A mathematician's guide to packaging analysis results

So do me that favor \ and tell me the good news first

As a math major in undergrad, I discovered that after a certain point, math classes move on from numbers and focus primarily on proofs. A textbook pattern is to state the theorem, such as “the sum of angles of a triangle always sum to 180°,” then lay out, step by step, the proof supporting that theorem.

I’ve found this approach works well for summarizing analysis results in people analytics. For example, I would start with the main point I want to communicate (this is an example taken loosely from Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules!):

We should send managers a brief onboarding checklist the Sunday before their new hire starts.

I imagine the question from the reader would be, “why?”, so I would support that key finding with what the research found.

We found that these reminder emails can reduce new hire time to productivity by a month (25% faster than average).

Many stakeholders will then want to understand how I came to that conclusion. So, on a second page or slide I would then go a bit deeper into that finding, perhaps showing a chart or how the results differed across key employee groups. After that I would go into more detail about what methodology I used, for anybody who wanted to know more about it.

Starting with the key point (ideally something our audience can do something with), and then iteratively sharing how I got there helps me be ready for a conversation with a stakeholder at almost any level. People who want to know the TL;DR or main takeaway will find out immediately. Those who care about the methodology have that too, but will know what it’s leading up to.

This is somewhat backward from what most of us seem to have learned in school, which was to start with the methodology and slowly build toward the final “ta-da” reveal of the key finding. Some of my math textbooks did this, but even most math professors know that we’re more motivated to learn and understand when we see what it’s all leading up to ahead of time.