Achieving linked data insights to improve lives: a leadership perspective

The latest blog in this series is from Emma Gordon, Director of the £105m Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) programme at ESRC. Since 2018, ADR UK has been working in partnership with UK government departments and the devolved administrations to open up secure access to administrative data for research, at scale. ADR UK have co-developed models to achieve this in each of the four UK nations that work for data owners and researchers, and which crucially also have public support. Here, Emma offers her thoughts on the importance of being a leader who has come from an analytical background. Emma highlights how drawing on analytical skills as a leader can help us to balance and refine the evidence underpinning difficult decisions that have the potential to improve people’s lives.

The work of ADR UK has clear relevance to our analytical leadership findings, particularly the importance of ‘Fostering an evidence-driven culture’, ‘Embedding structures to support evidence’ and ‘Investing in analytical capacity and capability’.  Emma also highlights importance ‘Collaborating across organisations to add value’ by working with other organisations to enable the sharing and linking of data, which can lead to new and powerful analytical insights and associated benefits for both government decision making and the public.

I was delighted when OSR approached me to ask if they could feature the ADR UK programme as a case study in their report on Analytical leadership: Achieving better outcomes for citizens. You can find this case study in the section of the report that discusses the importance of the “Collaborate across organisations to add value” enabler.

Achieving better outcomes for citizens is at the heart of what the ADR UK programme is all about. In 2018, we set out to build a UK-wide partnership between government analysts and external researchers, to transform the existing wealth of public sector data into research assets and policy-relevant insights. This is now a reality. Our website has an ever-expanding suite of Data Insight publications, which showcase research findings spanning many policy and research themes in an accessible way. This is how we are helping to embed structures to support evidence generation, which in turn can then lead to evidence-informed policy and service decisions.

Getting to this position has been quite a journey. I carry out my role as Programme Director from within the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), part of UKRI. The two main audiences I need to ensure we are constructively working with are Civil Servants (mainly government analysts) from multiple government departments and the devolved administrations, and academic researchers from across the UK. In other words, a very dispersed network of people from other organisations who are not compelled to work with us in any way. To gain any traction, this dispersed network of people needs to want to work with us, for the greater good, allowing us to collaborate across organisations to add value. We also need to ensure we have mechanisms and processes in place to be carrying out meaningful public engagement, to ensure we are building and maintaining the social contract to use administrative data for research in the public good.

From a personal perspective, being viewed as an authentic leader is very important to me. I want to be able to listen to stakeholders and partners from a position of understanding where they are coming from, even if I don’t understand all the detail, all of the time (that would be impossible in my role). I started my career as an academic researcher, before moving into the Civil Service then onto ESRC. I have no doubt this has helped me in my current role, as I need to understand the concerns and wishes of data owners, academic researchers and members of the public, if we are to truly unlock the public good potential of linked administrative data.

I would say my background as an academic researcher and an analyst in government also helped to build my tenacity and resilience. As any leader will tell you, these are important qualities to have, which you can nurture and build over time. I certainly didn’t start my career with these, but if you have a curious, analytical mind, it can be very satisfying to try different approaches to solving problems and learn from those experiences that didn’t go well (that’s a whole other blog!).

I also feel it’s really important as a leader to be continuously challenging yourself to learn new things, to you remind yourself what it feels like to push yourself outside of your comfort zone. After all, a lot of leadership is about managing change, so by definition, we expect those we are leading to be embracing challenges on a routine basis. For me, I do this through my role as editor for the International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS), so I can be learning about new methods being used to link and analyse population-level data, and be inspired by all the incredible research publications. I also do this in my non-work life by playing musical instruments. Re-learning how to play the piano after a 40-year gap has been truly humbling!

Another quality I have had to learn is being happy with ambiguity against a backdrop of needing to make decisions – big and small – continuously. The complex world we live in means things are very rarely “black or white”, “right or wrong”. The way I approach decision-making across the programme is to push big, seemingly insurmountable things forward in small, incremental steps that nudge things in the direction of a favourable outcome. Crucially, I make sure I have time to listen to the people who will be impacted by these big decisions, so their views are properly considered. As analysts, we are trained to deal with ambiguity in data. These same skills can be honed within a leadership context, to help us balance and refine the evidence underpinning difficult decisions and foster an evidence-driven culture.

At the end of the day, I must stress that a programme such as ADR UK only succeeds because of the quality of all of the people involved. Expertise and knowledge are enablers that help us to deliver quality in our work, which is why it is so important to be investing in analytical capability and capacity. Technology is another key enabler in us delivering value. For me though, trustworthiness is the magic that helps to build quality into human relationships, so that people want to work with you. It will not have escaped your attention that these three qualities, trustworthiness, quality and value are the three pillars of the OSR Code. This is why I believe analysts should embrace also being leaders, as our training sets us up so well for being authentic leaders in today’s data-driven and data-informed world.

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