I'm Garrett Solis. I'm content manager at Innerworks and I do a lot of things just getting smart people to talk about data and analytics. We actually talked about this Michael and Annabelle that for a long time I said, I'm not a data person. And Michael, you pressed me to be like, well, why would you say that you're not a data person? Right? So I'm I'm slowly getting more comfortable with saying that, but that's me. I'll pick pitch it over to Annabelle who, respectively so, has much more experience in data enablement to tell a little bit about herself. Yeah. Sure. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here and to run this webinar series with Garrett. I have, like, twenty years experience. I have been working in different role on from data analyst to leading a team of Tableau developer or even, like, on my last role, leading the center of enablement for SwissBanc. And that's why I'm really convinced that enablement is, is very crucial for any organization. This often, like, the missing piece. That's what make, like, a digital transformation or data analytics platform, implementation successful. At least that's what I think. That's why we come up with this webinar series. And every month, we receive, like, an interesting guess, And it's a great honor for me to receive Michael, Preuven. I hope that I pronounce it well. I pronounce it in French. So let's see. You will correct me. Preuven. Preuven. Ah, cool. Cool. So Michael is the vice president in quantitative analytics at JPMorgan Chase. And he lives in the Chicago area, with his wife and two kids. Michael wanted to be a music therapist, But he ultimately pivoted to consumer behavior with emphasis on behavioral economics and organization psychology. Very interesting, and like you can imagine, we have a lot of questions already just with that. So Michael is also a certified Tableau Desktop specialist and a frequent community contributor. And we had the chance to have a nice coffee with Michael at Tableau conference. So thank you very much, Michael, for joining. I will let you, like, develop a little bit of introduction. And, maybe to get you started, you can talk about your daily activity or why you think that enablement is important. Of course. Yes. Thank you very much. And, I agree. It was fantastic, getting to meet both of you at Tableau conference. One of the things that I gotta say at the very onset is, you know, disclaimer, all views and opinions expressed here are my own. And, if I mention any specific tool or technology, not an endorsement, but just purely through my own experience and personal interests. So that's out of the way. Great to see you. Yes. Great. Like, this is this is career journey. And, absolutely, as you had mentioned, like, summarizing a very strange adventure, as you'd mentioned, wanting to be a musician and a music therapist and then following my own enablement journey in understanding, you know, what is it that I'm looking for, what is it that interests me, but also what is needed or that I perceived as needed in my world. And so because of that, went from music to psychology to consumer behavior. And you'll notice that I mentioned all of those things, which definitely makes me one of those impostors. Right? I am a, quant analytics guy. I'm in big data all the time, but I'm an imposter. I don't have a computer science background, but that's okay. Because enablement really is understanding like, people people understand data. People want to be able to do fun things. And so enablement to me is really just simplifying things as much as possible so that whatever you're trying to convey or communicate or build or whatever has the greatest maximal appeal. And, like, people feel inspired or motivated to build cool things and to maintain clean data and to just have fun, really. Hello, love. A musician. I play with Legos all the time. Got two kids. They're very much into art and music and singing at the top of their lungs and just go from there. That's awesome. I I'll I'll start with the music bit. So what initially drew you to music? I mean, where did that where did that love of, music start? I know we talked a little bit in our in our primer conversation about piano, and you have an encyclopedic knowledge of of piano players. But what what drew you to that? What did it for you? I honestly have no idea. So in the way, way back machine, my great grandmother, shortly after immigrating to the Chicago area, she wanted music in her life. So even in their cramped multi story, multifamily flat in Chicago, she had a piano on every level of the house. And so she would play all of the time. And I never met my great grandmother, but I had nearly all of her music books. To this day, they have all disintegrated, but luckily, I was able to digitize them beforehand. But when I was four and my mother wanted to make sure that we all had a musical background, She took us all to get piano lessons, and my piano teacher was like, I don't usually take kids that are that young. But she saw that I was, observant and attentive and not a typical four year old just hammering on the keys. And so she consented to, teach me, and so I had lessons for a year, and then we moved away. And there's something about music, something about how it makes me feel, and then being completely separated from any formal training. I feel like I was allowed to grow into music because music was something that I did myself and invented myself. So lessons for one year, and then the rest is just self taught, which is it's how it makes me feel. That's great, which is and a very interesting contrast to what you studied in in university, which would be consumer behavior. Can you tell us about that jump? Yeah. So, as most people do as they are going through life, I, started at community college because I needed to fund my way through college as a lot of people mean to. And at that time, I was still thinking about being a music therapist, but then I, internally, recognizing in myself, discovered I'm a little bit too empathetic probably to be an effective therapist, just carrying on too many other people's life stories. And so then I was like, alright. I wanna be a professor. And so I pivoted to wanting to be just a college professor. And so that was a a lot of fun. And then when I was in my senior year, I had a personal finance course and great experience with the professor there, but he had a math and engineering background. And he's like, you know what? I want to build out a behavioral psychology component, but I don't know anything about psychology. You do. And around this time, this was, probably twenty ten, twentieth no. Twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. So put it in context of the macroeconomic trends at the time, I recognized that I needed to go into grad school. This was a great opportunity, and so I pivoted to that. And then as I got into grad school, I was like, well, music psychology research, a bit niche, but consumer behavior, that's cool. And so that was my pivot. And then lastly, pivoting from consumer behavior and becoming a professor, I realized, you know, maybe I don't wanna be a professor. Maybe maybe I wanna take my skills, whatever they are, and then apply it into something that's more forward thinking on my journey. That's really cool. I don't think that you will completely abandon, like, music. Even the way you speak, I see. Yeah. Like, the tone and everything. I wish I had, like, this capability to to sometimes limit the speed of my voice. Yes. No. Music is still very much a part of my life, listening to, enjoying it, in my music library on my computer. I've got probably close to thirty or forty thousand songs, and I've listened to almost all of them. Because for a time, I was like, alright. I wanna listen to everything and not just listen to it, but also rate it. So in your music library, you can rate things. And so just surrounded by music all of the time. And when I was in college, you know, one of the other things and part of the enablement conversations that we're going to be getting into is that in college, I loved to compose music for my friends. And so we put together little tiny, just group of people getting together to play music, but then I wrote my friends' parts. I can only play piano, but I've listened to so much music that one of my friends played the cello, so I wrote it for cello. One of my friends played trumpet, so I transposed things into trumpet clef and then a flute and a viola. Like, how many times does a person get to do that for their friends? Yeah. That's always funny. I think it goes back to that the way it makes something makes you feel and the way you can make others feel by giving them something with your abilities. I I'm curious what obviously, music consumer behavior, quantitative analytics on the surface, although those things seem very I don't wanna say disparate, but very different very different disciplines. But what's the through line for you? As Annabel pointed out, obviously, there's still some music and cadence in your voice in your presentation. But, you know, in your day to day, what you do today, what what what's been that through line for you from that love of music, consumer behavior, quant, all that? Yeah. So, music and psychology to me are really connected. They're part of the same thing, really. Everybody knows about the connections between music and math. No big surprise there. But music and psychology are inextricably linked because music can affect how we feel. We can express ourselves through music. And because of that, this guiltiness or this understanding of patterns and voices and tone and tenor, you think about it in terms of organizational psychology. Well, the way that you present yourself, the tone that you take, your pacing, your thoughtfulness, or anything else like that, Annabelle, It was a fantastic observation. It's that we, as humans, express ourselves through patterns. And so psychology really, at the end of the day, is an investigation of the patterns of people, the way that they think, the way that they approach problems. And music is really no different. If you understand psychology and you understand music, then you're able to tap into this harmony of life. So when I was growing up, I was very much enamored with lots of different pianists, especially. So I had, like most kids, probably, a kick of Beethoven. And so we would get lots of CDs of Beethoven sonatas, but then they were the same sonatas. One person wrote all of these things, but Glenn Gould and Van Cliburn and Nora Cabonia all play the same song, Midnight Sonata, opus twenty seven number two, but with different feelings, different paces. And so that, it was beautiful and revolutionary towards me because I was following along in the Sonata book myself. And so, like, I can read the notes, but then you can hear, you could feel how they are changing things, changing the patterns. It can change how you feel. And you also I suppose that you are a great listener because you are a great listener in music. So you are probably a great listener also to other people. And that's probably help you. I don't know if you're hard to do it, but at least that helped me, for really understand the business problem of a stakeholder and, for instance, in my case, building a great dashboard. But, so it's I think that listening and this psychology probably help you. Sometimes for me, it's intuitive. For you, I think it's more a concept. You probably conceptualize it. Yeah. So, like, to that end, I don't know how many times you've sat in, like, an undergrad or high school concert and you're hearing all the people or even when you get to a symphony orchestra early and you hear all of these instruments, all of these professionals, all of these different people experimenting on the parts that are difficult to them or the different riffs or the different motifs and different motives, and it's all this cacophony of sound. Well, to your point, that idea of a cacophony of sound is the same as our stakeholders in various settings. So when you are an enablement lead or you're in any kind of position where you have the opportunity to build something, you have a symphony of voices around you, and you're able to pick things out here and there. And so our goal as enablement conductors, enablement orchestrators is then to take all of those sounds and start getting it into a single thing. The stuff, the comments, the voices, and the objectives all need to come together into something that is beautiful for everybody. Mhmm. On this end, you know, you had mentioned the different versions of Moonlight Sonata, different different takes essentially on the same song. And on our prep call, I remember you saying something like, all data are the same. The only differences are the characteristic and expression. So this is a great through line. I mean, I'd love to hear your your thoughts on as it applies to data, how would you how would you characterize that? How would you explain that? Yeah. So, like, foundational statement. Thesis level statement, all data are the same. And you think about that a little bit. But that's because data have three components. You need to have a category, so, like, how you bucket something. Then you need to ascribe a weight, so, like, how significant is this thing. But then not only how significant is this thing, but also the temporal aspect. How significant is this thing in time? And so when you start thinking about data in that respect, it doesn't matter what tool you're using. It doesn't matter what technology, what system, what programming language. All data are con they need to contain those three things. And once you understand those relationships, then, like, you can build a thing and then swap out all of the data as long as the new schema that you're introducing has the same kind of stuff. One of my favorite books that I read, is, by an author. His name is George Lakoff, and the name of the book is Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. What categories reveal about the human mind? And so it Annabelle, to your point, like, I love listening to languages. I love investigating languages, and Lakoff is, a linguist. The book is fantastic because in different languages, one word can describe all three of those things. Oh, good. And so because of that, because we there are billions of people in the world. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of languages and dialects. And so the way that we express our words, the way that we categorize things is really important, really impactful. One of the things that I love about language and learning about language and the history of language is that there is one word that is nearly universally constant across nearly all of humanity. One word, lox, smoked salmon. I'd have breakfast. What are these? Right? And so, like, which lets us know that somewhere when the human trials were all closer together, one of the most important things that they had to eat was smoked salmon. And so as they dispersed all across the world over the course of thousands of years, there are some languages that are consistent across all the, you know, proto Indo European languages, but that is one of them. And I find that fascinating. And deep down, we all like fish. Maybe that's not what it means. Somewhere in there. I mean, I agree with that statement. I see nothing wrong with that statement. Locks is still a very important part of my life today. Indeed. I'm curious, though. You know, obviously, we we have these origins. We have these foundational elements. What happens you know, I think a a a big difference is is when people get far away from those. They get far away from those foundational things. So how do you how do you bring people back to speaking that same language if you do have change or you do have friction or you do have a movement from one thing to another and you have people essentially speaking a different language? How do you get them reunified and focused on the same thing back to those fundamental efforts so that, hopefully, they can, use the new thing better or embrace change more readily or whatever it may be? Yeah. That is a tough and loaded question. Yes. But when we are thinking about navigating through these change environments, these change situations. Ultimately, you need to understand each person as far as possible on their own level. So when I was in my, grad school training learning about, this mindset theory of, like, a fixed mindset where, like, being really good at understanding one thing or this change mindset, not necessarily or growth mindset, but this idea or concept that you're able to do anything regardless the feedback. If I fail, that's alright. Fail fast, and it helps me to learn. But then as you're helping people navigate through change environments from the psychology aspect, understand that deep down, everybody can be a little scared of change. And so you need to recognize that it's not necessarily that you're going to, you know, climb under this desk and hide in the dark. It's not that level of scared, but there's level of uncertainty. And so if you come to each person and that's the first thing that you recognize, we are in a change environment. So first, be empathetic and say, you know, we're changing. Alright? All of these things are changing. All of them are happening at the same time. But what is your foundation? And so you get people talking about their foundations. And across any change environment, the foundations are still gonna be the same. Like, we're still going to have data. That doesn't matter if data's on prem or data's up in the cloud or anywhere in between. Get people comfortable with their foundations, and then build from there. See where they wanna go and help them get there. Yeah. Until you take this cacophony sound. I always tend to say that the first reaction is often rejection when, toward change. And, yes, may maybe you have, like, additional tip to, give us, how to approach when, I don't know, I come with, like, a new dashboard that should save, like, a lot of time to them, and they say, no. I don't want it. I will push it away. I mean, I have my own trick, but maybe you have some good ideas about that. Yeah. So to me, this is one of the pitfalls of those of us with dashboard design of some type no offense, Annabelle. But sometimes we get stuck in our own little rut, and then we build things in silos. And so this great idea to me, this great idea to you, if we forget to continue to have those conversations, then whatever we build, it's not gonna have very good adoption. Mhmm. And so, like, that's that level of rejection. And so you build a thing. If you don't bring people along with it, then you're gonna have a hard time. That's why you need to have constant stakeholder engagement, constant stakeholder support because then once we unveil this new thing, if your key stakeholders can identify something that they had put in as input let's just imagine that you've got all this thing on the screen. And so, like, you've got six different stakeholders, and all six of them can see what they told you. They may not agree with all the rest of the five. But if they agree with you on one thing, you're helping to get that buy in so they become your evangelists, so to speak, to say, you know, this this is a good step. Sure. It's a change. Not really the way I used to do it in the past. But then to your point, Annabelle, of helping to get people more time, bring them more time, that's really the secret motivation of nearly every human on this planet. A universal need ignore Maslow and anybody else. If you think about it, what nearly every person wants deep down is more time. More time doing the things they love, being with the people that they love and care about, and less time, the stuff that they don't like. It all boils down to time. So you spend time coaching them, scaffolding them, bringing them along, then you're going to have less rejection. And then the last thing about rejection is that mindsets not only can you understand mindsets of people outside of yourself, but if you understand your own mindsets, you can learn to temporarily change the way that you think about yourself or your products or the things that you build. And so when I'm working with stakeholders, I let them know that I am open to all feedback. You can tell me that something is garbage. You can tell it to my face. I am not going to take it personally, but I'm gonna ask you how to make it better. Rejection is okay. It's the building afterwards. Exactly. We see I see that we have the same trick. Like, make them recognize the little touch. It's good. I like that, though. You give people a lot of times dealing with friction, the best way to deal with those those misgivings or that that friction or that uncertainty or that fear or whatever is is giving people a stake. And, Michael, as you had said, a lot of people want time, but I think a lot of people also want to feel that they have agency as well in in being able to do those things. And I think that's a really clever tactic to be and I say tactic, but, really, it's it is a well intentioned thing to say, you have a stake in this. You have a role in this. You have agency in this. And in addition to time, people just want to know that, am I are we on the same team? Am I do I matter here? Can I contribute here? Am I valued here? And by doing that, yeah, it just gets people involved. And then you you shift you shift that mindset as well. You shift that mindset from being, like, I'm gonna continue to focus on the problem to, okay, I'm gonna focus on the solution. And all of a sudden, the person I'm talking to is becoming solution oriented as well, which is a really important shift. So kudos to both of you. And and that's not to say that it's still not a challenging thing to do because sometimes that fear can can, overshadow those things. It's not always a linear journey for people. Right? Even after you have a great one on one conversation or you meet them at their level. Mhmm. And not only that, but it can take time as well. So, like, we are here in this conversation. We're talking about all of these great things. And at the top of the hour, this conversation is going to be finished, but that doesn't mean, like, these projects that we're talking about, these work streams, these changes, they all take varying degrees of time. And it's okay. Just take a deep breath. Just keep moving forward. Mhmm. So soothing. So reassuring. Right. I am your data therapist. I am your data psychologist. It's all going to be okay. I hear you. I really do love it. I I'm curious, Michael. This is this is an interesting question as well. And I think this is a good one that that potentially for for both of you. But as enablement professionals, so often, you all are focused on filling others' cups. Right? On on, giving them resources and connecting them to things. Where do each of you turn when you are looking for, resources or inspiration, or even just a a shift in mindset. It doesn't necessarily have to be I'm I'm looking for inspiration on the next big thing. It could just be I'm looking to change my mindset on something. How do I do that? What what are those resources you turn to when you're looking for help or assistance? She's thinking thoughtfully. Myself? So I will speak like so I will give, like, Michael some some additional second, more time. Now for me, it's like I'm I love to learn. I love to learn new things. I'm a constant learner. So I absolutely even if I know a lot about data visualization, best practice, how the brain works on everything, I'm constantly running book, attended webinar, and try to, have a fresh mindset. So for instance, last year, I attend, like, a webinar on visualization, more like on the data art, which is little far away of what I do at work, for instance. You know? And I listen of how this, amazing designer approach a problem. And, where they are doing your mood mood wall, sorry, and, getting inspiration on different, ecosystem website that I would have never thought about. So for me, it will be, like, learn and try to have a fresh eye and learn new thing, attend new thing and new trainings. Mhmm. Mhmm. That's Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. For me, if you haven't picked it up yet, I'll just go ahead and say it now. It's that I am always on the move, always trying new things. And so for me to refill my cup or to get a new perspective, it's to just keep reading. It's to keep learning, to keep listening. So you'd mentioned that we were all at the Tableau conference this year, and I didn't register for too many of, like, the big deep dive hands on sessions. I wanted to have a buffet of listening to practically everything that I could. And so I I went from thing to thing with an open mind, and it turns out that nine out of the every ten things that I listened to, it carried an answer that I was looking for. And so the other ways that I use to refill my cup is to have soft processing time. Sometimes we just need to quite literally shut down our computer, and then instead of sitting down and having lunch to just walk. Mhmm. And the the abilities that you can unlock and the skills that you can uncover and the cups that you can refill, a lot of that can be solved with just going on a walk Mhmm. In my opinion. Mhmm. I think there's science to back it up. I'm I'm not gonna quote a study. People can can likely find it out there. But my understanding and and from what I have heard is when you do something like walking, it uses a different part of your brain. It unlocks the executive function of your brain. So you go from this deep task work to this more and I don't wanna say primal, but more instinctual, like, I'm I'm going to I'm going to focus on walking. I'm gonna focus on putting one foot foot in front of the other. And what that does, kinda like a computer, it defrags some some parts of your brain and allows you to think about things in a different way rather than, you know, sitting in front of your computer. And as you said, Michael, just, kind of using the same pathways to approach a problem. And I I think that's that's the thing we we underrate a lot as people is we think so many of these problems are mental only, when in reality, your mental state is so connected to your physiological state, right, in terms of walking, in terms of doing something, in terms of improving our mood, in terms of improving the way we think about things. So I'm sure that I butchered that to some degree. Someone's gonna be actually it's like this function that you meant you meant to reference, and that is okay. Like I said, I am okay with being wrong. But I do know the the foundational principle here is there's a lot of power in those simple acts. Simply getting up from your desk and walking or enjoying nature. Someone had said walking through the forest is their reboot. I completely agree. I'm such a big nature buff. So, I think I think that's very true on on so many levels. This is this is an interesting question we got in the chat, if you don't mind. Someone had asked, how can empathy and understanding consumer behavior improve data analytics and spotting trends and predicting needs? Are there underused psychological insights that could make data strategies more effective? That is a fantastic question. Yes. Like, consumer behavior, understanding how people interact with your thing of interest, your object of interest is vitally important. So, like, let me think. I'm trying to think of an analogy here. It'll take me a moment. That's okay. Long, long, thoughtful pauses. So when you when you understand consumer behavior and, the motivations why a person is doing this thing or another, like, in data and design. Okay. So I had to think a little bit for something in my way way back machine to actually come forward and surface itself. So defract. So when I was doing master's research, one of the small projects that I had done was using an eye tracker to understand how people were natively reading things on a web page. And so this was in the era of using eye trackers to just watch where people's eyes are going on the screen, and this was about the age of the discovery of the Google golden triangle where you do a Google search and then, like, you eyes consistently have a pattern of where they look at things. It's very consistent really all across the world just based off of how the Internet has developed. But then to this idea of consumer behavior of, like, if your audience or your stakeholders or whatever, if they are interacting with a web page, then if you understand the consumer behavior or the the psychological behavior of how we scan information on a web page, then that can influence where to put a button or a feature or an advertisement or anything else like that. So one of the other sidetracks to this particular exercise was, well, okay, then. If we have this Google golden triangle and we know where people are putting their eyes, then what if you try and disrupt that somehow? What if you have an advertisement right in the middle of your search results? But then you get this curious feature of people quickly looking around it and not registering that it's there. And so you need to think about, like, what are you putting? How are you putting it? What does it look like? How big is it? What color schemes? What shape? Etcetera. But if you want to deemphasize things, the stuff that you don't care about, you put in the bottom right corner of the thing. Odds are people aren't gonna see it. So if you know about consumer behavior and intersecting with this data, if you have a web page or any other application that you are designing and you're freaking out about adoption, just take a step back and say, okay. Consumer behavior says people are gonna look in these areas. The thing that I want to drive adoption, is it over here? And then you do a correlation, and you're like, oh, well, the more likely that I have this thing over here, the less likely people are gonna do whatever it is. And so, like, that's where you start looking at behavior and then the outcomes that you're searching for. Yeah. Really smart. Really well thought ounce really well thought out answer. I appreciate the in-depth thing. This is Andrew. You said something that got me to thinking. I think often this isn't just true of enablement spheres or data spheres. This is, again, consumer this communication for anything. And often, often the issue that most people experience is a lack of communication. They don't know a thing is happening. They don't know the dashboard was built. They don't know the data exists. They don't know they have access to the thing. They don't know all the things that they can do. But, conversely, there are problems, and I have seen this as well where there's too much communication. And the old adage adage is is is if everything is important, then nothing is important. And like you had mentioned that, you know, you demand someone's attention with that, people are gonna start looking along the periphery because if you if you abuse that to the end, they're they're they're just going to view that as noise. And so I'm interested to hear your thoughts on in terms of when you're talking about data things or you're communicating a change or just communicating anything in life and work, How do you emphasize that signal over noise? How do you balance how much communication is enough communication? How much communication is too much? Are there any things that you just learned along the way? And I know you kinda touched on it a bit already, but are there any things you've learned along the way in terms of you know what? I've found that this is probably the most effective way to communicate a change or something important that people to know. Are there any strategies or tactics that you might recommend? Yes. Alright. That's all I needed to hear. Yep. That's fine. So with some strategies and tactics, first of all, if you need to convey an idea to a person or a stakeholder from this learning mindset or learning theory that we had talked about before, you make the information that that you're trying to convey as easy to get to as possible. Mhmm. In medicine, there's this idea of clicks save lives. And so, like, if your nurses or doctors have to keep continuously clicking through a million different applications, that's taking a lot of doctor time. Mhmm. And that has a lot of potential impacts with quality of health outcomes. But the same is true for us data professionals as well or even in education, really, any sphere where alright. You have a message that you want to convey to me. Right? Garrett, are you going to send me that just point blank in a couple of sentences at the top of an email, or are you going to send me an email that contains a deck, that contains sixty eight pages, and then the thing that you want me to know about is at the sixty seventh page of a sixty eight page deck that I have to barrel all the way through. Mhmm. Mhmm. The odds of me looking at that practically zero. So then to facilitate communication, there there always is too much communication, like too many emails, too many meetings, too many Zoom calls. But, really, the best way to communicate is to just talk to the key stakeholders directly. It can be a skip level. It could be skip several levels, up the hierarchy or down the hierarchy or sideways. It doesn't matter. If you need to convey a question or you need to get an answer, take the humble, empathetic approach and say, hey, person. I need help. Or, hey, person. I've got this thing because there's a limit to how much we can do. But if we listen to our stakeholders and we engage with them often, quite often, they will get excited and communicate the message for you. At the end of the day, that's what you want. Mhmm. So really simplify the communication. I've been going on at length for, like, four minutes answering this question, but it's really It's a complex question. Yeah. So, really, in every problem, if you can, distill it to between three and five key topics and stay to those topics and wander into the forest on crazy tangents if they get excited and want to go on that journey through the woods with you. Mhmm. Yeah. Odds are they will if you answer their question. Yeah. That's great. I I think that's a great point of communication to think well, a, to simplify. Yeah. That a hundred percent is is so true. But to gauge people's reaction, again, to use that psychology or or just that, you know, personal understanding of someone to understand what level of detail is this person feeling right now. And sometimes just asking, can help too. Asking someone, like, what level of detail would you like? Do you want me to include all the details? Are you someone who likes to pour over all that? Or are you someone who just wants the you you want the headline. You want the the the just the base information, and if there's anything additional, you'll reach out sort of thing. There's a lot of power in just asking people how they wanna be communicated with. Yes. Indeed. Okay. We have another question here. Says, also, you spoke about a symphony or on the flip side of cacophony. But what elements such as governance, integration, or adaptability do you think play the role of the conductor in orchestrating a seamless and impactful data ecosystem? All these great questions. Yes. Governance is absolutely important. And so when you have this cacophony of ideas and initiatives, like me as an empowerment or data conductor, orchestrator, I need to know who is responsible for each of the other portions of the orchestra. Like, I'm going to have a violin lead. I'm going to have a winds lead. I'm going to have a percussion lead. And so we, individual humans, cannot and should not do everything. And so when you're thinking about empowering people and empowering data, talk to your folks and find out who is the most passionate about helping to ensure rhythm. That's your governance. Like, you've got these things that you need to do, and there are people, again, fixed mindset versus a change mindset, like, everybody has something that they want to bring to the table, something that charges them. And so if you find this person who is just, like, truly passionate on the governance of things and you enable them to lead the rhythm section, they will do an amazing job, and they will do that for you. And so you can just trust them to say, you know government. You know governance. You know the rhythm. Do it according to the rules that are laid out. And you give that to someone who is of this fixed mindset, and it will be perfect. It will be incredible if you give them the time to do it. But you have to talk to them. You have to find out what they want. Does it match their personality, their goals, their outcomes? And just go from there. Data governance is huge, especially as we're moving from one system to another. We need to make sure that our data are clean. We need to make sure that our data are following all the appropriate rules. This thing called AI and CHA GPT and all this other stuff is out there. But, like, even those things, they need to be governed appropriately. And so you need to make sure that you have all of these guardrails in place to ensure that it is all being used appropriately. And there are people who want to do that, find them, and bring them into your team. Michael, it's, you already spoke, like, before about, moving to cloud or embracing AI or everything about, change. Do you have some tips, things to consider when we have to, go through a change or lead a change? Yes. So I earlier mentioned that nearly every human has a universal desire of time, more time and less time. Well, there is another universal constant that you may have heard before. I don't know who originally said it. I'm gonna butcher it. Garrett, I'll be in your camp too. Thank you. The only constant is change. Yes. Right? So we right now, it's it's kind of fascinating. It's not very often that we are able to realize that we are in a fundamental shift in the way that things are done. So one of my favorite authors, his name is James Burke, wrote a whole bunch of stuff and has a fantastic nineteen seventy nine documentary called connections, but he has this alternative view of change. And so he goes through the history of practically everything up to nineteen seventy nine. But what what he does a really good job of conveying is that these change events are happening all the time. And so the black plague in the medieval ages, It did a lot to the human population at the time, but because of that, there was a technological shift that more things became mechanized even in the medieval ages. And so, like, we are now in this instance of change where things are going from, these more on premise or slow antiquated systems over into the cloud. This is a change moment. And so for those of us who are able to see that it is change, it's important. And then to the question about governance, you know, recognize that change is happening, then get in the forefront of it. Nice. Let's tie it back to this tool question poll that we had at the very beginning. In these change environments, it means that there are going to be new tools. So you recognize that there's gonna be a change, and then you say to yourself, okay. What tool is going to help us bridge this change? Then the other cool thing is if you become this change leader, recognize that a change is coming, then you are able to guide or advise what should come along and what should stay behind. So if you know that you are going to be taking a trip to the moon, and I'm gonna be going with you, I probably shouldn't bring my piano. No. You should. You shouldn't be busy. That's going to be something that we will need to leave behind. Not like, we have built systems. We have built fantastic things. But sometimes, as you are migrating to an environment, you have to be okay with letting some things go. Mhmm. Yeah. That's really important. Oh, go ahead, Anna. Well, go ahead. No. I wanted to say almost phys philosophical. Right? No. Like, Interstellar, one of my favorite movies. Hopefully, no spoilers to anybody. But towards the end, one of the key characters says, well, the only way to get to where you're going is to leave something behind. Awesome buddy. No spoilers. But that can be a lot. Yeah. That can be a lot. It's it's it's tough to leave the things that are known behind because they feel safe. They feel comfortable even if they're not idea. Yes. Teddy is just asking. We saw a hand raise. So, yeah, by all means, please ask the question in the chat. We'd love to answer it. But, yeah, that that's a that's a very important thing. I I also something that resonates with what you said as well, Michael, is sometimes it is as easy as having someone whose job it is to look on the horizon. I think a lot of times we we, people get blindsided because, well, we're not making the bandwidth or the space to be looking for those things. And so, obviously, there there's, something to be said for people who can go and execute and operate and govern these things. But a lot of times, we just devalue the impact of just having someone who's part of their job is to look and evaluate and bring that back to the group, rather than it's just very easy to get tunnel vision and, you know, you're on the thing. You spent money on the thing, and you're using it. And, you know, you're you're you're you think you're beyond that evaluation phase, but it's always important, especially now, like you said, in this moment, to be on the lookout for things that are that are changing. But also to balance that with other people who can cut through the hype because there's plenty of hype. There's plenty of marketing. So it's all a balancing act. Absolutely. I didn't hear a question in there, but I agree with you. No question. Commentary. Commentary. Did Lynn was Linda able to ask their question in the chat? I have not seen it yet. We have about a minute left, so we'll see if it gets, popped in there. In the meantime, I'm gonna put up these slides just so people can see if they want to connect with us. I'm just I'm interested. You know, Michael, we had talked briefly, kind of at the beginning. Aside from all the work related things and philosophical things, I mean, what else do you really enjoy? What else gives you life beyond your professional pursuits? I know you had said making things for people. Is there any more on that that you can influence on? Yeah. Absolutely. So, when I was in college, I've got a good buddy. I'll tell him this anecdote after we're after we're done here, but he has a game that he plays. I don't play it at all, but he was like, I need help keeping track of all these things that I have painted for his own game. And so, like, he, knowing that I dabble in data stuff, I just made a cloud based solution where he could easily keep track of all these little things that he's painting, and he's so happy that he's able to do that. And that fulfills me. And so just always being able to make things. One of the other things that refills my cup is, with my two kids, baking with them. Like, just bringing them along for the ride and say, hey. Today, we're gonna make muffins or bread or waffles or whatever, and just bring them along. It's so much fun. So making making is so important in my life, just making all kinds of things. Mhmm. I like that. I like the things that fill my cup and fill my belly, so baking is a great one. Yeah. Yeah. You know, lastly, so, our neighbor over here, they are going to be putting in a new, deck, and so they had to rip out what they had before. And so there's just this pile of scrap wood. I'm like, well, can I have it? He's like, okay. So I built some tables from the scrap wood. I haven't built tables before, but it was so much fun. Mhmm. Mhmm. I love that. Yeah. I I remember I built a table, oh, ten years ago. It's been a long time. But building, creating, that's such a it very is such a human thing. Whatever it may be, whether it's music, whether it's something tangible, whether it's something edible, whether it's, you know, any any of those things. So I love that that through line of creation not only permeates your professional life, but your personal life. And I think though all those things, they feed each other. Right? It's all this kind of virtuous cycle that all comes together. So we are at eleven o one. I will start by saying thank you so much, Michael, for joining us for being on here. This was, this is data enablement philosophy hour. I really enjoyed it. Of course. It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It's great meeting both of you, Garrett, Annabelle. This is so much fun. Awesome. Thank you for calling. Yes. And just a reminder to people who are tuning in, for this recording, this will be emailed out, within a few days, and I saw someone who had mentioned the LinkedIn profiles. We'll be sure to include those links in the email once the once the web inar is live. But, Annabelle, Michael, thanks again for joining us, and I will wish you a good day. And you. Be well. See you next month. Bye. Bye.