CDOIQ Symposium 2024 | Dr Nicole Radziwill | team-x.ai

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Dr. Nicole Radziwill

Fractional Data & AI Officer

team-x.ai

play_circle_outline Bridging Neurodiversity: Data Science's Role in Making Organizations More Inclusive

play_circle_outline Data quality engineering practice and patterns of successes and failures

play_circle_outline Utilizing AI to enhance teamwork and team performance

play_circle_outline Biases and motivated reasoning impacting interpersonal dynamics in the workplace

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Dr Nicole Radziwill | team-x.ai

Dr. Nicole Radziwill

Fractional Data & AI Officer team-x.ai

The book "Data, Strategy, Culture & Power" explores dynamics of data and AI teams in organizations. The speaker discusses why projects are seen as failures despite meeting targets and deadlines. Power differentials and biases within organizations are crucial for digital transformation success. Team X uses AI to improve teamwork. Tools like Biodex aid team understanding and inclusivity at work. Dialogue and feedback are essential for team improvement. The speaker, an autistic individual, addresses challenges faced by neurodivergent individuals at work. Advice ... Read more

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What is the inspiration behind the new book "Data, Strategy, Culture & Power"? add

What were the key factors identified in determining the success or failure of digital transformation initiatives? add

What is the purpose and functionality of the Biodex product created by Team X, and how does it incorporate AI to improve team performance and create a more inclusive work environment? add

What are some common biases and examples of motivated reasoning in the workplace that have been observed recently? add

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Dr Nicole Radziwill | team-x.ai

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>> Welcome back to CDOIQ Conference, the 18th CDOIQ Conference here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Paul Gillen on the queue, with my colleagues Dave Valenti and Sanjeev Mohan are around and will be back shortly. We are here in Cambridge, Massachusetts and talking to a lot of people who are very smart about data. And little background here. About three years ago I wrote an article for Silicon Angle about neurodivergent people, people with autism, and how they function in an IT world. And in the course of that article, I met a remarkable woman, Nicole Radziwill, who's our next guest. A little bit about her. Nicole graduated from Penn State University at the age of 18, has a PhD in quality systems, taught data science at the university level, was editor-in-chief of the academic journal Software Quality Professional, is the author of six books, holds numerous roles in numerous societies related to data quality and data management, and is really an expert data scientist. You wouldn't know from credentials like that, that she's also autistic. And the work she's doing right now is to bridge the neurodiversity issue and the data science issue and find ways to use data to make organizations more diverse. And Nicole, thank you for joining us here.

>> Yeah, thank you so much, Paul.

>> The new book is called Data, Strategy, Culture & Power, and how did that come about?

>> So for many, many years I've been building data teams and AI teams, worked in startups and traditional organizations. And one of the things that I always realized was that there's times where you can structure initiatives, where you can get the executive buy-in, where you can do everything right. The projects work. You meet your dates. You meet your deliverables, and yet they're still perceived as a failure. And so one of the things that I wanted to figure out was why is that happening? There's got to be something going on underneath the surface. So a few years ago, when I started working with Ultranauts, which is a majority neurodivergent professional services firm, we were building a data quality engineering practice. And during that time I had the opportunity to work with probably 20 to 25 different companies, different organizations and their leadership teams on data and AI and data strategy. And so you're able to see a lot of the interpersonal dynamics that go on. You're able to see lots of initiatives that do fantastically and a lot that don't quite. And so what I was looking for was, what is the pattern here? And at the same time I was looking at what makes digital transformation initiatives succeed or fail. And one of the things that we discovered was that from looking at these patterns of successes and failures... And we know this under the surface. Everything depends on the people and the culture. But one aspect of the people and the culture that we tend not to put as much attention on are power differentials between people, between functional groups, and even between executives. So this book is all about the way that bias and motivated reasoning impact how we engage with our data. Because as professionals in the data and AI space, we're really creating weapons for our stakeholders to use for good or ill. And we need to be aware of those dynamics as we're engaging in our initiatives because that's going to help us be more successful overall.

>> And this really comes down to interpersonal relationships and the dynamics of teams and how power relates to teams, which are very personal issues or psychological issues. But you're applying big data to this problem. How are you doing that?

>> Absolutely. So I'm a fractional chief data and AI officer, and one of the organizations that I'm working with now is called Team X. So there's three products of Team X. One of them is the Biodex, which grew out of Ultranauts. That's a personal user manual. It's something that over the past 10 or 12 years we've figured out what kinds of questions should we ask you so that your teammates know how to engage with you, when to engage with you, how to interpret the things that you say, the things that you do. So that's at the individual level, the Biodex. What we've also discovered is a way to use AI to help teams engage in AI-enabled teamwork. So when you look at each of the individual people and their Biodex and then look at the combination together, what you're able to do by analyzing that data is to figure out what next step that particular combination of people needs to do to create a more inclusive environment so they can achieve their goals and objectives more effectively. So it's a way of tying an inclusive work environment that fosters and values wellbeing with actually getting stuff done so you can feel better and your bosses can be happier too. And that's what we're using data to do. Beyond that, we're helping organizations right now use this tool to help individual teams, some of which are struggling and some of which are doing great, to help them get to that next level in honor of continuous improvement of teams using AI.

>> So what is a bio deck and where do I get one?

>> So Biodex is... You can look it up online. Biodex.info is the place to go. And we're going to be releasing a product later this summer where when you type in your Biodex information, that is a blueprint to help other people interact with you. It'll also do an analysis of your information to help you recognize what kind of person are you going to be as you join a new team. The three things that we like focusing on are how likely are you to raise issues, how likely are you to feel a sense of belonging, and there was a third one that I can't remember now. But what we want to do is since everyone comes to a team with experiences all the way back from childhood, with experiences from your managers and your bosses that you've had all through your career, you bring those experiences to the next team. And whether you're willing to raise issues or whether you're going to feel that sense of inclusion and belonging is in large part due to those experiences that you've had in the past. So what we're trying to do is help teams be able to engage in that dialogue more effectively and more readily so that they can get through the forming, storming, and norming stages and get to performing a lot quicker.

>> I want to ask you about neurodivergence. That's a fascinating topic and one that's very close to your heart. And excuse me, the questions might get a little personal here. But first of all, looking at you, meeting you, I would never think that you were neurodivergent. What is it about you that is different?

>> Like aliens, I've studied people very intensely for a long time so that I can act like everyone else does.

>> Live in their society?

>> Yeah, exactly. No, actually, when I was 19 years old, I had a job as a project manager, and I had an incident with one of my bosses. And it turns out I wasn't adding value in a particular project, and it made me feel so bad that I had read the signal so wrong that I decided I was going to figure out what it meant to add value and study people and study the interactions, and so pretty much spent the next 30 years doing that.

>> So you sort of use your intellectual gifts to overcome some of the inherent deficits you might have?

>> Yeah, I could say that.

>> But one statistic that was remarkable to me was that about 80% of autistic people are underemployed or unemployed.

>> That's right.

>> And many of them are extremely intelligent, extremely capable. Why is that, do you think?

>> I think one of the reasons is that for many autistic people, other conditions are comorbid. Anxiety is over-indexed in the autistic population. ADHD and dyslexia also tend to... They all come together, and so several of these can cause... It can make it harder to just get through an ordinary day, to engage with people in an office where the lights are bright, to do the social thing every hour of every day, five days a week, and sometimes more. So I think that's one of the things that is a detriment, a detractor to autistic people in the workplace. Another big reason though is that there can... Whether you're autistic or not, when you engage in a work relationship, there's you, there's your teammates, and there's your managers and supervisors. And you have some sort of understanding about exactly what is it you're there to do, what are the standards for performance, and having that feedback loop in place so that whether you're doing what's needed, whether you understand what it means to add value, and you're engaging in that as it goes through time. Any two people are going to have difficulty reaching that understanding. But when you make those two people one autistic and one neurotypical person, the differences are even more extreme. So there's quite a bit of opportunity for misunderstandings, and I think a lot of those misunderstandings end up in shortened employment terms rather than finding the basis for shared understanding that's really going to make everyone .

>> So give advice for a hiring manager who maybe is considering a neurodivergent employee. What steps should they take? What consideration should they take into account in working with that person?

>> So assuming that we've already gotten to the point where the employment relationship is in place, the number one most important thing is having honest, open discussions about performance standards. Just like anyone else, some autistic people are going to need more instruction, more detailed step one, step two, step three, and others are going to need you to create a space for them to go and do creative things in. You just need to spend that time understanding each other and make sure that the specifications for what's required are not only understood, but documented, and then ensure that that happens frequently. Quarterly performance reviews don't do it. In fact, even the whole notion of reviews don't do it.

>> What does?

>> Constant dialogue, weekly at the very, very least, and sometimes maybe even more than that depending upon what the project is. So it's that engagement. It's that getting to know each other, and it's the vulnerability to make sure that you can say what's needed and adjust both people in the relationship.

>> And this gets back to some of the work you're doing right now in power structures and understanding how the boss and the employee and how they relate to each other, how that may be interpreted differently by somebody on the spectrum. Are there surprises that came out of your research?

>> I think the biggest surprise was that... I had been aware for many years that we all have biases. And you see people in the workplace who use data to achieve certain ends. Sometimes you see people in executive positions, and they ask for information or they ask for a report because they want it to be able to make an argument. That's an example of motivated reasoning. What I had thought up until now was that the biases and engaging in motivated reasoning were maybe not as prevalent as they were, but after deeply observing this for the past few years, it's everywhere. It's in every interpersonal interaction. It shows up in interactions between groups. It shows up every time that you know there's an information silo somewhere in your organization. Because for example, if you know that there's a silo over here, the question you can ask is, "Who does that person not like or not trust?" And whether it's now or it was last year or five years ago, you can be assured that there was some sort of trust gradient there that the organization hasn't been able to get over. And so if we're aware of these things, if as organizations we make ourselves vulnerable and decide to surface these things and talk about these things, I think we can cut to that performing stage of teamwork a lot more quickly.

>> I'll read you a short passage from this article about Rajesh Anandan, who is the co-founder of Ultranauts. He said he remembers preparing for one client engagement that involved reading through hundreds of pages of highly technical documentation. He said, "It would've taken us weeks to ingest it, and Nicole processed it in a weekend." What's that like?

>> It's kind of like, Paul, saying, "What's it like to be tall?" If you've been tall your whole life, you don't know. What I will say though is that as an autistic individual, there's some things that I do better and some things that I do worse. One of the things I do better is find connections in things, and it is easy, like you said, for me to read hundreds of pages of documents in a weekend and figure out what the most germane connections are between them so we can go into a client meeting the next Monday. The frustrating part is something that I think other people can identify with too, and that is, I know you've had ideas or you've recognized things. Maybe you saw an issue or a problem at work, and you really would've liked to get someone else or some other group of people to understand or to see it. And no matter how hard you tried, they couldn't. When you can see connections between things a lot more quickly than other people... And I mean that's not with everything. It works for some topics, and it doesn't work for other topics. But when you can see connections, you still have to engage in the same path to understanding to help get on the same page with someone else. So that connecting with other people is still going to be the most important part of the puzzle.

>> So it sounds frustrating. I mean, it sounds almost like as an employer, I need to behave differently in engaging my neurodivergent employees. But the neurodivergent employees also have to show some tolerance for those who don't make the connections easily.

>> Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'll go back to what I said earlier. It is all about vulnerability and getting to a point of shared understanding. We all need to expend effort to do that, and that's why I'm so excited about the Team X project because we figured out a data-driven way to use AI to help teams make the next step, and also to help individuals take the next step in their own personal evolution.

>> I would like you to address one stereotype if you will, which is that of the superpower.

>> Yeah, okay.

>> Neurodivergent people are often thought of as having these kind of superhuman powers at certain types of tasks. In fact, does that exist, or in fact, are neurodivergent people any different than the rest of us?

>> We all have spiky profiles, which means we're really good at some things and really not good at other things. I think the superpower myth is something that doesn't benefit any of us because if you're an employer and you decide to change your hiring processes, change your interview process so that you do get more neurodivergent applicants, more neurodivergent employees, then you may have this expectation, "Oh, well, I'm getting a group of people with superpowers, and they're going to go above and beyond." One thing that's been very frustrating to me, particularly in my early career, and one of the reasons why I didn't share this with employers for an awfully long time was if they think you're there to overachieve and they expect that from you, you're not allowed to be just another member of the team. And that's sad for everybody.

>> Teamx.ai is the website?

>> Team-x.ai.

>> Team-x.ai. Biodex, learn more about them. Data, Strategy, Culture & Power. Win with data-centric AI by making human nature work for you. It's all about bridging the human and the technical. Nicole Radziwill, it was such a delight to have you here today.

>> Thank you so much, Paul.

>> We'll be back from CDIQ in Cambridge, Massachusetts in just a moment.