From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

How do you accept that you're not going to know stuff?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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How do you accept that you're not going to know stuff?

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(upbeat music) - How do you accept that you're not going to know stuff every once in a while, even though you're in this prestigious role in someone's company. - All the best companies and any great place to work has a fundamental tenant of intellectual honesty. How do you create a space where things are just awesome to be around and work? Like you're able to kind of throw out an idea and somebody's like oh, that's interesting. You're like, oh, glad, because I thought it was stupid when I was about to say it. But now that I've said it. And then people go huh, that's actually really curious. That kind of fostering model of being in an environment where that is treasured will lead you down this path of this richer questions and answering and being around these things. I'll give you a very specific model of that. Actually it got implemented, interestingly enough, at LinkedIn. We have all these questions around data and you know, it's starting to get to this point of like well, you brought your data, I brought my data, let's go at it. That wasn't what was interesting. What was interesting was actually to step back and say well why does your data show it this way? Why does my data show it this way? Are we calculating it the right way? Are we actually asking the same question? Maybe there's something else. And by getting to why is the data different, that's where we learned a lot more. To make that a cultural shift, we actually made a separate meeting, which we called the Metrics Meeting. It was attended by the CEO, the CFO, head of products, the kind of key people led by the data team and it started with just an idea of look, we're just going to look at data. And the goal wasn't to be able to answer any of it, it was just actually, we called it literally SSR, sit down, shut up, and read. And you just did that for fifteen minutes. You could ask clarifying questions, why is this denominator calculus, moving average, 30 day window, how should we do this? But the goal was to just ask after you look at that, just kind of questions like so why is this number going up, what's the ratio here, what's behind this? It's equivalent of like a harbor analogy of put more water in the harbor, all the boats are going to go up. So let's increase the sophistication of everyone on the team in a safe spot where there's no decisions being made because it separates the decision process and it prevents the meeting and the data from being politicized inside an organization and it makes it super safe. (upbeat music)

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