Hi ,

​

You may find this hard to believe, but I was a teenage nerd.

My high school friends and I would amuse ourselves by making references to British comedy series (mostly Blackadder, Red Dwarf and Monty Python). The number of references you understood determined how much you belonged.

We didn't care that no one else got our jokes. All that mattered was that we did.

Of course, we didn't do ourselves any favours when it came to connecting with people outside the group.

On Monday, I shared a photo of a sticker I picked up from a data science conference. In case you missed the reference, the sticker was a parody of "The Treachery of Images" by Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte - the '%>%' symbol is the R pipe character.

Given the target audience for the sticker was data science conference participants, the fact that most non-data scientists would have missed the humour isn't too bad (although, judging from the feedback on my last post, many data scientists also missed it).

However, if the conference organisers wanted to connect with non-data scientists, who may have also been there, this sticker totally missed the mark.

Here's the thing...

In-jokes are great for making you feel part of a group but achieve nothing if you want to connect beyond it.

To succeed in data science, you need to connect with people beyond the data team - which means making sure that they are in on the "joke". That they understand what you're saying when you talk data science.

It may be fun to talk about model fitting and AI among data nerds, but for those outside the group, the real "fun" comes in being given the knowledge needed to belong, too.

Succeeding in data science is all about bringing everyone along for the ride.

Talk again soon,

Dr Genevieve Hayes.

All past emails are available in the archive.