So we're gonna go ahead and get started. I know people are kind of trickling in here, but I'm gonna take a little bit of time for introductions to start off with. So really happy to see how many people are interested in API design. I'm super stoked about that actually. Yeah, so this is a talk called Broken APIs Break Trust or as someone from the audience suggested, Broken APIs, Broken Hearts, which is awesome, thanks again. But yeah, we're just gonna be talking about API design, client design, and a bit about backwards compatibility and why it's important. So hi, I'm Alex, and I've noticed a trend in some of the talks I've gone to where people are posting embarrassing photos from their youth. So I was recently on vacation in Japan where I have some step family, and I found this photo, which I have not seen in a long time.  So if I accidentally cough into the mic, just remember that every time I accidentally cough into a mic, somewhere a puppy is getting adopted. So we can feel good about that. Yeah, so I work for the AWS SDK for Ruby. Just curious, show of hands if you've used the Ruby SDK in AWS before. That is super awesome. Feel free to ask questions or heckle me later after the talk, depending on how you feel about it. You can find me on Twitter at Alex Wood with two W's because the one without my middle initial was taken. And I kind of evaluate how well I've done on a talk by how many people tweet about it. So feel free, if I see everyone on their laptops and phones, I'm just gonna assume that people are excitedly tweeting about everything they're learning. Yeah, and I also have bad jokes. I'm sorry, or you're welcome in advance. All right, so today we're gonna walk through rules and strategies for API design. Essentially, we wanna understand what breaking API changes are, how to avoid them, and then how you design your APIs to avoid the need to make breaking changes as often as possible. And we're also gonna try to think about ways we can look around corners to find ways that your users may be relying on your API and client design in ways that you have not considered. So I mentioned my work on the ADOS SDKs. Another thing that is a part of my job is we do API reviews for every API that Amazon releases. So we have over 110 services with a large number of APIs per service and we review all of them. So there's a lot of lessons that we've learned over time about decisions we can make in our API design to try to improve the customer experience. And my hope is that's what we can get across today. So to start off with, I wanna get into some definitions and kind of a common language about how we're going to describe APIs. So this is a Rails and services track talk. So we are going to talk both about how your API design can affect your Rails applications and how it can affect client library design. And also this interaction is really important because your community is going to have potentially a large number of client users, especially if you're releasing Rails APIs which are becoming more and more common. And a lot of your client users may not wanna think too hard about how you did the details of your web API implementation. They just want their code to work and you might even have community client authors who want to make sure that they have a consistent web API experience. I was gonna add a quick note again since we have a lot of people on the wall, raise your hands one more time if you have seats next to you just to help people out. Thank you so much. I'm excited, I'm following that under high quality problems. Okay, so we have here a list of terms. I don't wanna spend too much time on it but essentially these are the terms we use for naming parts of an API at AWS. These are not universal terms, these are not the only way to describe things, it's just a way to have a common language to talk about this. So things like resources which is probably a familiar term if you're a Rails developer but also we use shapes as a way to describe the input and output models and shared components of the API interface itself. So input shapes, output shapes, error shapes and even subshapes and we'll talk about all those. A member is a single property that exists in a shape so often the closest equivalent is a single column in a database for example but your APIs are not necessarily going to be one to one with the database so what we're talking about specifically is API shape members. Operations are something exposed by a service to be invoked so in Rails, generally anything you're writing in your routes file is something that would be likely one to one with an operation. And an interesting note, so when you're writing libraries if we step outside of Rails for a second like just literally code libraries that people are interacting with whether it's across teams or something you ship, a lot of the same stuff still applies. So you don't have to be going over the internet for these API design principles to apply to your work. Okay, so let's talk about the most basic scenario. You have a client, you can imagine the Ruby SDK since a lot of you said you were using it as an example and it's talking to an API so you're making a request to S3 for example. It's a simple, we're all familiar with this. This is the life cycle of something that is done by web service. And eventually we're gonna add new features to our API and we'll launch a new client version that has support for those new features. But as new iterations of an API are released people are going to still be using the older clients. They're still going to be hitting that endpoint and it still has to work.    And it just continues. You have a new version of an API and now you just get this spaghetti nesting problem and it can get out of control really quickly and it's really important that these older clients continue to work. Updating your clients shouldn't be required to continue functioning. New client versions are for new features. It shouldn't be required housekeeping just to keep the lights on. And if you can ensure backwards compatibility in your API the mental model suddenly becomes a lot simpler. Your API evolves, your clients evolve to provide the new functionality and users of older clients if they don't need the new functionality yet they just keep going along. There's no problem. If there is no problem then there is no problem. And you have little to no forced migration. So there's kind of like a recipe for happiness here. And Ruby is a language designed to maximize developer happiness so we can take this all internally. As a design principle, we want APIs to be backwards compatible so that existing calling patterns and output usage continues to work in perpetuity as much as possible. And we want clients to be forwards compatible so that the only changes you need to make to your code are the changes you need to support using new functionality rather than mandated code changes for standard upgrades. Other than our brave soul on the wall here nobody enjoys that. Okay, so we're talking about definitions. So here's an example of how you might model a resource for an API. So here we're talking about a trip which many of us had to take somewhat drama we'll get back to that later. You have travelers on a trip, a string description of it, and a flight shape which we'll get back to in a second. So shape members. This is kind of the common language we're using to describe these API concepts. You'll also notice that we're typing our members and that's gonna be important even though Ruby, we're talking about Ruby and everything's an object because when we get to our full set of customers we're not just talking about Ruby. And flight, it's a special member because shapes can be complex and in this case we have a shape which references yet another shape. So nested shapes allow for us to avoid duplication. So there might be several points in our data model where we're talking about a flight and the flight is the same. You have a flight identifier, you have an airline, you have some sort of status and if you came to this conference your flight status might've changed a few times I know mine did. But you can have changes of that shape be reflected everywhere that it's used across input and output shapes. And we have our operations. So get, create, update, list, delete, fairly standard controller stuff. In fact it's gonna map pretty one to one with a lot of the default routes that Rails would create for a resource. And it's gonna map about one to one with controller actions that are gonna be generated by any kind of scaffolding. So these are basic Rails concepts like whether or not you're thinking about and modeling what your API does, it has an implied model and it's useful to think about what that is and move with a sort of intentionality. Okay, so from an API client perspective let's look at a request response lifecycle. So we're talking about people using code to access your web API. So first we have a user, they're making a client request such as getting trip information and that's gonna turn into a request on your web API. And that's in turn going to give us the response shape that we spent a few slides describing earlier and your client can translate that into a language object so that your user can not think about the details of what your web API is doing. Though this example I actually had to go back and change because that was actually my original flight number but I had to take a different flight because it really was delayed because Blizzard Conf. You may also receive an exception from the service and surface it through the client. So maybe your system deleted the trip from the flight database because you drove instead of flying because they after tomorrow Conf. And that's just gonna be represented as an error and it's gonna be raised and your client's gonna handle that in whatever way is appropriate to them. So yeah, again these are definitions that we use because they're useful to us for designing and essentially reviewing APIs.  And don't worry about taking a picture of this slide, I'm gonna put all the slides up later. So you will be able to find them, I will definitely post them on Twitter. All right, now let's talk about safe API changes and unsafe ones. So avoiding breaking changes is really important. Like a lot of you have experienced the time where you did a bundle update. You know your gem file was, you didn't have loose dependencies, you were thinking about it and there was some patch upgrade to some library and it had a breaking change and all of your stuff exploded in production. It's a horrifying experience as a customer and so you really want to take intentional effort to avoid inflicting that pain on your users. So let's go back to our trip shape. We wanna make changes. For example, what happens if we add a new Boolean member to differentiate whether a trip is confirmed or unconfirmed or a booking service maybe. Let's totally fine. You can add new optional members to a shape like new output members, new optional inputs. That's totally okay. But I realized another thing and that's that I made this array of travelers and for some reason in implementation I've only ever been doing one to one. So let's just go ahead and delete that. We don't need that. Wrong, no. Changing the type is going to break older clients. It's a breaking change. Imagine the poor guy who made an each condition around the traveler's shape and suddenly they're getting no method errors and nil values. It's a horrifying experience and we're gonna get into this a little bit more later but also think about someone who's using a Java client because you tried to support multiple languages and now their code doesn't compile because they're looking for an array and it's not an object. They actually have to have a type and it has to match. Even if we're using Rails, which is great and for all the reasons we've talked about our clients might be in many languages. Oh, okay, okay. But collections each, I get it. You know, I really wish though confirmed could be a number of states because again, BlizzardConf confirmed as a state of mind. Well, so maybe I can make it a string. It can be multiple types. No, this will also break your clients. You might be able to find clever ways around this in Ruby. I know someone's thinking like, yeah, but if it's nil, then I mean, and if condition works and Ruby's awesome. But again, client libraries in multiple languages, you're gonna break people using compilers and even with Ruby clients, you're kind of stepping into weird uncharted territory. So once you've set a type, it's a commitment. So let's go back to that happy change. We've added a new Boolean member output shape. What does that actually look like for old clients? Like how is this actually working? Why is it okay to add things? So if we're using the latest version of our client, we can access our new value returned by the service. I wanna go check if something is confirmed. It is confirmed, even though I'm gonna go to the airport and it's gonna say my flight is canceled after I get through security, it's confirmed now. And if we're using an older client, we can access the output values we knew about. You know, the confirmed shape is gonna show up, it's gonna get dropped on the floor, but that's fine, I wasn't looking at it. Nothing broke. So adding new things is okay. And if I need to use the new values, I can upgrade. It's a reasonable story. Let's explore another question on adding and removing shapes from our input shape where we're listing trips from a service. So raise your hand if you're familiar with the concept of pagination. Okay, we've got most hands, but essentially like, if you think about like index all and you have a million items, if you don't have some way to break up the response, you're gonna have a bad time and that's pagination. So we have like list objects in S3, we're not gonna return in a single response every single object you have, that could be a very bad time. So we have concepts like next token and max results and you can use that to control the way that your API paginates. So maybe that's all we launch with. That's enough to have a functioning list trips that's gonna scale pretty well. And now I wanna add a new optional parameter called confirmed so that I can go limit our listed trips to confirmed trips or trips that are not confirmed or if I leave it on set, it just gives me everything. And that's totally fine. New optional parameters on input shapes are good. But now I'm running into a scaling problem because Rails doesn't scale, we all know that. And so I wanna require that you have to tell me if the trips are specified or not and is this okay? Interactively, is this okay? No, relaxing parameter requirements is okay. If we had an old required parameter and we wanna say it's not required anymore, that's fine, that breaks nobody. But adding new required parameters is going to break you. Why? So let's consider older clients. They've touched literally nothing, their code works, they're doing what they're supposed to do. And now we add this requirement on the server side. Yep, they're broken, they're probably broken in runtime too. And worst of all, they're literally unable to fix it until they do an upgrade. They can't add the parameter, it's not in the library. And I'm imagining too that a lot of you have experienced a problem like this with a service or library that you use. Don't do that to people. It's wrong. Oh, okay, okay, okay. But we've got this guy, he always upgrades and that's all my customers because they're really on the ball and they upgrade their bundles with a daily build and that's great and that's still insufficient. You still need to make a code change if this restriction is put on the client side or the server side. And to be honest, nobody has a user base which keeps fully up to date with all their dependencies for any number of reasons. It's not a realistic thing to expect or ask for from your users. So what I want to instill is a sort of empathy for your users. Yeah, breaking your users is gonna get a bit of ill will. Some of you probably when you came to this talk or I started talking, started thinking about libraries that had mandatory deprecations and where you're really frustrated. And it's not even the most important thing, it's almost like, why does this engender ill will? Because your code is gonna break at runtime.  At best, someone adds a sprint task of urgent but not important but not useful of yet another overhead code change and it doesn't actually help them achieve their goals. And it's preventable. An ounce of prevention in the form of carefully reviewing your APIs before an initial launch is gonna prevent the need to cause most breaking change possibilities. So if you're respecting the rules, even if you have to do a little bit of creative thinking and you're not making the exact perfect change you wanna make is going to lead to happier users and we think it's worth it. And finally, especially important for us because some of these breaking changes here would cause compile time issues for something like Java but in Ruby these problems are probably gonna show up at runtime. And even if you test and you went to the mini test talk, you went to the RSpec talk, you'd love testing but changes to a backend server are kinda hard to model in tests anyway. And you can't rely on the fact that all your users are even writing tests so good behavior is still important. All right, so now we're gonna talk about more about constraints and validation and exceptions. So modification of shapes gives you some of the most obvious opportunities for breaking changes but there's a lot of subtle changes we need to think about when it comes to constraints and exceptions. So again, no new required parameters. It breaks existing code even if they're upgrading but it's important to remember if you have an existing required parameter and you feel like you wanna make it optional, that's okay, it's not gonna break anybody. And it's worth reviewing just because this theme is gonna come up over and over and over again when we talk about constraints and validation. So constraints on both the server side and the client side are important. If you're writing APIs, you're probably writing clients. So if you look again at our requests for listing trips, a maximum value for max results is reasonable. So it's probably implied when you don't specify it as well. Maybe you don't validate anything on the client but if I send you more than, if I say 50 results, I'm gonna get 25 and there's an implied maximum. So you can ask for less, you can say give me five per page but you can never ask for more. So maybe later I wanna squeeze a bit more performance out of my server for first page requests and lower that limit, is that okay? No. No and double and triple no if you're doing validation on the client side because now formally valid requests are gonna raise validation errors. Customers are gonna be relying on that previously accepted value and they're gonna break. But increases by loosening constraints, that's totally fine. No old code using lower values is going to break. They can pull in the new maximum and actually so this is a design decision that we were thinking about in the Ados SDK for Ruby when it comes to client design. We only validate required parameters in the existence of parameters. We don't validate other constraints. So there's APIs that say like you can only have a certain length on a shape and that'll be validated on the server side if you exceed that but we don't check that on the client side. And this actually came in handy at one point.  We actually ran out and users of older Ruby SDKs had no problem with this even if they didn't upgrade. However, if we had validated the previously correct length constraint on instance IDs customers would have needed to upgrade their SDK to keep functioning and it's not a good experience. So I'm not gonna say wrong, you can't do it but use caution when you're validating constraints on the client side. Use your judgment but not a fan. Okay, so I wanna talk a little bit about states. This is gonna get a little bit into the weeds and this doesn't affect a lot of you but it's worth covering at least a little bit. So let's consider the example of our flight shape and the status value and while the type over the wire and in rails is a string, effectively this isn't innumerable. In fact, if you're writing a Java client you might literally use the type innumerable because that's going to be useful for them. So consider the possible states of a flight and I know all of you have as we would represent in our flight status. The interim set of statuses could be used as a flight workflow and the terminal states are the end states of the flight. It was landed or it was canceled like the original flight I was supposed to take to get here. Maybe we decide we wanna be more descriptive and we wanna split landed and to land it on time and landed late. And by now we know this is wrong even though we would have found this super handy for all the people whose flights landed late. Well, okay, but I'm clever, I'm smarter. So let's keep that value and just add a new one. Now we haven't deleted a value. We've only added a new one and I mean again we really need it after our experience in this conference. So cool, right? No, no, no it's not. We have in fact split a terminal state and users are going to be getting an unhappy surprise and the way to think about why this is is to think about concepts like waiters. If you've used the AtoS SDK for Ruby, raise your hand if you've used waiters before. Okay, we got a few hands. Essentially a waiter is something where you're pulling on a described type request over and over again waiting for a certain state to arrive so you might say wait till it says landed or wait till it says canceled and keep pulling every five minutes. Well, now we've added a new state that's just gonna pull forever until it hits a timeout. So we've actually broken our customers. And one way we could look at this is okay, but we still wanna describe if it was on time or if it was late in the end. You can add an extra member that has that information. So this is where we're thinking about creative ways to get the information we wanna get across without breaking existing behavior. Adding interim statuses is different, it's often okay. You could look at them as lifecycle events. So rather than pulling determination on these states and risking looping forever and for all time, you're potentially taking an action on certain interim states. So a lot of the airline apps when a flight is suddenly boarding you get a text message notification. That's something where you're pulling on an interim state. And if it never boards, cause it's canceled, well, your code probably knows that's a possibility and you're ready to handle it. If new unrecognized services states arrive, that's a lot easier to just ignore and drop on the floor. And I say this is tricky because there's interim states that are optional in the middle of a flow and then there's state forks. State forks are generally not so good, but I could probably spend a lot of time just talking about states and terminal states. The short way I'm gonna say it is generally interim states are okay, new terminal states are not okay. And also consider that even if you're adding interim states in languages like Java, you probably have to future proof. You have to account for the fact that you might get an enum value you don't recognize at some point in the future and you don't wanna just explode as soon as you see it. So thinking about ways you can future proof clients is also important. Okay, so remember our old example of a simple exception? I canceled my trip, I drove and I specify a unique ID that's not present. I get an exception and it's neat and tidy and I can handle it rather easy in code. So I go to get a trip. It's in like a getter method and maybe if the resource isn't found I don't need to crash hard. I can ignore it. I have to pick up the error. I log it. I return nil. It's cool. We've all written code like this all the time. It's not invalid. When do we have a problem? Well, I've decided that HTTP status code 4.10 is the greatest idea of all time and I'd love to give my users an amazing insight when they specify a resource that used to exist but doesn't exist anymore. So I split my exception behavior. Okay, pause. Again, show of hands. Is anyone in the room been burned by code that depend on doing this? I feel so good for you. I only see a couple raised hands. I've seen it happen. It's not fun because what ends up happening is this old code with squashing one type of exception. Now it gets another type and that's gonna jump the stack and possibly crash your application at runtime. The code above has no idea why the resource is missing and now for a previously supported use case you're gonna get an error breakout. And some of you were thinking, because we're all smart, inheritance can fix this and in library design you're right but an API design nesting exceptions can bring on a lot more complexity and you don't wanna necessarily go there. So clients need to be future proof. So proceed with caution or again prefer to use added fields and headers an exception to breakout details. So go ahead and put your 4.10 gone information in an optional header field. It's fine, it'll work. This is wrong. Yeah, adding a new field parameter where you have that information you can go ahead and fork in your logging. That's cool. And customers who use curl style requests will also like you a lot more. Okay, one thing I wanna think about for a second is looking around corners because again, customers are clever. They're gonna do things that you weren't anticipating. A note of caution. One thing you'll note throughout the presentation is a lot of the proposed API changes that broke customers were well intended and even potentially useful. But at the same time, customers weren't writing bad code and getting punished for it. They were following common conventions. So I wanted to introduce Hiram's law. Backwards compatibility in practice and especially at scale, it's hard work. Customers are gonna build workarounds based on shortcomings of your API whether those are real shortcomings or just something they perceive should work differently.  And they notice behavior quirks that you didn't intend on and they build on them. So if Stack Overflow becomes sentient and starts shocking PHP developers they're gonna start depending on the free electricity at some point. Every detail or inconsistency is gonna become part of someone's workflow and careful design can minimize those sharp edges and reduce the scope of the problem. But now you can't stop a security fix because it's gonna break someone's workflow. There's always exceptions but you should be mindful when you're making changes that have a downstream behavior impact. So I know that when we're doing changes to the Ruby SDK at AWS we're super, super paranoid about things that are going to break users even in applied ways like new defaults changing the way that retry behavior works. It's not technically a breaking change but if you were relying on some part of that behavior you might get a surprise you're not happy with. You might have been relying on the fact that we only retry a few times and then fail out rather quickly so that you don't have cascading timeout failures in your system. And suddenly we decide to give you a lottery tries so that we can make sure things will succeed and you get a knock on failure that takes down your system. You're not happy with me if I do that to you. So think about not only modeled behaviors but unmodeled behaviors. All right, so let's wrap this up with API design rules that you can use. But first I wanna talk a little bit about related talks you might wanna check out if this is peter interest. And again, I'm super stoked to see how many people are interested in API design. So much of this talk was inspired by a talk from my colleagues Kyle Thompson and Jim Flanagan at this year's re-invent called embracing change without breaking the world. We all work together on reviewing APIs at APS or APIs at AWS, say that five times fast. And their talk is especially useful for understanding the static language side of the problem in more depth. Kyle is a developer on our Java SDK team. Second, I gave a talk at the same conference about building APIs with Ruby using a Ruby on Rails example using our API gateway service. And given that API gateway gives you the ability to generate SDKs for your services automatically in multiple languages including Java, Ruby, several mobile SDKs, JavaScript. This talk can be a bridge between the concepts you learn today and using services that we offer, quick plug, for applying them to your real world API customers. And finally, I added this one recently but there was another talk which already happened. So you'll have to look at it later on YouTube if you didn't go on GraphQL. It has some interesting ideas about different approaches to some of these same problems. It's not an endorsement, it's not not an endorsement but if you want to learn a little bit more about ways people are looking at these same problems, it's an interesting talk to check out. Okay, so, four out of five, this is the slide you can take a screenshot of if you want. I'll still be posting all the slides later but this is kind of the thing we've been building up to over time. So I have enough time to do the thing that speakers are not supposed to do and read the slide. So do for APIs, add new members and shapes. Do add intermediate workflow states, cough carefully. There, a puppy got adopted, I coughed. Do add detail to existing exceptions. Do add new opt-in exceptions. So I use a new feature, I might get a new type of exception, that's okay. Do loosen constraints. And for clients, think about forward compatibility, build so you support all those things. Focus on discoverability which is not something we dove into too much but could be a whole talk in and of itself. And Kyle and Jim's talk at Reinvent talked a little bit more about this topic if you're interested. And then the do not. Do not remove or rename members and shapes ever. And renaming is the same as removing. Don't change member types. I know you're clever. And that you can find some way to make it work in Ruby.  It's not a good time. Do not add new terminal workflow states. Do not add new exceptions that are not purely opt-in. Don't fork exception behavior. And don't tighten constraints. And in clients, again, asterisk here, this is kind of a do-it-your-own-risk but I wouldn't recommend it. Don't validate API constraints or do it very carefully. It can cause more problems than it's worth. So hopefully you found this useful. I've got AWS stickers. So if you have questions, I'll take them over here. If you just want stickers, I've got them over here. So there's two sticker piles. Thanks everyone for your interest. Thank you.


top of the hour. Hello and welcome. My name is Mark Horseman, Data Evangelist with Dataversity. We would like to thank you for joining the most recent webinar in the Dataversity Monthly Series, Elevating Enterprise Data Literacy with Dr. Wendy Lynch. This series is held at the first Thursday of every month. Today, Wendy will discuss the language of literacy. When we label people, does it help or hurt? Just a couple points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, you will be muted during the webinar. If you would like to chat with us or with each other, we certainly encourage you to do so. And to note, Zoom defaults the chat to send to just the panelists, but you may absolutely switch that to chat with each other. For questions, we will be collecting them via the Q&A section. To find the chat and the Q&A panels, you may click those icons in the bottom middle of your screen to activate those features. As always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days containing the links to the slides, the recording of this session, and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now let me introduce to you our speaker, Dr. Wendy Lynch. Wendy is the founder of analytictranslator.com and Lynch Consulting. For over 35 years, she has converted complex analytics into business value. At heart, she is a sense maker and translator, a consultant to numerous Fortune 100 companies. Her current work focuses on the application of big data solutions in human capital management. In 2022, she was awarded the Bill Whitmer Leadership Award for her sustained contributions to the science of corporate health. As a research scientist working in the business world, Dr. Wendy Lynch has learned to straddle commercial and academic goals, translating analytic results into market success. Through this experience, she has created her new book Become an Analytic Translator and on an online course. And with that, I will give the floor to Wendy to start the presentation. Hello and welcome. Thank you, Mark. It is lovely to have you here and to everyone that's joining us for the first time, welcome. For those of you who have been with us before, welcome back. We have a lot to cover today, so keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times so that you don't run into anything. Today, we are going to talk about language and talk about labels. And I want to start by just having us imagine, because somebody who comes into the data area for the first time, it's like they are learning a new language. Perhaps that's Portuguese. And so I'm going to have you listen to basic terminology in data science in Portuguese. All right, I'm sure you've all got that. And for those of you who don't know Portuguese, I'm going to also have somebody ask you for a simple request having to do with data. So I hope you've got that and that you can deliver that on time. When we think about somebody learning a new field, it is like learning a new language. And if you have been looking at the area of data literacy like I have, you have noticed that we are calling it a lot of different things. We are calling it literacy. Some people call it data confidence. There's the term data abilities, data engagement, data competent, data brilliant, straightforward data skills. They're labeling people data natives, having data savviness, intelligence, fluency, maturity, personas, empowered. And so we'll ask today, does it matter? Do all these labels matter? And let's start just by thinking about labels in general. And when we have the good side of a label, it necessarily in many cases has an opposite. So if you're not data literate, are you data illiterate?  If you're not data intelligent? If you're not savvy, are you data ignorant? If you don't have data maturity, are you immature? If you're not data competent, are you data incompetent? When we talk about how we measure literacy, the way we categorize people probably matters.  So I'm going to talk about some of the ways that different folks in different organizations are talking about literacy. This particular organization, atland.com has an assessment that comes out with categories that seem very straightforward to me. So you are anywhere from a novice to proficient to an expert. And the word novice, I think at least for me, has a pretty benign connotation. A person who is new or inexperienced in a field or situation. If somebody said that I was a novice unicycle rider, I would not be insulted. I don't know how to. And if I was learning, I would categorize myself as a novice. Another organization called EW Solutions, they have their own way of measuring. And they start at the bottom with remedial, then basic, then literate, all the way again up to expert. But remedial has a very different connotation to me than a novice. And when you look up the definition, it's applied to students who have fallen short and they have not necessarily achieved what they need to achieve. And so if we start calling people remedial, and that's the level where they are categorized, that connotation is going to be different. And this organization also categorizes attitudes. And that goes from a data skeptic to a data driven person. Now, it seems like they've tried to make those a little bit less pejorative. But then you just have to look at the faces.  And if you're data driven, you have a smiley sunshine face. And I don't even know what the data indifferent is, whether that's somebody following off a cliff or what.  And you want to be a happy data driven person. The data abilities people from data to the people, they have 15 data abilities. And they measure people on each one. And when you are measured on each one, you have a score of a level one to a level six. That's an interesting way to do it. And then you have different levels of ability under different circumstances, whether that's just understanding data or actually doing analysis. And they use descriptions of three categories. So if you are a one or a two in a particular ability, then you are considered curious, as opposed to confident. Or the people at the top who are the coaches, because they can teach other people. And curious isn't so bad. It implies that I want to know. It implies that I'm a learner. And it implies that I am just starting out and wondering about things. So it's not so bad of a label, I don't think. Erin does personas. And when you fill out their assessment, you get a persona. And they start at the bottom with the data skeptics, who not only don't know much, but they don't believe in the value of data. Then the next level is a data enthusiast. So they don't know a lot, but they're excited about it and willing to learn. And so they're sort of more like the curious. And when we put these kind of labels, again, if you are calling somebody a skeptic, what does that imply about them? What does that do when we label them that way? And then the click folks have four personas that are quite interesting. At the bottom level is the data doubter, which is a lot like the data skeptic.  They don't really want to deal with data.  Then the next level is a dreamer. So that's an interesting name. I guess a dreamer could be curious or could be enthusiastic. So maybe they're like the enthusiasts and they at least recognize the importance of data, but they don't know how to use any kind of data skills. And so they are categorized as needing to improve their skills pretty dramatically.  Their third level is a data knight, which is kind of interesting. They are skilled at what they call battling with data. So these are the folks in the trenches. They have good analytics skills, but they aren't quite at the top because they tend to get overwhelmed by everything that they have to do. So these knights don't have shining armor. They are just still fighting their way to the top, which they designate as the aristocrats. So the aristocrats are like our experts. They are the folks that are the leaders. They have a very high aptitude, and they can be like the coaches that we heard about in data abilities who help upskill and uplift others. So we have a whole variety of ways that we talk about people. And I want to think about that because I have a question about who has to get to that high level of literacy? How much literacy is enough? Or to use the other languages? How much data engagement, data competence, or data savviness is enough? Now it's very clear with the labels that being at the top makes you a superhero and being at the bottom makes you something not great, remedial, or doubters, or skeptics. And so we never have anybody put some weird labels at the top. We don't have a persona that is called a know-it-all or a smarty-pants. So there is nothing bad about being at the top, and there's a lot bad about being at the bottom. So we have to think about the implications of how we talk about these categories. So if we think about data literacy and we think about a population of people, the proficiency would be up on the left axis and how many people would be at the bottom. And companies are saying that they want everybody, the whole population, to not just be able to read and understand data, but to convince people with data to explain analytics and then learn how to teach and or perform analysis. So yes, we know this is important and we see all the time that leaders believe that literacy is going to be critical to their success. We absolutely hear that all the time. And we hear that literacy is not something that we should do a little bit of because when you read about it, literacy is going to be the future. There are calls to have other professions all be data scientists. When an explanation of literacy comes out on Forbes or the MIT Press, they will say that everybody needs to grasp statistics, interpret charts, and be able to understand analytics. Oh, and we also start name calling because the summaries that I see, I was going to say something meaner, the summaries that I see point out who is good and who isn't good. And least literate teams are often identified as those in the more social sciences or the interactive people kinds of roles. So human resources and sales are called out as being the least literate. So we would put them in the remedial, the curious, the skeptic category. Now, leaders say they want everybody to be literate, but they overestimate how many people already are literate. 75% of business leaders in one Harvard Business Review article said that they believe that most or all of their workers are data literate. Now, the middle managers are a little more realistic, but still half of them believe that most or all of their workers are data literate. But what is the truth? The truth is Accenture found that less than a quarter of employees were confident in their data skills, which would be put them in that proficient or confident category. Another study found that only 8% of people could be put in those higher categories, the aristocrats, the even the data knights. And so leaders think that most are all of their people are literate. But if only one out of 10, not even are aristocrats, then what are we actually doing? And what can we expect? 62% of US adults operate at a very base math level. One in five can't read their bank statements or understand it. One in five have such severe math anxiety that if you look at their brains in an MRI, the activity is similar to pain and fear.  So leaders think that most are all of their people are literate. The evidence says it's somewhere between 10%, let's say, and 20% who are highly literate. A huge portion of people are afraid of numbers and will have trouble. And so if the majority of employees are not highly literate, then should we change how we think about this issue? Because 80% of them at least are falling into the remedial, curious, bottom, skeptic, doubter, novice level. Does it help us to have the majority of people labeled in that way? Because that corner where the illiterates are is going to be very crowded. And the number of them who are going to be the superhewers is going to be small. So how is it that we talk about this? And how can we put this into perspective? Well, I'd like to remind us of a few other areas that are important. Oh, and by the way, one third of leaders, meaning CFOs, CEOs, COOs are considered highly data literate. So if we are in that mode of labeling people, then the headline would probably look like this. Two thirds of business leaders are illiterate would be the headline if we are going to be labeling, or incompetent, or ignorant, or remedial. So we have to think about whether or not these labels are helping when the majority of people actually fall into those lower categories. So there's another type of literacy that I will call business literacy that is very important also to the success of organizations. It's called strategic alignment, I'll call it business literacy, but it's the phenomenon of when everybody in the organization is aligned in what they believe are the priorities of the organization. And you see as much in the management journals, if not more, about this issue than you do data literacy. So employees have to know what the strategy is to implement it. Employees have to understand the context and why they do what they do. And it's so important that just like with data literacy being important, companies whose people are strategically aligned have more revenue and are more profitable. So if that's the case, then we want business literacy with everybody, not just doing their job, but connecting their job to critical performance indicators, being able to know what strategy is, knowing how to make decisions according to that strategy and the priorities of the organization and actually become good at understanding and creating strategy. And leaders just like with data literacy believe that their employees, most employees can explain company strategy. Now only 20% of executives have really high confidence that most employees can explain strategy, but still more than half believe that most of their employees can explain a business strategy. How many actually understand business strategy? Less than 30% can pull out what the strategic priorities are from a multiple choice list within organizations. Only 13% of frontline managers can name their company's top three priorities. And in one Pricewaterhouse Cooper study, 93% of employees could not articulate their company's strategy. The ones that can, do we call them business aristocrats? Do we call them business experts? And all these 93% are they remedial in their business expertise? Are they business curious or business doubters? What do we say about the people who don't understand this? Do we categorize them? And another interesting connection between business alignment and technology. So we might think of that as our digital and technical and data literacy. When you have alignment between business strategy and technology strategy, it is one of the most prominent indicators of whether the company is performing well. But there is a discrepancy between business executives and technology executives about whether there is alignment between the technological strategy and the business strategy. And so in fact, when you ask technology executives, they believe that their strategy is completely aligned with the business strategy. Whereas fewer business executives believe that they are totally aligned. And so is this discrepancy? Is this discrepancy because the technology executives aren't business literate? Is it because the business executives aren't technologically literate? Is it because they disagree on what the definitions are? We don't know. But we know that there are things missing between these two efforts. And so I ask, just like with data literacy, if a majority of employees are not highly literate, in this case in business strategic alignment, then should that change how we think about it? How do we move people along the continuum when it's the majority, if not 93% of people? We want everybody at the top, but we don't know if that's realistic. So one of the ways that I've started to hear people talk about data literacy is using data fluency. And I actually think that fluency sounds a lot more realistic of an analogy because we are learning a new language and new concepts. And the Gartner Group, which is a big management advisory and consulting group, put together these levels, which are really interesting. But what struck me to begin with was that their lowest level was conversational.  You really can't have a basic conversation if you don't know the language. And so I added another level at the bottom that I'll call introductory, where you're just getting familiar with the terminology so that you can at least maybe ask for directions or point to the right food or do something right as you enter this new country. And so a friend of mine from Women in Data, Karen Jean-François, helped me with this to look at these levels. And I want you to imagine that this is your entry into the data world. You've come into the data country and you are just learning terminology.  The next level at conversational is where we have to put them together so we know how to describe them or compare them with new kinds of words. So again, if we just got to this country, we have to start to understand these things. Once we understand this much, then to be literate, we need to be able to understand an example result, for example. So how do we describe, and if we are now asking people to understand how to interpret, then it's almost like now we have to be able to have a conversation using these terms that we don't necessarily understand yet. So let's go to competent. Competent means that you can actually start to do the analysis and do some of the analytic work so you have to understand a request. And then lastly, in order to be fluent, you have to be able to put it all together. And what the Gartner folks say is that you aren't just fluent in analytics, you are also fluent in business. So you have literacy in data and literacy in business. I know that I'm beating this analogy to death, but I can't help but think of how we label people as being incapable when all of us know how uncomfortable it is to go to someplace new. If these words didn't make any sense to you, then are we putting a lot of people in that situation of making sense. So they have another level called multilingual, where the people are not only fluent in data and analytics, but also in multiple business domains. So to them, this is the top level of literacy. What I started to wonder is whether or not we have one more aspect that we need to attend to. And I will call this people literacy. So are you socially and emotionally aware enough to understand when somebody is uncomfortable? Are you able to figure out whether someone is following or not? Are they struggling with this new language or do they seem like they're doing okay? And this is a critical leadership and business skill. In Forbes, we hear about it all the time. Harvard Business Review, we hear about it all the time. 80% of long-term job success depends on your emotional quotient rather than your intelligence. Managers with a high emotional quotient have teams that perform better. And HR leaders are saying they're going to hire people based on this. So let's start to think about this one more skill and what it involves. So people literacy is that you are self-aware. You recognize emotions and social situations that other people are in. You empathize authentically with them. You have the skills to interact regardless of what that situation looks like. And you can guide others in how to do this. So if we think about people literacy, once again, how do we label them? What do we call somebody who is not emotionally literate, who is not people literate? And how many people actually have high emotional people literacy? Well, once again, here we are. 36% of people are able to recognize emotions, which means that 64% are not. And 95% of people think they're self-aware, but only 10% to 15% actually are self-aware. And now, just to take this all the way back around, people majoring in science and business and technology have significantly lower levels of people literacy, the same way that people in HR and sales have low data literacy. So this is especially important in data efforts because 90% of companies in the next few years plan to accelerate large data transformation projects, whether that's how they collect or store or implement AI or whatever they intend to do. But it appears the majority of them do not accomplish what they want. And when you look at those failures, 80% of it happens because of people issues, not technology issues, not talent issues. So we can't ignore the fact that it's about people as much as it is about tools and process. So once again, we're going to ask the same question. If a majority of people are not highly literate, so they are emotionally curious, emotionally remedial, they are people skeptics or people doubters, or they are emotional aristocrats and they are doing the best that they can. If the majority are not highly literate, should that change how we think about the issue? Because in all three of these cases, the vast majority are not at the top. Yet we pretend that that is the goal that everybody be at the top. So I'm going to ask a question that I have asked before. And that is whether or not data literacy is our goal. And I would suggest that it's not. Data literacy is a means to achieving something else. And that is company-wide information-driven decisions. What companies want is that they make use of timely information. They notice problems and opportunities quickly. They ask better questions, they make better decisions, and they extract insights at all levels of the organization. So the goal is to be highly insight driven. Now the reason why we talk about data literacy is because it's high literacy that gives us access to those insights. Because some insights are accessible to everyone because they are the very basic pieces of information. But then as we get to where we need to be able to manipulate data, the need to be able to interpret and analyze data, we have to be able to use advanced, sophisticated machine learning or other types of AI. In order to get all those insights, we ask people to be highly data literate. But in order to gain access to insights, the question is do we need to get all of these people, all of these curious remedial doubters, skeptics with the brownie faces? Do we need to get them all up there to the high level? I would say no. Can we take some of the lower level folks who are interested and have an aptitude and train them to help other team members get a little higher access to more of these insights? Can we train people who know how to do basic manipulation and understand some of that data integrity and data analytic capabilities? Those folks who are proficient, the confident, the data knights, so that we don't have to rely only on the aristocrats to give us what we need. And then can we designate analytic translators to help pull all of the highest insights out in a way that takes into account business knowledge and people knowledge? So are we focusing too much on these low levels rather than trying to find the intermediaries that can help pull more people up? Because it does make you wonder whether you could train people with the aptitude and interest to get us part way there and embed translators to get us most of the way there. Can that happen quicker than educating every employee who is currently a skeptic remedial doubter novice? I think it's worth asking. So I would put one more at the top just like I put one more at the bottom. I think we have to acknowledge that there are people who are below conversational and we should think about whether there is somebody who is not only fluent in business and analytics but also understands people in a way that they can get the most out of the different types of literacy. So I'll take us back to the beginning. We can choose ways that we talk about this, whether it's confidence or engagement, whether it's competence or brilliance, whether we just talk about skills, whether we talk about people's native language, whether they're savvy or intelligent, we can think about personas and try and figure out how to refer to people. We can think about whether we are assigning the superheroes and revering them a little bit too much with aristocratic kinds of labels while we put bad labels down here. We have to wonder which of these things are the most useful and also leverage the abilities and interests that people have rather than thinking only about the folks at the bottom needing to get all the way to the top. So yes, you've heard before. I believe analytics translators are likely to be part of the solution and I will stop us here and open it up to any questions and Mark, I invite you to make any comments or tell me how much you agree or disagree with this position. I love how you've presented it here today and I really enjoy, as we were discussing in chat on the side here, the image of folks being pulled up to a new level of literacy and rising to the challenge with the ladder there. I thought that was very well illustrated and the point made. So yes, if people have questions, I would love to see them in the Q&A. I've got a couple here. So one question in here. How do you identify people who may have disengaged by being labeled? How do you see those folks in an organization and how do you understand if that's happened at your organization? Yeah, that's a really good question. My guess would be that they will not raise their hand if that has happened to them, which is going to make it much more difficult and especially if they have data phobias or math phobias, it's going to make it much harder. And so my bias would be that as you start to find the folks who want to be a go-between, whether that is the citizen analyst or whether that be a person that wants to connect with others, they may be identified more likely on a one-to-one basis when we start to have these mid-range people. So if somebody down here is talking with a team member that has some data familiarity or a team member that understands how to interpret it and deliver it in a way that's not scary, then you may be able to re-engage them. But my guess is that if you have already ticked them off because they feel like they've been labeled, they are not going to raise their hand right away. Well, what strategies have you experienced or developed to help bridge the gap between data and technology? My work has been as an analytic translator, my whole career, and then lately as a instructor teaching people how to be an analytic translator. And what it involves primarily is communication skills. So it sounds kind of backwards because you have to understand the analytics first. But if I don't know how to ask a person questions in a way that help them get clear about what they need, if I can't explain something in language that is more digestible and be able to recognize when that hasn't worked so that I can look for another way to translate it, then it doesn't matter how good my analytics are because I'm going to either answer the wrong question or deliver something in a way that nobody understands. So that has been my bias as a solution is to train more people to get past the differences in language because sometimes it is almost like one group is speaking Portuguese and another one is speaking French. That's a great segue to another question that's in Q&A here. Is there a minimum level that everyone should get to to successfully operate in the kinds of businesses that we have today? Yeah, I think that is the million dollar question. And I would love to have a debate with somebody where we take extreme positions and figure out where we end up landing in the middle. I think that with the right language and it sort of is dependent on the job is the other thing. There are some jobs where if you don't understand what the data are telling you then you could really mess up. So I think it's somewhat job dependent. I think we can aspire to everyone understanding the data that are involved in the job that they are doing, which means that as we teach, we would teach about what their performance indicators are and why the data are numbers you can trust or why they are numbers you can't trust. And if we tie their own performance and understand what they think about the numbers that reveal their performance, I think that's a place that we can start. But I really don't. That's such a great question. And I think it's the question is what do we all need to know? I mean, you almost would believe that every citizen needs to understand basic numbers so that they understand what's going on in the world, but I'm not sure that that is likely either. So we've got a very popular question in Q&A here. How does one consider negative reinforcement versus positive reinforcement within the discussion of labeling? Some people may be motivated by perceived unfavorable labeling. Well, I guess it depends on what your goals are. I tend to think that kindness and encouragement and empathy get you further than insults do. But I also know that there are some people who respond well to being challenged and they may see this as a challenge. So not everybody is wired the same way. But my bias is always more toward kindness and especially since we're talking about the majority. So we're talking about 80% of people not being even moderately data literate, 80% of people not understanding the strategy of their own organizations and 80% of people not being able to read other people's emotions. So if we're talking about the majority, labeling them all as remedial and insufficient, I think is counterproductive. Yeah, I really agree with you there. One thing that I learned a number of years ago from somebody who was my mentor back in ye olden days, as I like to say, is to catch more flies with honey. While you may catch flies by other means, I think you're trying to cast as wide a possible net as you can and a positive message is always going to do that more effectively in a corporate environment. So I love exactly how you put that, Wendy. I think that's perfect. We've got a couple of related questions that I'm really interested in your take on. And one's kind of leading the questioner a bit. So I'll ask it second here. Who do you encourage to take the lead on deploying this change to the organization that seems like a senior level directive? And the other question is, how can a data governance team support this initiative? Right? You know, it's so interesting because my career has wandered around in a whole lot of different fields. And whether it's corporate health, or it's other types of training, it always goes better when a top leader shows that they are interested and they value this, and they tie it to some real essential strategic aspect of the organization. But they allow themselves to be vulnerable and to express the ways that they also need to learn and that they also need to grow. Because top down is important. But when they say things like, well, it's easy. I do it all the time. That's not motivating. And even just saying this is critical. You need to go do this is not motivating. But explaining that this is going to help all of us succeed. And I am working hard as an individual to also learn some of these things that are important for me to learn. I think that is critical to have the top be interested in it. Especially since we now saw that only a third of the C-suite. So a third of CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CHROs are data literate. And if they can't admit that they have gaps in the way that they look at things, it's going to be very hard to convince other people to do that. Now the data governance people, I have such an incredibly difficult job unless they have support like that. Because folks who don't understand data are going to be less aware of how important data structures and data governance and data literacy could be. So it is an education that has to happen from the bottom up too. And hopefully you have an ear that will listen to you somewhere at the top. I love how you put that to you and in chat somebody was saying 32% seems a little bit high to be honest. And I know from my experience whatever I've rolled those dice and talked to someone at the C-suite results definitely varied. I would agree that I think that that's a little high. Maybe they were surveying companies that included a lot of tech companies. But yeah, I have lots of stories of conversations with top executives that where you just go, oh my gosh, I didn't realize this is where we're starting. So yeah. Yes. It sounds like we have a shared lived experience there. Yes. But I will also say in all fairness, all of those leaders that I'm talking about that were not particularly adept at analytic results were excellent leaders in other ways. Oh for sure. I think the whole point and for the most part the people who are in leadership or doing a good job are there because they are excellent at what they do. So calling them remedial, skeptic, doubter, novice, whatever is not helpful, which is I think the whole point of today. So yes, I can laugh as a person who thinks analytics is like the best thing ever that I and I can laugh when I find out that someone doesn't understand a bar graph, but they do a lot of other things well that I don't do well. So. Yeah. I think we share that experience as well because a lot of leaders that I've run into in the past, they've always shown me their excellence in other ways. And I'm always in awe at folks in the C-suite. So yeah, definitely, definitely. We have a couple minutes left here and there's another very popular question and I'm very excited to hear you speak to this. How do you recommend measuring data fluency? You know, we had one session in the spring on assessments and those assessments varied so much like how people put those together. And what was interesting is probably the one that I was the most impressed with was one that was homegrown by a committee inside of Evergreen Health Organization. They created their own. So Heather Wilson shared some of what they did because they had very specific things they wanted to measure in their health environment. And it almost felt like that was more straightforward and appropriate than the ones like data abilities, which is widely used. It has benchmarks around the world. Those are all important skills, but it may or may not help with your organization, with your tools, with your mechanisms for sharing information and how much people understand about that. So it makes it more difficult because there isn't one off the shelf necessarily. But I think that more people being able to interpret the results of things that are pertinent to your organization is when you get an indication of fluency in your environment. So I think we all have different languages and different terminologies. So that's unfortunately the way that I'm starting to think about it is that in some ways it's native to your culture, which is your organization and your priorities and your metrics. That makes so much sense. And again, I just love the way that you put that and couldn't agree more. Well, that brings us to the end of our session today. So thank you so much, everybody, for sharing some time with us today and talking about data literacy. And thank you very much, Wendy, for the excellent, excellent webinar. As a reminder, the slides and recording will be made available within a couple of business days. Thank you, everyone, again, and have a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you so much, and thanks, Mark, for all your help.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick, you're watching Playthings of Alien Forces. Ha ha ha ha! I'm Siddharth Dhanian with me on the show as always is our sports editor Leslie Xavier. Today is an ICC World T20 special. We're talking about all our stories are from that tournament which is currently underway in the UAE. India of course having a dismal start to the tournament. Two losses out of two, first against arch rivals Pakistan. And then last night against New Zealand a proper rubbing. Leslie, you watched the game, there wasn't much to sort of comment on. But what really went wrong? What are the key aspects that India is clearly lacking on? I guess batting failure has been the common factor across both the losses. Of course against Pakistan you can't say a complete failure as such, but still the batsmen failed to make good on the start that they got. And against New Zealand of course the New Zealand ballers they have the ball to play, they have won the toss and then if you look at the wickets that India lost the early wickets, all of them were in the outfield caught and tagging shots. Wrong ball, I mean yeah it's a tricky call in T20 right, you have to be attacking. So someone was deceived by a slower ball, someone was deceived by the bounds. Kohli again I mean going for a six against Spinner. So it's they went attacking but I guess when at international level you talk about batsmen applying themselves and with the experience that the Indians have across formats, IPL, they should I guess have that understanding which ball to go for, which ball, which baller. So for me if you look at it there was a besides short selection or besides the timing of the short as such, there is also this lack of individual attention given for planning for opponents which New Zealanders came with, which Pakistan players came with. If you look at a baller's strength you should know what to expect from that baller right, if it's a change of bounds, change of pace, drift. We just went in, I don't know was it overconfidence or was it lack of strategy or was it fatigue also because these guys are playing back to back, biobubbles, nonstop in the Middle East itself so it could be a factor of all these things but yeah. With arguably a lot more at stake in other tournaments but we'll come to that little further on in the show. First I want to ask you one of the things that I was reading was that India were done in by the size of the boundaries, the bigger ground in Dubai. Now for a team that plays this much cricket is that kind of a reason or reasoning valid from any stretch because you see then Darrell Mitchell I think coming and hit sixes whenever he kind of felt like it. We also hit sixes, it's not like our players didn't and also it's not sixes that win matches right, there are also options to go the ground route, you can hit boundaries, you can make two, I mean classic what do you call that, cliches of cricket convert two to three and all those things because the ground the larger the chance for that and so again coming to the quality of Indian batsmen on paper and what has translated in the tournament there is a gulf, pun intended. Because Filuccai, Raui Sharma or Virat Kohli, again Virat Kohli as played just that it didn't work this time around but first match he did play well. So our KL Rahul that brilliant stroke players use of timing is one of their hallmarks also so you can hit boundaries, you don't have to hit sixes all the time and as far as sizes matter Indians are played in all sorts of, I mean Indians never play in smaller grounds that way it's medium sized or large grounds whereas New Zealand come from a country which has smaller grounds so if you look at it that kind of handicap applies more to New Zealand than India so I would disagree with that. So mathematically still of course there are chances but very difficult now for India to make it through to the next stage which is the semi-finals of this tournament so massive sense of disappointment I guess for cricket fans in the country. Disappointment it's also, I don't know, Indian team is on a cusp also right because Virat Kohli's last captain's team has a T20 skipper and so I don't know, I mean I don't exactly qualify as a cricket fan because I am a professional too so I look at it things differently but these kind of things are natural in a team's transition so for me I would take lessons from this, I would look at future, I would look at the next captaincy candidate the coaching staff changes that is going to happen and I would take it forward from here and as a person who watches cricket for the joy of it and not necessarily fanatic for one specific team as such I would look for positives from this, I would look at young players who are there in the mix someone like Spinner like Varun Chakraborty or Ishan or Rishabh Panth and all these players and see how these players can fit into a larger scheme and take things forward and I would be hopeful that the next team management would not be insistent on having someone like MS Dhoni as a mentor because that gives out a wrong signal to the current crop of players it's giving wrong signals to Kohli because there is this idea that Dhoni has a brilliant mind Kohli is aggression personified but not necessarily so that drills in that sets a wrong precedent as such so I hope the BCCI and the management realizes that mistake, I would call it a mistake and give the players in the mix the chance to evolve and become better and be good at what they do Right, hope and BCCI in the same sentence, you are truly an optimist my friend Yeah, I woke up in the wrong side of the bed, it's clearly evident Fair enough, final question, does India seem to be suffering from a spin problem, from the batting point of view all of this cricket is being played yet Sodi had a great game for New Zealand and it seems like our boys didn't understand quite what to do with the spin It's again, I would say it's a cascading effect because you have a bad start then you can't be careful with the spinner and when you are facing quality spinners of course it becomes a problem, excuse me so I wouldn't call it a problem with spin because Indians traditionally have played in smaller pitches they know how to attack, take the... So if you look at the batsmen and when they were playing, they were reading spinners okay, it's just that maybe shot selection might have been better but that's why I say the cascading effect because they had no choice but to go for shots at that point because they were already in the back foot run rate wise, wicket wise so how do you play that and it's just 20 overs so I would still not call it a spin problem as such, I don't think that exists Indians batting has a problem, in general fair enough alright, we'll wrap up the India bit at that Leslie some kind of headaches for the suits at the International Cricket Council because India going out of a tournament early on is never a good sign I mean we remember the 2003-50 World Cup in the West Indies where not only did that tournament collapse but sort of as a fallout I mean the current situation of West Indies cricket and the kind of economic and other difficulties that they find themselves in can be traced back in a way to that... it was 2007 2007 World Cup and can be traced back to all the sort of economic fallout that India's early exit from that tournament had so we'll see if they can figure out some magic formula to make sure fallout I don't know because BCCI hosts here and last I heard they made some 12,000 crore so I don't think they would be too much worried so they're pretty happy to be at your bank fair enough we're moving on to a slightly more complex story than of course India's performance on the pitch at the ICCT-20 and we're talking about Afghanistan cricket of course the Afghan men's cricket team doing pretty well at this ongoing ICCT-20 championship they beat Namibia quite convincingly after also registering another win so two wins out of three reasonably close fight with Pakistan as well so they're doing not too badly still with a chance of qualifying for actually out of a quite tough group that also includes India and New Zealand for the next round we'll start with what's happening on the pitch for Afghanistan and then move into some larger aspects of how sport is being looked at under the new Taliban regime in that country I'll just get into the India bit of it as far as tournament is concerned so India started off with the strongest opponents in the group while Afghanistan started off with the easiest opponents so them getting six points in the kitty I mean four points in the kitty against two smaller teams Namibia and Scotland I mean should have happened and it's gone according to script they lost against Pakistan though and now for them it's the tight matches against New Zealand and India and both of them are in a must win situation I mean all three of them are in a must win situation that way so India has mathematical chance revolve around New Zealand messing up and then Afghanistan winning big against Afghanistan because as far as Afghanistan's victory against Scotland is concerned it was by a huge margin so their net run rate is plus three and for India it's minus 1.6 so if things fall into place with New Zealand slipping up and a chance over net run rate with Afghanistan India have a huge task and against the three lesser teams but still they have to go out and win those matches with a big margin and Afghanistan as a team we should understand that over the course of the last four or five years they have gone through stages of development it's not that they have been you can't call them minors at the T20 level anymore because they have players who are who play in different leagues players who feature in IPL as well and a couple of spinners are world class their opening batsmen are aggressive they I mean with the right mould for the T20 game and a couple of great fastballing talent as well when you look at I mean that side of the world again that generative factor food, water, whatever that is that works for Afghanistan as well and playing together and they also had a training base in India as well they were based in J.P. Green's in New Delhi so it's all these factors have slowly and also their experience playing various including test playing countries it's not like they were playing associate members again so that as made them a cut above there are teams like Scotland and Namibia whom they were rivals a few years back and so that takes us to that question where ICC's policy about keeping associates separate and the test playing nations separate and the top three again as a great elite match it hardly helps the global growth of the game as such so only with a team's effort and team's luck and all these factors and also the time factor it just grows out and classic example is Bangladesh early 2000s Bangladesh had many number of bilateral series with countries like India, England and test playing nations West Indies they just grew from there and they are a great side now and the same thing is Afghanistan is getting there now and just that politically the country is in turmoil and things all the growth all the work that has done in Afghanistan or for that matter any sport that way because Afghanistan football team is also a great side there is a chance that things can get undone because of the policies of the current regime over there so that's a big worry still the players are out there performing with all these things happening back home they are probably performing with the mission to showcase what they have and what the current regime there should realize how sport is an engine for them as well so I don't know how things will progress in the near future because ICC is yet to come out with the stance on Taliban government and what its approach might be just before we get into that any further just to set the context for our viewers the situation is such that Afghanistan of course scheduled to play a historic one-off test with Australia the Australian cricket board has threatened to call that off if Afghanistan's national women's team is not allowed to play cricket now the signals from the Taliban government currently in power in Afghanistan are pretty clear that there is not going to be despite perhaps voices that might have indicated differently earlier there are not where sport for women is not going to be a thing anytime in the near future the few people who are on the ground we were able to contact and speak to have also indicated the same women athletes those that were engaged in any kind of sport earlier are now staying as far away from it as possible even if there is no official ban in place there is definitely fear that if women are seen engaging in sporting activities or anything that goes against what is being interpreted as the laws of Islam or anything that could be interpreted as un-Islamic will be dealt with very harshly and therefore they are choosing to stay as far away from it as possible Afghanistan receives five million US dollars in aid from the National Cricket Council annually this is for the development of sport at the grassroots level and other such as far as India's role is concerned in the US backed regime in Afghanistan one of our focal areas was the development of a multi-million dollar cricket stadium in Kabul and cricket was a big part of our diplomacy as Leslie was mentioning they have now found a base to train here in India many of the current players in the men's cricket team who are also like Leslie was saying involved in T20 cricket they have now found a base in Dubai or other such places away from the country which allows them to continue their training their families are relatively safer and they can continue however because of the doubts around women's sport continuing many nations and international sports bodies in Afghanistan and as far as we can tell the methodology that they are going to resort to is banning that nation from participating in international events so this approach in mind Leslie how does a ban work and what does it solve firstly it solves I mean if you are looking at forcing the government to realize what is wrong I don't think it has ever worked any which way yeah it creates sort of like a president it creates it sets that idea of sanctity of sport and saying sport is equal for everybody and these are the set of guidelines or these are the set of maxims that sport follows and if at all someone falters if human right violations are happening or if things are not right in a particular country there could be a ban but the larger purpose that it serves I mean I mean if sport is making a ban or a move it should it should serve sport in that country or the sports person in that country right so how will a blanket ban on Afghanistan serve the current cricketers like you said hardworking cricketers who have put in effort over the years to come up to where they are and they are shifted basis and still applying their trade and if they can't represent their country then it's their loss and and it's not their fault also so who is getting punished the players are getting punished the sport is getting punished so probably the ICC or for that matter any global body like the IOC or FIFA subsequently all these questions will arise because Afghanistan has a football team it also has a women's football team who apparently are now in Qatar I think they have airlifted from Afghanistan and they are based in Qatar now and so a larger discussion should happen within the sporting communities as to how to deal with this this crisis this situation and ban is more like a caveman approach to it bang bang bang it hardly works anymore we should realize the reality of what global sport has become and what it stands to lose and what it stands to gain if an altered approach can be arrived at especially when we are talking here about the context the whole story is based on inclusion that women and perhaps at a future stage or even at an early stage transgender people be included in sport and organized sport and on the other hand you are excluding this nation from participating so it's almost at loggerheads with your own logic exactly so that's what Australia's the first thing that when Australia's news came up the threat to not stage Afghanistan for the test match was that wouldn't it serve a larger purpose for Afghanistan sport and the democratic voices that need to come out that give these players a platform and let them use that platform and let them also the willing players among the mix and I'm sure many of them might have their opinion about what is happening in their country imagine that a person scoring a test essentially in a story test and then post that he comes out and he talks about what is happening in their country and what needs to be done and that as a larger global say to sway things than not playing at all when it would be like whose loss is that and also Australia should also realize that they should probably because that's what Indian world food also cricket Australia food also probably think out of the the money idea of it as well because for them when they do the math it's like if you ban India then they lose a lot but if you ban Afghanistan they lose nothing that's what they thought is but imagine what they would gain out of it as well goodwill the larger role in cricket diplomacy sport diplomacy and also that's an entity which set precedent for global bodies like the FIFA and IOC to take cognizance and take over and device means how to deal with this thing and Afghanistan is not a one-off also across the world there are places where crisis I mean interior crisis are happening and there will be instances when such measures have to be mulled and so let this and I would urge administrators and diplomats to use this as a stage to set precedent on how to deal with things and well that's moved on from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s where these things worked not anymore particularly from sort of an internationalist multilateral stage you know it cannot be a similar approach to the United States that the United States takes embargoes and sanctions on countries that they don't like to deal with and we all know that these embargoes have vested interest and larger things behind so trade embargoes so blanket bans it just it means is to kill a culture kill a country ultimately the losses that you lose something so and it's a loss felt most by the people there and not necessarily the goals that were set the so called goals it's never met of course a complex situation there in Afghanistan and one that we'll be looking at closely in the next weeks and months to see how that develops and we'll keep you guys also updated at least from our understanding how things are going and finally we're talking about another very complex situation and country South Africa and the actually mixed bag of taking a knee approach in support of the Black Lives Matter movement that several teams have taken at this ICCT-20 South Africa being among them where apparently it was conveyed to the players that this is a compulsory decision that players must take a knee and as a result of that making it mandatory one of their I think key players Quintin de Coq who's been a feature of several of their sides across formats chose to withdraw from that team it's not something that we are talking about in great detail today because we'll be joined by our friends from South Africa and those that are covering cricket more closely Sharda Agra perhaps to talk about it in detail with Leslie later on but just to put the story into a bit of context Leslie why did de Coq pull out and subsequently he released a two page statement that in my opinion didn't say much but how did you read it? He was trying to state or justify not taking the knee I mean more or less indicating that he was a little confused and also that he felt that it infringed on his right to decide which on the outside it's pretty clear it's a personal choice also right where you stand as far as Black Lives movement or the larger picture of racism or as some South African cricketers former cricketers also have put it racial inequality that's inherently there in South Africa sport South African society as well so it's openly there have been issues in South Africa as far as running of the sport is concerned I'm not getting into the society part of it because it's a hugely complex you call it rainbow nations I would I've been I've traveled to neighboring states of South Africa covering cricket to Zimbabwe I've met a lot of South Africa former players as well as journalists and the understanding is that it's rainbow but it's also completely fissured as well so it's quite a tricky situation there and so former skipper Graham Smith heads the cricket operations director of cricket operations in South Africa and a few months back for his stance for the general stance of cricket South Africa as far as Black Lives Matter movement is concerned the stance that he took many former cricketers including players like Pat Simcox and all that who has shown inclination that he is a bit racist and and also various quarters he received even death threats for his stance supporting the movement so that's the kind of social societal pressure that is there on players on white players and on black players as well and the pressure on black players is manifold and it's even Michael Olding as dedicated a chapter in his book book towards this quoting Makaya Antini who is one of the greatest black players first black player to play for South Africa internationally and it's the quota system which was supposed to help integrate black players into the mainstream cricket and international cricket but it's the backfiring that is happening is that the players who make it they are under tremendous pressure throughout the career so much so that their achievements are also marginalized or undermined with the quota tag Antini has openly said that he is one of the greatest borrowers of the generation and he always felt that he was never there he always felt that he was not recognized so and that kind of baggage that a player a black player has to carry it it trickles down into the grass roots where young kids young black kids are not willing to take up cricket at all week and that's again Antini has come out earlier in the year on record saying how the province that he comes from and also various states where black players used to come up it's it's it's it's dwindling now nobody is taking up the sport and so it's not about so what he was trying to say was that the quota system is firstly creating problems and secondly it's not coming down to a planned systematic approach where domestically there is a system in place where black players can be included and brought up that's not there it's always I mean the root always is for white players and to add to that Brexit has created problems where all the white players used to leave South Africa they are all going to come back it's going to be a big mess now South Africa cricket with the corruption allegations in the previous administration with the current headaches that the current crop have to deal with including what Dicoc has because it's not I mean if you look at Dicoc's move it's not a I mean it can it is interpreted as a personal decision from his letter it's they have tried to portray it as that but it showcases a larger problem in that team in that setup in the country and and it's something that ICC has to deal with also because it shows that ICC's approval for the teams it's not ICC's decision apparently ICC's spokesman on record has come and said that it's a team's decision to do this we have nothing to say in that we have just given them permission because ICC's rule states that any sort of political social religious messaging or insignia or signage on jerseys and all that our band are not allowed will be allowed provided prior permission is taken so again in that statement they never mentioned that they have given a blanket permission for black lives movement taking the knee symbolic gesture of taking the knee but it's clear that they have and again interestingly India also joined the bandwagon but second match they didn't take the knee as well and it's it's a kind of like a zombie situation where brain watch situation I would say where players didn't have any say I believe if you believe what Koli was saying, saying we were asked to do it we're doing it and we were asked to not do it we are not doing it so where do we stand as far as responsible discontent so in that regard maybe Quintan de Cork is better because he at least took a stance on something he believes is right right or wrong look forward to your in-depth chat on the situation in South Africa because I mean many of us in our country we can relate to the challenges that any policy decision that includes affirmative action all of the the obstacles, the barriers, the opposition that these kind of moves face and how it oftentimes lead to further marginalization of the sections that are not further marginalization but in this kind of in the narrative at least that's created in against these kind of quota systems so I look forward to that larger chat and I think many of our viewers will as well but that'll do it for our show we said we'll do about 25 minutes and we've done a little bit over that as usual but we'll keep it under 30 so let's let's wrap it up here thank you very much for watching you this has been playthings of alien forces from Leslie and me that'll do it for us today you can follow us on newsclick.in for all our sports stories as well as see updates on all our social media channels we'll be back next week with more and stay tuned for all the updates on the other stuff we do around sport goodbye


Kim Jae-bun, thank you very much for being with WPCTV, you're the Secretary-General of the Korean American Association. That's correct. What do you think of American foreign policy in the Asia Pacific region in general and towards Korea in particular? Well, I don't think I have a spontaneous answer, it's a very tough question. But as all the other countries' foreign policy fluctuates, the United States, the big country also moves a little bit. Now we are very much interested in the Obama administration's foreign policy, which is called Asia Pivot, and it can be a proactive foreign policy or a simple repercussion from the big topic, the rise of China. So is it a helpful pivot? Yes, for the Republic of Korea in particular, I think it's quite helpful. In terms of containing China? Not really. The traditional theory of the balance of power, I think Korea, which is in its own niche. And between the big powers, we need that kind of balance. So the balancer, the United States is always necessary. And particularly in the era of sequestration, many people are concerned about possible removal of the U.S. presence from Asia. So I think it's quite helpful for its allies, not only Korea, but others, the United States' presence and its pivot policy. Yes. Kim Jae-bum, thank you very much. You're very welcome. Very nice to meet you. Kim Jae-bum, thank you very much. You're very welcome. Very nice to meet you.