The Curiosity to Question: An Interview with Adam McKinnon

Insights on Problem-Solving, Storytelling, and the Future of People Analytics

Visier Inc. recently had the pleasure of speaking with Adam McKinnon, PhD. , People Data and Analytics Leader at Reece Group , about his perspectives on succeeding in the evolving field of people analytics.

With academic roots in psychology and statistics, Adam brings a spirit of curiosity and investigation to his work. In our conversation, he shared his approach to framing analytics insights around practical business solutions rather than technical details. Adam also offered his vision for the future, where people analytics underpins strategic HR decisions and examines the broader ecosystem beyond just employees.

Read on for Adam's advice to future practitioners on the must-have mindset and skills for people analytics. Learn how he makes analytics digestible for leaders through storytelling. And discover his thoughts on the transformational potential of AI in taking workforce intelligence to the next level. Adam's insights provide an inspirational glimpse into how people analytics can continue unlocking opportunities for organisations and employees when driven by curiosity and imagination.

V: How did you get started in People Analytics?

Adam: I started out studying psychology, which had a strong research component. That led me to take a lot of statistics courses, which was surprising since math didn't come naturally to me in high school.

However, I found a growing appreciation in professional settings for bringing more data and definitive decision-making to HR instead of relying solely on intuition. My interest grew from there. I fell into and pursued data science with passion in recent years, which led me to my current role.

V: What is your most memorable people analytics project?

Adam: this was an idea I had a few years back while working in a large organisation. It had over 50,000 people globally across multiple countries.

The idea was to take people's performance objectives and compare one individual's objectives to everyone else's across the company using Natural Language Processing. The process would be repeated to understand how similar any given employees objectives were to every other person in the company.

The intent was to ideally identify synergies across the company because I would unlikely ever know more than a couple hundred people in such a broad organisation. It was a way of connecting people to enhance productivity and reduce duplication of effort - an unnecessary waste of resources.

I consider this a beautiful symbiosis of technology doing what it does well to supplement humans doing what they do best.

V: What advice do you have for people looking to get into people analytics?

Adam: I think the critical mindset is one of curiosity. Definitely, curiosity, which lends itself to this investigative process you find yourself exercising when doing people analytics projects. I think curiosity, coupled with more technical skills - familiarity with data and the ability to manipulate and analyse it. The ideal is when you can wrap those skills up in the ability to tell a compelling story to colleagues. Those are very handy skills to bring together in the context of people analytics.

V: Do you have a favourite people analytics approach or metrics?

Adam: I try and keep things fairly simple. At its core, I'm always asking myself "So what?" and then "Now what?" I'm trying to challenge myself in my work to put myself in the shoes of my business stakeholders and provide them with something of practical value.

Ultimately, I think I'm trying to answer three broad questions: What's happened? Why has it happened? And what's going to happen next? It's a very simple yet pragmatic framework that most people will inherently understand and be able to follow the narrative.

V: How do you personally try to make PA insights more digestible and actionable for business leaders and stakeholders?

Adam: I don't start with the statistics. I tend to start with the solution. And if there's enough interest there to understand what's under the hood, then we talk about how we got there - what was the data, what was the approach, what's my level of confidence, and so on. I'm not trying to overwhelm people with technicalities. To the contrary, I'm just trying to make it clear and understandable.

Ultimately, you often end up having conversations around when you pull this lever; you're likely to get this outcome and just trying to connect the dots for business leaders so that they have confidence - that you've done the homework. You're de-risking the decision-making process on their behalf so that they can move ahead with confidence.

I feel that probably runs counter to the education I received at university. You're always trying to show people a systematic, thorough, thought-out process there. It's essentially like telling the longest joke in the world, hoping that people will remember all of that detail until you get to the punchline. In business you want to get to the punchline quickly.

V: how do you stay on top of the latest innovations and people and practices in people analytics?

Adam: there are several newsletters that I subscribe to which focus on the development of artificial intelligence in the world, which is not limited to people analytics.

And then, there are programming newsletters like R-Bloggers, which is specific to the R programming language, that I like to keep an eye on to pick up useful tidbits and tools that I could potentially apply in my work.

And then just a lot of LinkedIn to keep abreast of what people are doing, what events are on and things of that nature.

So it's a bit of a mixed bag, a little bit haphazard at times, but it seems to serve me well.

V: What is one current trend or topic in people analytics that you personally believe or think is particularly important right now?

Adam: I'm probably not going to be very novel in my response here, but I'm going to have to say generative AI.

The reason for that is that many people have used it to write a cover letter, answer an email, or even write a funny farewell poem for a colleague. But I think what excites me the most is that historically if you go back five years, it may have taken 6 to 12 months to bring a machine learning model to productisation.

But in the age of generative AI, we're going to see that timeframe reduced dramatically. And as a consequence, we are going to see a lot more specialised technology hit the market. That will reduce the price point and make it more accessible to general users.

I think the downside of that is we're likely to be inundated with technological advancement. And it will be a challenge to keep up to speed and sift through what's relevant for individuals—a double-edged sword, but an exciting challenge nonetheless.

V: where do you personally see the future of people in analytics in the next five to 10 years?

Adam: I suspect people analytics will gain more prominence within the HR arena, not necessarily as a leader, but underpinning a lot of the decision-making that happens in HR, replacing some of the art with more science.

And I think it will also move across functions. Right now, people analytics, by its title, is often embedded in people functions. But, people operate in an ecosystem that includes technology, infrastructure, and even other companies.

I think we'll start to look at that ecosystem more comprehensively in future, to both understand and navigate it more effectively. The technological advancements we see will help us distil that complexity, which, right now, I genuinely believe is beyond human understanding.

V: what do you most enjoy about your current role in your everyday people analytics role

Adam: I'd say learning. I'm really nourished by my curiosity and picking up new things, learning new things, and ideally applying them and seeing a good outcome as a result.