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.

And later this afternoon, we're going

to hear about a lot of nudges that are good.

So in summary, what am I saying?

Just in case I haven't been here so far all,

let me go meta and tell you the answers to Tim's three

questions in my own talk.

What I want to know is that we are

pretty terrible at communicating science and analytics.

And I want us to feel-- how do I put it gently--

I want us to feel really crappy about it.

But fear not-- all the evidence suggests

that 100% of people who listen to Michelle and Christine

walk away as better communicators.

So let's pay attention to them, OK?

All right, thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC PLAYING]