask the candidate gracefully.

Plan to be on time, because the candidate did their best to be on time. In my experience, interviewers are habitually late, sometimes by as much as thirty minutes. This problem results from not prioritizing interviewing as a task, wastes everyone’s time, and is entirely avoidable. Additionally, make sure that your interviewing time is uninterrupted. An interviewer that is distracted by answering phone calls or emails is not an interviewer who is reaping as much information as possible from the candidate. If there is something more pressing than interviewing the candidate during the time which was set aside by everyone to interview them, reschedule. Interviewing is an effort and attention intensive task, and can’t simply be “fit in” or “made to work” if there are other things going on at the same time.  

The interviewers should have the candidate’s resume in hand, along with a list of questions. When possible the questions should be woven into a conversational framework rather than in an interrogation-style format. Conversational questioning keeps the candidate out of interview mode slightly more, though it’s not going to be possible or desirable to jolt the candidate into a more informal mode because of the stress involved in being interviewed. Remember that the goal is to ask the candidate the questions that will help you to determine whether they are socially and technically qualified for the job. The facade of the candidate doesn’t matter, provided that you can assess the aforementioned qualifications.

Don’t waste everyone’s time with procedural, legal, or “necessary” but informationally unfruitful questions! Leave the routine stuff to HR and instead prioritize getting the answers to questions that are specific to evaluating this candidate in particular. HR isn’t going to have to live with having this person on their team, but they will likely be concerned about logistical stuff, so let them do their job and you can do yours more efficiently. If there’s no HR to speak of, a phone screen before the interview is the time for any banalities. To reiterate: focus on the substantial questions during the interview, and ensure that procedural stuff or paperwork doesn’t eat up valuable time when the candidate is actually in front of you.

If there are doubts about a candidate’s technical abilities or experience, have a quick way of testing in hand and be sure to notify the candidate that they will be tested beforehand. Once again, do not wing it. Remember that the candidate’s resume got them to the interview, so there’s no point in re-hashing the contents of the resume unless there’s a specific question that prompts the candidate to do something other than summarize what they’ve already written down for you. I highly suggest that questions directed toward the candidate are designed to shed light on the things which are not detailed in the resume or cover letter. The thought process and demeanor of the candidate are the two most important of these items.

Assessing the experience or thought process of the candidate can frequently be done by posing a simple “if X, then what is your choice for Y?” style question.  In this vein, consider that personal questions aren’t relevant except to assess the social qualifications of the candidate. Therefore, questions regarding the way that the candidate deals with coworkers are fair game. I highly suggest making questions toward the candidate as realistic as possible rather than abstract; abstract questions tend to have abstract answers that may not provide actionable information whereas real creativity involves manipulation of the particulars of the situation.

Aside from asking fruitful questions, the interviewer should take care with the statements which they direct toward the candidate. I will take this opportunity to explain a common and especially frustrating mistake that I have experienced interviewers making. As is self evident, the interview is not the time to question whether the candidate is suitable to bring in for an interview. To discuss this matter with the candidate during the interview is a misstep and is time that could be better spent trying to understand the candidate’s place in the team more.

To this end, it is counterproductive and unprofessional to tell the candidate that they are not technically or socially qualified for the position they are interviewing during the interview! The same goes for interviewer statements which explicitly or implicitly dismiss the value of the candidate. Interviews are rife with this sort of unstrategic and unfocused foul-play. This has happened to me a number of times, and I have witnessed it as a co-interviewer several times as well.

A red flag for a terrible interviewer is that they tell the candidate or try to make the candidate admit lack of qualifications or experience. Mid-level managers seem to be the most susceptible to making this mistake, and mid-career employees the least. It is entirely possible to find the limit of a candidate’s knowledge in a way that does not involve explicitly putting them down.  Voice these concerns to other interviewers before the candidate is invited in. If your company considers minimization of the candidate’s accomplishments as a standard posturing tactic designed to produce lower salary requests, consider leaving.

Aside from being demeaning, the tactic of putting down the candidate during the interview is frequently used by insecure interviewers who aren’t fit to be performing the task of evaluating candidates. There is no greater purpose served by intentionally posturing to the candidate they they are not valuable and are unwanted! Time spent lording over how ill-fit the candidate is for the position is wasted time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Don’t play mind games with the candidate– it’s immature, misguided, and ineffective. Such efforts are nearly always transparent and constitute an incompetent approach to interviewing based off of the false premise that candidates misrepresent their ability to do work to the interviewers, and so the interviewer must throw the candidate off their guard in order to ascertain the truth about the candidate.This line of thinking dictates that the “true” personality or disposition of the candidate is the target of information gathering during the interview. The habits and realized output of a person while they are in the mode of working are the real target of inquiry in an interview, so don’t get distracted by other phenomena which require digging but don’t offer a concrete return.

Typically, the purpose of these mind games is to get beyond the candidate’s presentable facade in an attempt to evaluate their “true” disposition or personality. This goal is misguided because the goal of an employee is not to have a “true” disposition that is in accordance with what their employer wants, but rather to have an artificial disposition that is in accordance with what their employer wants. We call this artificial disposition “professionalism“, but really it is another term for workplace conformity. I will note that professionalism is a trait that is frequently (but not always) desirable because it implies smooth functioning of an employee within the workplace. The mask of professionalism is a useful one, and all workers understand more or less the idea of how to wear it. A worker’s “true” or hidden personality is unrelated to their ability to cooperate with a team and perform work, if the deeper personality even exists in the individual at all. Conformity keeps the unshown personality obedient and unseen in the workplace, so it isn’t worth trying to investigate it anyway.

After the candidate has left, it’s time for a debrief with the team. Did the candidate seem like they’d be able to fit in with the team socially? If not, could the team grow together with the candidate? Did the candidate pass the relevant technical questions? Is the candidate going to outshine anyone in the team and cause jealousy? Did anyone have any fresh concerns about the candidate, or were any old concerns left unresolved despite efforts to do so? It’s important to get everyone’s perspectives on these questions. Report back on the answers to the questions that were agreed upon beforehand. If everyone did their part, there shouldn’t be much duplicated effort, but there should be a lot of new information to process.

Not all perspectives are equal, and not all interviewers are socially adept enough to pick up subtle cues from the candidate. Conversely, some interviewers will ignore even strong social cues indicated a good fit if their biases interfere. Interviewers have to remember that their compatriots likely had different experiences with the candidate– if they didn’t, effort was wasted and work was duplicated.

Is the candidate worth calling in for another interview, or perhaps worth a job offer right away? What kind of social posturing did the candidate seem to be doing during each interaction? What was their body language like when they were answering the most critical inquiries? Pay particular attention to the differences in the way that the candidate acted around different interviewers. This will inform the interviewers potentially where some of the candidate’s habits lie, and allow analysis of whether those habits will conform with the group’s.

If the interviewing process is really a priority, the interviewers will write down the answers to the above questions and compare them. How you process the results of this comparison is up to you, but if you don’t do the process, you’re not getting the most information out of interviewing that you could. If you take one concept away from this piece, it should be that teams have to make their interviewing efforts a priority in order to avoid duplicating questions, wasting time with posturing, and properly assess social and technical qualifications of the candidate.

If you liked this piece, follow me on Twitter @cryoshon and check out my Patreon page! I’ve been sick the past week (as well as involved in an exciting new opportunity) so I haven’t been writing as much, but I should be over my cold by Monday and back to regular output.

 

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How to be a Good Adviser by Playing Pretend

Upon leaving a job about a year ago, at my going away party one of my friends and coworkers asked me if I had any advice to pass on to the team. At the time, I stated that my advice was not to give generalized advice without a specific issue in mind, because it wouldn’t contain actionable information that would improve the receiver’s experience. With the benefit of time, I can see that there are a few more wrinkles to discuss regarding advising.

Most of my early experience with advising was from my school and university years. Later, I’d go on to advise my friends on their business ventures by asking questions then following up with more questions. I’ll disclose a caveat to my thinking on advising: I’ve never been so keen on asking for advice because of all the bad advice I’ve received over the years. My negative advising experiences have given me a lot of ideas to chew on, though.

There is a distinction between offering a piece of advice, and being an actual adviser, and for this piece I’ll touch on both, with an emphasis on the latter.  I’d like to revisit that sentiment and delve a little bit deeper. Before I do, a brief discussion of what advice is and what advisers are is in order.

Generally speaking, people are familiar with the concept of taking advice from others regarding areas outside their expertise. Additionally, people are usually comfortable with the idea of providing advice to others when prompted– and, frequently to the frustration of others, when they are not prompted. Advice is the transfer of topical information or data by a third party to a person looking for a good outcome. A large volume of our communications are offering, requesting, or clarifying advice.

The concept of advice as information will be familiar to almost everyone. Frequently, the topical information that is elicited by a request for advice is anecdotal. If the adviser is careless or not directed, the anecdotal information offered to the advised may merely be tangentially related or actually unrelated to the issue at hand. Not everyone pays close attention to their outgoing advice if they have no skin in the game. The main problem with anecdotal evidence is that it refers to specific instances of a trend rather than the rules which govern that trend. Yet, most advice is anecdotal, perhaps as an artifact of humanity’s sensitivity to personal stories rather than hard data or universal laws.

Informally, it’s nearly impossible to escape anecdotal evidence when requesting or giving advice. Frequently, an adviser will forgo telling the actual anecdote, and skip right to the advice that they have distilled from their own experience, leaving the advised with an even more incomplete view. This has predictable consequences when paired with people’s tendency to do as others tell them. Using an incomplete group of anecdotes culled from the experience of others and processed from an uncomfortable position of ignorance, decisions are made based on the emotions of others rather than clear-headed analysis.

I am sure nearly everyone has received completely heartfelt yet completely detrimental advice in their time. If we are lucky, we avoid the consequences of receiving bad advice and catch the mistakes of our advisers in time to reject their thoughts and prevent internalization. If we are unlucky, we follow the path to nowhere and are upset with the results.

Part of maturity is understanding that while others are capable of delivering bad advice, we too are likely to give bad advice if given the chance. We don’t have to commit to delivering advice if we don’t feel qualified, nor do we have to ask for advice or follow advice once given. Advice is just a perspective on an issue, and not all perspectives are equal.

Critically, good advice is specific and actionable rather than vague. If the best that an adviser can do is offer a general direction to follow up on, you’re outside the realm of their experience or outside the amount of effort they’re willing to invest in you. A typical red flag for bad advice is that it’s delivered quickly, sleepily, or nearly automatically.

Good advising is extremely effort intensive! Rid yourself of advisers that don’t respect you enough to apply themselves fully. In my experience, the prototypical awful adviser is coerced into the role rather than choosing it themselves. University advisers are the worst example of being forced into advising. Identify which advisers are around only because they’re required to be, and then avoid them and their bad advice.

So, how are we going to limit our ability to deliver bad advice and maximize our delivery of good advice? Should we simply stonewall all requests for advice and refuse to ask others for help? I don’t think that this is the answer, because advice is one of the principle ways in which we can share the experiences of others and make use of experiences that we have not had ourselves. Sharing experiences is a critical component to being human, and it’s unlikely that we could stop even if we tried.

The way that I propose to avoid delivering bad advice and to actually deliver good advice is to use a mind-trick on ourselves. The mind-trick that I am referring to is playing pretend. First, I’ll need to build a mental image of the thing I want to pretend to be– the best possible adviser– then when it’s time to give advice, I’ll be able to pretend to be the embodiment of the image and put myself in the correct mindset for delivering good advice. After I’ve built the barebones of this mental image, taking it out for a test run with a hypothetical request for advice will help to fill in the details and also provide a template for how to think when it’s time to deliver real advice.

What are the properties of this mental image of the ideal adviser? I think that the perfect adviser is a professorial figure, and so adopting an academic tone and patient, receptive train of thought is necessary. Advising someone else shouldn’t be careless or haphazard, so the perfect adviser should mentally state an intention to provide their undivided and complete attention to the pupil for the duration of the session. The aim is to achieve a meditative focus on the present where the power of the adviser’s knowledge and experience can act without interference. The adviser is never emotional. Value judgments are deferred or unstated; the details and the pupil are at the forefront.

In order to advise properly, this professorial type will know the limits of his knowledge as well as his strong points, and will weight his statements to the pupil in accordance with how much he really knows, making sure to be precise with his language and to qualify his statements. Reaching the limits of the adviser’s knowledge isn’t something to be ashamed of, as it’s an interesting challenge for the ideal adviser to chew on.

The aim of the perfect adviser is to consider the particular details of the situation of his pupil, relate them to the universal trends which the adviser has uncovered with conscious effort, and then use a combination of the universal trends and the particulars of the pupil to offer a prescription for action. The mental image of the adviser will explicitly recite the universal trends to himself as he ponders the direction to indicate to his pupil. The conversation between the pupil and the adviser is marked by long pauses as the adviser takes the time to call critical trends and details into his working memory so that the pupil may make use of them. Advising is a conversation that can’t be rushed, because the adviser might forget to make an important connection of communicate in a precise way. The best advising has no time limit.

With each stanza of conversation, the adviser will find that his idea of the prescription in progress is stalled by a facet of the pupil’s situation which hasn’t been discussed. The adviser asks deeply focused questions which will unblock the progress of making his advice draft. The draft will have to be completely reworked in light of information gathered from the pupil. Once the draft is completed, the adviser will ask validating questions to see whether their draft is workable and realistic. Upon validation, the adviser will deliver the draft in a reassuring yet detached fashion.

I actually use this mental image when I’m called on to give advice, and I think it helps a lot. “Playing pretend” is just a convenient way of stepping into a foreign mindset without getting too self conscious. The important takeaway here is that the mindset of being a good adviser is very different from our normal range of thought because it is both clinical and creative. Clinical in the sense that facts and particulars are recognizable within a general framework, and creative in the sense that the solution to the clinically described problem probably doesn’t have a pre-established treatment.

Advising is a skill that can be learned and perfected, though it’s seldom prioritized. I think that prioritizing becoming a good adviser is absolutely essential if you think that giving advice is a core part of what you do. For the most part, “first do no harm” is a maxim that I wish more advisers practiced. If you liked this article, follow me on Twitter @cryoshon and check out my Patreon page! I’ll probably revisit this article when I have a bit more experience advising.

 

 

How To Write Systematically in 11.5 bites

After a few years of working in biomedical research and a philosophy degree from college, I know a few things about writing and thinking systematically. Unfortunately, I see a lot of people stumbling in their writing when they try to create complex abstract or technical materials– writing is tough, and accurate, succinct, detailed, and logical writing is even harder.

To me, systematic writing is a method of writing which seeks to transmute the complex relationships between raw or parsed data into a coherent, readable narrative that can be effectively understood and analyzed by someone who is generally knowledgeable on the topic, but who didn’t gather or prepare the data. Systematic writing is part of a greater family of writing that includes scientific writing, technical writing, and financial writing, along with other types I probably haven’t even thought of.

While this definition may seem overly abstract, I’d like to point out that most of our received and sent communications are not systematic; a news anchor is not relaying systematically prepared information to the public, even though the reporters have gone through the trouble of parsing raw data (events that happened) into a narrative (what the anchor says). The quantity of technical detail and data referencing in a news report is slim, as news reports are designed for a very wide audience who have little previous context for the event that happened (the data). An email we send to a colleague referencing data or analysis is not necessarily systematic writing, as it’s entirely possible for a certain context to be inferred between two people; systematic writing provides its own context and content explicitly to the audience.

Systematic writing is typically intended for a small, already-savvy audience, and should only offer the minimal viable context. A reader with general knowledge on the topic of the piece should be able to acquaint himself with a systematically written piece in short order, but a layman should not, because establishing the amount of context required for a layman would involve a lot of background information which falls outside of the scope of a particular instance of systematic writing. We don’t want our systematic writing to sprawl, because systematic writing is intensely purposeful and detail-heavy writing, and lots of background information and tangents dilute the factual details we’re trying to communicate.

So, the title promises 11.5 bites describing the process of writing systematically, and without further ado here’s a primer on how to write and think systematically:

  1. Define your goal. What kind of narrative do you want to make, and what data are you planning on using? Who is going to read the report, and how much context will be required?
  2. Put on your white thinking hat.  To use the terminology of the fantastic thought guide Six Thinking Hats, the white thinking hat is purely unbiased and factual thinking used for establishing a common ground among readers. If you’re going to be writing a systematic document which refers to data, you need to make sure that you don’t take any liberties with the data without explicitly qualifying them as speculation or partially supported. No spin!
  3. Assemble your data. You can’t write systematically without having data. Ensure that your data is collated/parsed/charted in a non-deceptive and easy to understand way– the only person you’re trying to inform at this step is yourself, so it behooves you to be honest about the quality of your data and what knowledge we can actually extract in analysis. If there are computations or manipulations required of your data, now is the time to do them.
  4. Determine the limits of what your data can tell you. Soon, we’ll analyze our data, but first, we need to vaccinate ourselves against narrative mistakes. Though it seems simple, it’s easy to slip up and attribute facts to your data that aren’t actually there. Explicitly state the variables which your data depicts (sales, months). Remember that going forward, all of your statements should be in terms of the variables which you outline here. If you’re not talking about information within the purview the data that your variables describe, you’re not being systematic.
  5. Extract verbal information from your data.   Write down simple statements to these effects,  such as, “the data for November showed 42 sales.” If you computed averages or other values in your data assembly step, now is the time to introduce it as a simple phrase. If you expect that handling the data in this way will be confusing, document your process simply and clearly so that your audience will understand. Do not introduce any explanation at this point, merely state what the data say, and, if necessary, state how the data were processed. Remember not to speculate, the point of this step is to establish purely factual statements.
  6. Analyze your data at a basic level. Now that you have a series of simple statements depicting your data in an unbiased way, comparisons between data statements can begin. Are the sales from November higher than the sales from October? Write that comparison down if it’s relevant to your originally stated goal, and make sure to directly reference the values in your new synthesis statements. The point of this step is to explicitly state simple relationships of the data, independent of any narrative.
  7. Analyze your data deeply. Stay focused on your original goal during this step. What questions can your impartial data statements answer explicitly? Implicitly? What trends in your data are noteworthy? What points of data are outliers? Can you explain the outliers? In this step, writing more complex statements is necessary. “The sales data from November (42 sales) are higher than October (30 sales), following the upward trend of the fall season. These data tell us that the fall season is our strongest selling period, despite the high sales in December.” Don’t try to speculate or hypothesize about “why” yet, just tease out the more complex relationships in your data, and write them down in a clear way. As always, reference your data directly in order to build context for your audience and keep them on the same page. Don’t worry about over-analyzing at this point, we’ll prune our findings later.
  8.  Ask Why. Why did we see the data that we saw in our analysis? What are the general principles governing our data? Address each piece of relevant data with this question, and ensure to answer it briefly. The outliers that were previously identified need special attention at this point. Keep explanations of your data concise and factual, though remember that your explanations are not actually within your data set, so you should draw in outside proof to support your explanations if necessary. It’s okay to hypothesize if you don’t know exactly why certain data turned out the way that they did, but be sure to explicitly label speculation.
  9. Build a narrative using your data, analyses, and explanation. Consider your starting goal, and how to marshal the data, analyses, and explanations in order to accomplish that goal. Your narrative should proceed first with the data, then with a simple factual explanation of the data, then with a more complex analysis of the data, and finish off with an explanation of the data if it’s required. The narrative step of systematic writing is where you put all of the pieces together and put it into one attractive package for your audience. Don’t neglect graceful segways between different portions of the data set. The final product of this step can be considered a first draft of your systematic writing effort, and may take the form of a PowerPoint presentation, meeting agenda, technical report, or formal paper.
  10. Anticipate questions and comments from your audience. Look for areas in which your explanation, analysis, or data prompt a response, and plan accordingly. Questions regarding your narrative are typically the easiest to address by clarifying what you’ve already written explaining why your data appears the way it does. Questions regarding your analysis can get a bit technical depending on the audience, and so you should be prepared to refer back to the source data in your responses. Questions regarding the data itself  or the parsing of the data are the most difficult; typically, the outliers will be under the most scrutiny, and their data quality may be called into question. I find that it helps to get out in front of questions regarding outliers, addressing them to your audience before taking questions.
  11. Prune non-critical information. This is the step where most of the data-statements and analysis statements meet their demise. Which analyses, explanations, and narrative elements aren’t strictly serving your original goal? Remove extraneous information to create a hardened product. Ensure that the relevant context and core data analysis remains, and don’t build a misleading narrative by omitting contradictory relevant data.

The final half-step is, of course, crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s for your final draft– and make sure it’s perfect! A missed detail on something not mission-critical will still distract your audience from your data and analysis.

I hope that my readers have a better idea of how to write and perhaps think systematically after reading this piece. I think that many non-technical people struggle with systematic writing because of how data-centric it is; communicating in the style of referencing data and withholding speculation can be quite difficult for people accustomed to relating written concepts intuitively and emotionally.

If you have any questions, leave em’ in the comments and I’ll respond. I know that the 21st century will have the highest demand yet for systematic thinkers and writers, so I’m also considering forming a consultancy in order to help organizations with training their employees and executives to think and communicate in systematic ways, so expect more on topics like this in the future.

As always, follow me on twitter @cryoshon, re-post my articles to social media, and subscribe to the mailing list on the right!