Bullshit your analyst told you.
Actually, you pay them… so technically they sold you.
Not long back, Cards Against Humanity sold 30,000 boxes of Bullshit on Black Friday. On the revenue side, it brought them $6 a box. On the PR side, it was genius. But sadly, those guys are bush league compared to the hundreds if not thousands of analysts routinely milking the business world.
Every hour of the work week analysts are pedaling Bullshit and you’re paying! Here are a few of the things they’ve told you that you should never believe and probably stop paying for…
We need to be asking big questions.
Translation, give us something to work on that will allow us to avoid accountability for as long as possible while sounding really important. If you really want a team of people pondering nebulous questions that are likely too big to be realistically answered or acted upon, hire some Philosophy majors. Forbes has them #4 on the their 10 Least Valuable Majors list and at $30K a year, you will save a small fortune.
There is no doubt that questions are important. I’ve developed a whole series of articles on just how. Your analysts should be asking important questions and quite honestly those are often quite small. In fact, any time an analyst use the adjective Big… hide your wallet.
Insight must be actionable.
Actionable Intelligence is great. Not all insight is actionable and really shouldn’t be. Insight serves many purposes. The first and most important one is educating you on some very basic questions. How do my customers use my product? How do my customers connect with my value prop? How do I better understand the inefficiency in my market? How do I collect better feedback? The list goes on.
These answers may or may not be actionable. They WILL be educational. Analysis and insight should educate first. If your analysts aren’t educating you, they are setting you up for failure when it comes time for truly prescriptive or actionable analytic insights. Why would they not want you to be well informed when you are making major decisions for your company, your products, and your customers? Two words — job security. Analysts should be teachers first.
Leveraging big data will make it easier…
There is that big word again. I am not against investing in data. I’ve been advocating just that for decades, but big data is NOT easy. Or cheap. Nothing gets easier with volume. It may get more efficient but then these kinds of analysts despise that word.
Data infrastructure is complex and costly. Big data repositories lead companies into poor investment choices and even poorer analytics. How can data makes things easier? Only when it is organized and artful.
Note — this article could just as easily have been titled Bullshit your data scientist told you. Changing the buzzwords doesn’t change the problem.
Analysis isn’t efficient.
Shut the front door! Demming is rolling in his grave. And yet, I read this almost daily. Fair enough. Analysis IS complicated. It includes a lot of uncertainty. It is difficult to forecast insight development and research. There is a certain amount of artistry or craftsmanship involved. BUT, it is all about efficiency.
Great analysts synthesize. They simplify. They operationalize. They forecast and monitor. They work in iterative fashion and they create efficiency for your company. The next time you hear someone tell you analysis isn’t efficient — get angry.
The experimental outcome is indisputable. The test is conclusive. The science is settled.
Just stop already! This is nonsense. Worse yet — this is a signal that either your analysts have no idea what they are talking about or, worse yet, are sure you don’t. These statements show and extreme lack of respect for either you OR the fundamentals of science and the scientific method.
We can argue about the semantics of what conclusive means but that is actually the point. Analysts shouldn’t present things in a way that leave you philosophizing about the meaning of common words. Leave that to political science majors — also cheaper.
They should be providing probabilities and statistics punctuated with helpful explanations that detail the risks associated with interpretations of outcomes and processes. They should be educating you on limits of what they can know and test. They should be aware that few tests are conclusive, that outcomes are difficult to replicate, and that science evolves along with our understanding. Never stop testing — true facts are illusive.
We can bend the curve.
This one deserves an article all its own — to be continued. Essentially, know this. No matter what curve is in question, it is not that simple. Most curves are rates. Most are built on ever growing denominators. Any analyst with a few good years under their belt can tell you that rates built on large denominators are a nearly impossible to influence.
Worse yet, curves that can be bent are not single curves at all. They are composites. If your analysts are earning their paychecks, YOU should understand exactly what components are driving that curve. They should be tracking the components separately. Your business should already have changed the organizational structure to reflect it… you get the idea.
L1, L2, L3 … and other KPI bullshit
Analysts build models, well good one do. Great analysts synthesize and simplify. I know, I am repeating myself. KPI — Key Performance Indicators are just vastly simplified models of your business. Analyst should be creating these near daily, tracking them aggressively, and educating you one them relentlessly.
Pitching KPI development back to the business is ludicrous. The business needs to validate these micro-models, not create them. So why do so many analysts so readily allow them to be built by committee or decree? Why so easily abdicate prioritization of these metrics (L1, L2, etc) to the executive team? One word — accountability. When the KPI is misleading, non-insightful, or worse — who takes the blame? Wasn’t me…
Ad Hoc analysis and Fire drills are distractions.
Another red flag that your analytic team is missing the point comes with the claim that ad hoc analysis is a distraction. This is also claimed of fire drills. There is some truth here, but these events also represent valuable feedback and opportunity to create better efficiency. They should be viewed as just that, an insight into your companies needs and gaps in their education.
Let’s be a little more clear. Last minute analytic requests originating from poor planning or process are not helpful. They need to be better managed, but then that is why you pay your analysts in the first place — to better manage. Ad Hoc requests to chase kittens and research pipe dreams are a waste of resources. Things need to be prioritized. Guess who should be handling that too?
There is plenty more…
There is plenty of Bullshit to go around. Fortunately, we like to keep our articles under five minutes. We don’t want to lay it on too thick... So, I will stop at these eight, for now. Are there other claims you would like my take on? Leave your comments below and stay tuned for a second round.
For more information on the author visit his profile on LinkedIN — George Earl
