Three powerful techniques to remove blind spots and help your business analysis career take off
Most breakdowns in business analysis are caused not by incompetence but rather by a business analyst’s blind spots. If you look at the track record of the BAs with the highest success rates, you’ll likely notice three things they tend to do consistently more than the average analyst:
- develop and test hypotheses to explore the limits of what they know and don’t know;
- reframe the why, what, and how of their recommendations in order to expose their assumptions, biases, and blind spots;
- adopt the right psychological frame to share ideas in a way that makes them carry greater weight.
Below are three powerful techniques you can use to follow in the footsteps of these high-performing BAs:
#1 Ask yourself what could go wrong
If a decision is an important one, ask yourself, how can these plans end up in disaster? A great framework for figuring this out is the premortem. Evidence suggests that looking at what could go wrong via the premortem technique to think in terms if “did this, not that”, rather than “do this, not that” give us a superior vantage point.
Suppose you’ve been put in charge of recommending which features must be included in the first release of a new software application and which ones can be safely deferred to a future release. Here’s a premortem exercise you can do at the beginning of the project to help you identify and address the highest risks:
Imagine that it’s one month after the first release went into production. Assume that the effort had the worst possible outcome (e.g., the majority of users were unable to migrate to the new application, forcing the company to renew an expensive contract to keep using the legacy system). Write a story about why the failure occurred (e.g., a deferred feature turned out to be critical for users to be able to switch from the legacy system to the new application, the choice to build a feature only for Android caused an entire module to become unusable because the segment users who’d benefit from it carry iPhones, etc.).
#2 Do the work necessary to hold an idea
Having opinions is easy. The work to justify an idea or opinion is the hard part that the average BA avoids.
Let’s say you want to convince your organization to reject a request from the sales team to build a “one-off” SaaS feature that would help gain one client but add complexity that would frustrate a large segment of customers and make the software more difficult to use and maintain. Or you want to persuade a leader to stop the purchase of an expensive AI solution that you know won’t deliver the expected returns. An effective way to increase the chances of having your idea heard is to put your opinions on trial and being as an impartial judge as you can.
This blog post from Farnam Street explains how:
You have to do the reading. You have to talk to competent people and understand their arguments. You have to think about the key variables and how they interact over time. You have to listen and chase down arguments that run counter to your views. You have to think about how you might be fooling yourself. You have to see the issue through multiple perspectives. You need to become your most intelligent critic and have the intellectual honesty to kill some of your best-loved ideas.
When you are able to argue against yourself better than others can, decision-makers are much more likely to side with you. Any opinion that survived being challenged by the best arguments against your view is going to be treated much more seriously by your stakeholders.
#3 Learn the art and science of persuasion
The two first techniques above are about doing your homework to make sure your ideas are solid and their associated risks are mitigated. The third one is about recognizing that in order to get people to see things your way, you need more than tightly reasoned analysis and logical proof. Top performing BAs understand the vast difference between simply transmitting information and effectively communicating to change not only minds but also hearts. They develop an acute awareness of how the latter can dramatically increase their ability to have their recommendations accepted.
BAs who know how to build a convincing case and catch people’s attention invariably accomplish more. I’ve written several articles about the importance of learning how to sell your ideas, including Stop blaming others for your lack of influence power and The Art of Letting Stakeholders Have Your Way. Both articles include a list of books where you can learn about the counterintuitive research in psychology, behavior science, and other fields that shed new light on how to effect transformative change.
The ability to avoid blind spots is at the essence of how exceptional business analysts achieve superb results for their organizations and their own careers. BAs who aspire to greatness must rise to this challenge in order to join the ranks of analysts who consistently deliver outstanding and innovative results.
