Unlocking the analytical mind

In today’s age of limitless and real time data availability, and a new found love of making sense of that data to make better decisions, analytics has become one of the key pillars in every organisation and getting it right can give you that edge in a changing world with new players and new rules.

As many who have started this journey have learned, the road to actionable intelligence is steep and treacherous. There are tools and apps abound crunching through petabytes of data every nanosecond, and it still leads to some disappointing results at times. This is when we see a heading revealing a great insight such as ‘too much sugar may not be good for you’ or ‘people in organisations are not happy when there is inequality in pay’. The other end of the spectrum delivers more obscure prophecies that are harder to understand, let alone action. One recent example is the link between parents using mobile devices resulting in a (possible) increase of mental health issues in their offspring.

I have been lucky to have been working with data for over two decades, I don’t think I could remember, or even imagine, a decision being made without at least some insight to support it. And that has not changed. We just have more data, and faster data, and different, often conflicting types of data: qualitative and quantitative, attitudinal and behavioural, conscious and subconscious, and the list goes on from here.

At this point I imagine at least some of you rolling your eyes thinking, sure, we know all that so where is this heading? A question I have been asked many times is how to get to great insights fast, and how to make sure that these insights are simple, repeatable, measurable and actionable. What is the secret sauce? Which tool is the best on the market? What is the process that leading organisations who seem to have ‘nailed it’ use?

The answer is relatively straightforward: people. Yes, not artificial intelligence (yet) but an obscure group of minds who can make sense out of chaos and find nuggets of gold on the bottom of the data river by selectively panning them out. The tools and gizmo’s help, yet often I have witnessed organisations purchasing the tools, not investing in the people behind them, to have the analytics equivalent of ‘buying a Ferrari to pull a caravan in circles around the parking lot’.

Everybody uses insight, not everybody has the ability to generate it. Successful organisations invest in getting this mix right: insight generation – insight translation – insight execution. Today’s leaders are becoming more data savvy than ever before and this is fuelled by a group of select analytical advisers who make sense out of the senseless and translate this into language everyone can understand.

Who are these people behind the screens that craft the strategies of corporations, political campaigns, and cutting edge innovations? This is what recruiters are trying to decode when tasked to arm their organisation with an influx of analytical talent.

Qualifications, education and past achievements are a great start, but how can you really be sure to have spotted an analytical mind?

 Boundless curiosity

One of most dominant personality traits I have seen in great analysts is an endless curiosity, an insatiable appetite for knowledge. There are two easy ways to spot this. For starters they will have a keen interest in any topic you talk about and overload you with questions to the point of irritation. For many people it is hard to fake an interest, yet for the analytical mind, faking never comes into play. Gardening, football or the sleeping habits of your 8-month old baby are all interesting to some extent in their own right.  Likewise, you will notice that they seem to be interested in – or at least be very comfortable talking about – just about everything from quantum physics to arts to politics to the latest celebrity gossip. They are data crunching machines who are too curious not to be in the know. Just test the theory and switch the conversation topic from quantitative easing to the latest developments in the life of the Kardashians and you may be surprised.

 Exceptional people skills

For those of you who think the best analysts are sitting in a basement in Langley, Virginia, think again, that’s what Hollywood wants you to believe. In order to advise, you have to understand first. In order to speak with authority, you need to listen first. In order to explain, you have got to know your audience first.

A great analyst is first and foremost a great listener. There is much to learn from listening and little to gain from talking. Likewise, every good analyst will have learned that just giving you the insight on a silver platter is not what you really want. What you really want is to go on a joint mission of exploration and discovery and to find that insight yourself. I often call this move ‘inception’ – it is not about the ability of the analyst to provide insight fast; it is about providing insight that sticks. Sticky insights never occur on solo journeys of exploration. And finally, a great analyst – to quote many a successful Roman senator – is a person of the people, talking for the people. Your insight is only as good as the level of buy-in from the people who need to action it, so getting them involved early and throughout is something a great analyst will do naturally. Great analysts are often very likeable as a result, and far removed from the stereotype of the cold and calculated android.

 A mild case of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder)

The preferred way of the analytical mind to make sense of things is to create order. Most of you will remember the catch line of chaos theory (aka the Butterfly Effect): ‘A butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico causes a hurricane in China’ is something that will make most analytical minds lose sleep over. Why? How? What is the connection? Can we find it? Predict it? Influence it?

Why these people are so good at what they do is because they have a (mild) disorder (I prefer to see it as a gift) to ‘need’ to create some sort of order. Not surprisingly, going through the CV of leading analysts, you may see that they have had some dabblings in mathematics, data management or programming at the start of their career. There is a subconscious reward trigger in their brain that lights up brightly when order has been created or the ‘key’ has been discovered. In the day to day office life, you may also notice that the output delivered by great analysts is often a work of art.

 Infectiously passionate

The depiction of the cold and calculated analyst providing the options and their likelihood of occurrence in a dispassionate way always makes me smile. The leading analysts I worked with are quite the opposite and they have an infectious energy and passion because they genuinely feel that a discovery has been made that will alter current perceptions.

Take this out of the corporate world for a second. Spending some time listening to the birth story of ‘Sharktivity’ was more exhilarating than the last 8 Apple product launches. These guys built an app that tracks sharks in New England (mainly Cape Cod) based on tagged sharks, lifeguard data and the general public. So if you find yourself taking a dip a few feet in off Nauset Beach and your phone buzzes, you may want to make a run for the beach. Now the people behind this beautiful app just figured out that many are better than few and by people reporting sightings (because that’s what we like to do these days on Twitter anyhow) it could become the best early warning system ever. So fast forward a few months and when the coast guard showed up (after less than 3 minutes) to get people out of the water after their helicopter spotted a shark, they were surprised to find everyone already neatly on the beach taking selfies with Jaws in the background.

The motivation to create this app was not financially driven, but just to see if it would work. Now that’s passion. Oh, and to make it even better, the person passionately telling me this story first was a fisherman, who was closely involved in developing the GUI for the app and tagging the sharks. Sticky insight for sure.

 Born risk takers

To come up with breakthrough insight often requires challenging the status quo. A good analyst will keep on testing the boundaries and will inevitably go where no other person has gone before.

A lot of organisations are often caught in the cycle of ‘problem admiration’. They thoroughly understand the issue and the reasons why it is so hard to change the behaviour they are trying to change. The subsequent analyses seem to find ever increasing exotic ways of confirming the problem but often fall short of a solution. The same thing happens with some of the best strategies delivered by top consultancies; it all makes great sense on paper and is a great read, yet falls short of an instruction manual (or maybe just a hint?) of what needs to be done.

So with great analytical power comes great risk taking … To break the cycle and to move the needle from current thinking to different thinking is often a bold step falling on deaf ears.

A known energy drinks manufacturer firmly believed it had a target audience of athletes and gym-bies, whilst in reality they were catering to quite a different audience. A spreadsheet with consumer consumption data wasn’t going to break that cycle, but a full blown movie with some interviews of why consumer A (target) hated the drink and consumer B (non target) loved it was risky but opened peoples’ minds. Today that same manufacturer caters to both consumer groups with a tailored offering.

 Childishly imaginative

If you ever get to experience a think tank, or just any session that touches upon scenario building or wargaming it is always a joy if an analytical mind is in the room. Where the misconception is again that they may be the least creative people partaking, the reality is often the opposite. Making optimum use of the data in their head, combined with a need to order and find links, and an urge to break the status quo by taking a risk or two, you may be in for a ride.

Great analysts break down the whole into its tiniest parts and reconstruct the problem bottom up. Some of the more notable inventions came from making connections between data points, such as Ford’s insight that people not only wanted ‘faster horses’ but subconsciously also the ‘independence’ to operate their own mode of transportation. Or the tablet PC, finding the link between people wanting a ‘smarter’ smartphone that was less ‘phoney’ and a lighter PC that was less ‘computer-y’. And if we look at Elon Musk’s Tesla concept, he is again linking our deeply vested primitive urge to have ‘a fast, powerful car’ with a renewed passion for doing the right thing for our planet.

 Most definitely not geeky …

If still not convinced after reading the above, make no mistake. Leading analysts are anything but geeky. Most of them operate in the high echelons of organisations, advising its top leaders. Analysts are often confused with the genius minds who build the tools that analysts have learned to rely on. Their skill is one of finding ways to tag, process, capture and display vast amounts of data. The analyst is the person who – together with the business he or she is working with – tries to make sense of that data and to translate it into something that can be used to action. A different skill-set altogether and, I must admit, it is often hard to separate the two as they work as a symbiotic organism. As an analyst I have often worked closely with providers to improve their algorithms and in return they have used me to test new concepts. Where one could argue that I was ‘the client’ in this relationship, I think that in the early days of social media I was more of ‘a partner’, where ‘my clients’ were an altogether different group. The misconception that an analyst has to be ‘geeky’ is a contradiction in terms.

 … but deep down they’re all ninjas

Not all eccentric people would make great analysts, but take it from me, most great analysts are a tad eccentric. Their role is to constantly fight ‘the way we do things around here’ and to challenge the truths of old. I have often noticed that they are not motivated by the ‘traditional’ career paths and reward structures and follow a different code to success. There are different kinds of power, and the power of the analyst comes from knowledge, and even more so, the know-how of accessing and unlocking knowledge from seemingly unlikely or unrelated sources.

When you have a great analyst in the organisation, you will know who he or she is. It will be the go-to person for difficult or less than ordinary questions. It may be the person who challenges the concept with a new set of ideas. It may be that infectiously interesting person who just seems to know a lot and give great advice. I bet you secretly like her/him.

When you find them, keep them close and don’t let them go. Or before you know it, they are gone. They’re ninjas after all …

This article represents my own, personal view and has not been written with or for any organisation I work/have worked with.

The artwork comes from System 3’s computer game ‘The Last Ninja’ for Commodore 64 (1987). For those too young to have ever played it, try it, it’s great! I predict a comeback …