This is a sample video of the full-length session on the power and importance of data, and the three things you and your team should be doing NOW with data to future-proof your businesses.
For the full session, sign up now for Graeme Codrington’s Future Club.
The TED Talk by David McCandless can be found here.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Throw Forward Thursday. My name is Graeme Codrington and come with me to the future of data analytics.
Now, this is the second part of a session we started last week when I talked about the use of artificial intelligence in astronomy, and not ChatGPT type so called artificial intelligence, but real AI usage that is about massive data sets. It’s about big data analytics. It’s about machine learning on that data to produce and identify patterns and extract sense and insight and wisdom from that data. That’s what I mean by AI, and I think astronomy is one of the best use cases that we can point to in the world at the moment.
So, if you didn’t watch that video and if you didn’t read the links associated with that video, I put a link to that video alongside here in the notes, and please even pause now and go and have a look at that. It’s a valuable starting point.
So now that you know what I’m talking about and that I’m really wanting to focus in on the power of data, there are three things that I want to share with you. And we’re going to look at all three of these for the members of my Future’s Club who have access to the premium edition of Throw Forward Thursday. For those of you who are just passing by, you’ll be able to get the first of those three. If you’d like access to all three insights, the link to sign up to the Future’s Club is in the notes, or just go to www.jointhefuturesclub.com, and you can get access to it right now.
But the first thing that I want to say, and I actually want to link you to another video to do this, is that data becomes powerful when we can see the sense in the data. In other words, if the data has a story to tell us, then human beings react to sense-making best when we see the patterns, and to put that into English, I’m talking about infographics or data put into the form of graphical representations.
And the person I believe who did this best in one of my favourite TED Talks of all time is David McCandless. It’s a 2010 TED Talk called Data is Beautiful and I think he also has a book by the same name which is well worth looking at. David McCandless, again, the link is in the notes, and in fact, I’d even suggest you pause me, go and have a look at David, and then come back here.
Because what David shows clearly is the power of turning massive data sets into visualisations or infographics, and then because you can now see it in visual formats, suddenly patterns emerge. He goes and talks about all the way back to the very first person to do this was Florence Nightingale, who famously used the world’s first known pie chart when she went to speak to the members of Parliament to try and get them to change the hygiene conditions in hospitals.
And she had basically proven through the data that nurses and doctors not washing their hands and sanitising their hospitals was a cause of disease that actually people were getting more diseases in hospital than they were outside. People didn’t understand what she was saying, and they didn’t understand the numbers but when she put it into a pie chart, suddenly it all made sense.
What you need to be doing is asking, how are you taking the data your business has got and turning it into sense-making patterns? Of course, that leads us to the second question, which is how much data is your business got?
If you’re not a member of my Future’s Club, this is where your sample of this session ends. If you would like to continue and see some of the insights that we’re going to talk about in terms of the importance and value of collecting data. I’m going to talk about the fact that AI isn’t really in most of our businesses yet but when it comes, the more data you’ve got and the more valuable that data is, the more your AI systems will have to work on it, and that’s when the real competitive advantage of the AI revolution is going to take place. It’s not going to happen this year or next year, but you can’t wait for it to happen before you start gathering your data.
Anyway, if you want to get insights into that and some of the real business lessons of this episode of ThrowForward Thursday, please just make sure that you sign up at www.jointhefuturesclub.com. Go and check it out now. I think that there’s a pricing option to suit everybody’s budget and it’s a risk-free subscription because if you don’t like what you see, we’ll give you your money back and no questions asked.
Thank you very much, as always, for joining me on ThrowForward Thursday. I look forward to seeing you next week when we jump into the future again and see what’s going on there.
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Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognized futurist, specializing in the future of work. He helps organizations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.