Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Prasad Setty. I lead, among other groups and people operations at Google, our people analytics and communications groups as well. Now that we're back from lunch, I know exactly what's going on in all your minds. You're thinking, there are those napping parts that we hear are all over Google? We've hidden them away. But I am going to indulge you for a little minute. Close your eyes, everyone. We're going to do a little bit of a thought experiment to begin with. I want you to think about your most favorite piece of artwork. Some of you might think about a masterpiece from one of your most favorite post-impressionist artists. Others might think about the dinosaur their kid drew in first grade and is still on their refrigerator. Mine is this charcoal piece of work that my wife did and was her very first present to me. What emotions come into your mind when you think about this artwork? What meaning does it have in your life? Keep your eyes closed this a little longer. Now I want you to think about something different. I want you to think about the most compelling piece of science or analytical work that registers in your life; again, something that has a deep, personal meaning. And for all the academics in the audience, you can't think about your own research. That's would be too easy. No thinking about your own research. Give it a couple more seconds and now open your eyes. Wasn't the second exercise much, much more difficult? I see a lot of heads nodding. We spend an inordinate amount of time doing hardcode science and analytics. But how do we ensure that it's memorable? How do we ensure that we can communicate better so that our messages resonate and stick? Over the next 30 minutes, that's exactly what we're going to explore. The speakers that follow me Michelle Gielan and Christine O'Connell, have the answers. I, on the other hand, get to play executive. So I'm going to vent-- there's going to be a lot of venting. And I'm just going to leave you with a lot of problems to solve. Tim Chatwin, who leads communications and public relations for Google in our Asia Pacific region, and who used to be the speechwriter for David Cameron, the prime minister of the UK before he joined Google-- that is Tim joined Google, not David Cameron-- when you ask him what he thinks about as good communications he says there are three things, It all boils down to three things-- what do you want your audience to know, how do you want them to feel, and what do you want them to do. And when it comes to communicating science and analytics, we typically fall short on all three questions. Instead of telling people what they should know, we like to tell them what we did. We like to use a lot of highfalutin jargon in all of our work. It takes a PhD typically to understand the work that another PhD does. Of course there's the age-old question of if a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound. The philosophers can duke that one out. But I have a follow-on question for you. If a tree falls in a forest and we use the pulp up the print and publish a prestigious academic journal, did we suck out even one more sound out of it? [LAUGHTER] And I think we know the answer to that one. So I'm really glad that Christine is going to come up on stage soon and tell us how to communicate science in the comprehensible manner. Tim's second question is even more of a problem. We don't even think about emotions when we communicate science and analytics. It's as if in our quest for objectivity and rational thinking we try to strip away all emotion from our speech. And that becomes less memorable. So personally, for instance, I've been at Google for a few years now. And I have a pretty vivid memory of everything that we've done in analytics here. I spent five years at my previous employer. And if you ask me what I recollect from that time, I can really think of one vivid analytical example. The organization was going through a troubled phase and we needed to lay off a significant fraction of the workforce. And we had develop the right severance packages for these people. The analytical team developed a simple visual that showed what happens under the existing severance policy. Executives were going to make much, much more money than your typical rank and file employee. And we shared that with the CEO, who also happened to be the founder of the organization and though of every employee as a family member. He had such a visceral reaction to seeing that visual, and immediately made the decision to double the severance for all rank and file employees, while keeping executives exactly where they were. It was going to cost a ton of money, but in his mind it was absolutely the right thing to do. Going into this piece of work, I just treated it as just another piece of analysis. But coming out of the meeting with the CEO, I could see the difference that it was going to make in people's lives. And as I think about what we did there, it was quite by accident that we were able to induce that emotion. I'm really glad Michelle is going to tell us soon about what it means to induce an emotion intentionally. That gets us to Tim's third question about how we get people to act on information. And we have a long way to go there as well. But this is an area that Google has invested a tremendous amount of effort in to try and improve. We experiment a lot with all the communications that we do to see what influences behavior. And just to look at one particular example, we've been thinking about all the advances in the literature around framing. As you know, how you frame a message has an impact on what happens. To summarize from some of the prominent researchers on the framing field, here's what they're saying. There's an understandable but misguided tendency to try to mobilize action against socially disapproved conduct by depicting it as regrettably frequent, thereby inadvertently installing a counterproductive descriptive norm in the minds of their audiences. You got that? I put into to Google Translate. [LAUGHTER] And our machine learning algorithms have still not caught up. So I asked Jessie Wisdom, who is one of the PhD's in our team, and speaks all this research juju, and she told me what this actually means. She said basically if you frame something in a positive light it leads to better outcomes. So what is an example of that? So let's say you're talking about ground beef-- pretend you were. If you framed it in a positive light and said that it was 75% lean instead of negative light saying it was 25% fat, apparently it tastes less greasy and it's going to be registering better. It's going to sell better. The only people this kind of framing doesn't work on is the vegetarians, like me, but who cares about them. So we've done similar types of randomized controlled trials at Google as well. And what we've found is that when you use social norms to nudge people we actually do find changes in behavior. We have fewer people cancel interviews that they're scheduled for, fewer people cancel training sessions that they're registered for. Behavior change is possible.