Comic Book Lessons in Analytics — Daredevil
Navigating a dark world with too much to see
So, you’re an analyst facing a problem you don’t understand. There are too many requirements, too much data, and too many questions to ask. You feel frustrated. Overwhelmed. Lost.
If that doesn’t sound familiar, then you’re either new at analytics or just not very good. I can walk through any schema you hand me almost by instinct, and I still get lost in the data sometimes before I make sense of it.
The complexity is there, just like the model is there. If you can’t see it, then you can stop reading this article now because you’re wasting my time.
Still here? Then listen up, kid. Stick trained Daredevil. I’m training you.
Analytics
Analytics is about finding useful and meaningful answers. If you think that is an oversimplification, shut up and listen. It covers the point. You’re lucky I cut the really long paragraph of crap that was the original intro to this piece.
Finding the right answers is tricky. First, you need to know the question. So the question is actually the first answer you need (bonus wisdom).
Decent analysis involves sorting through a lot of data to locate the relevant facts. Then you have to determine which are true, followed by which are useful. Finally, you get to put it all together and decide a course of action.
Sounds pretty simple until you actually have to do it.
Matt Murdock
Matt Murdock grew up in Hell’s Kitchen living with his father, a local boxer who was strong-armed into throwing fights for the mob.
When Matt was a boy, he jumped into the path of a moving truck to push an old man out of its way. Brave kid. As his reward, some sort of toxic waste splashed out of the back of the truck, directly into Mattie’s eyes.
It blinded him. It also amplified every other sense beyond belief. Mattie lived in Hell’s Kitchen, a rough part of New York City. The sounds deafened him. The constant smells sickened him. The random tastes were worse. Every surface felt incredible, which was both amazing and agonizing.
Matt was in agony.
Even stranger, he almost felt like he could “see” everything around him (later, he called this his “radar sense”). By contextualizing the sum of his senses, Matt could picture the world around him in every direction.
He tried to deal with it. His father tried to help, right up to the night he was killed in a mob hit. He had been instructed to go down in three, but he had already promised Matt that he would win the fight. Matt believed in him.
He won the fight.
Tough break, kid.
Stick
Some time later, an old blind man named Stick came along and found Matt in an orphanage, crying in agony while the nuns tried to comfort him.
Stick did not try to comfort Matt. He did train him to manage his senses in order to avoid being overwhelmed. He also taught Matt to accept the world as it was instead of fixating on what he wanted it to be.
Big world, not all of it flowers and sunshine. And the only way guys like you and me can survive is to grab it by the throat and never let go.
Matt would have been lost without him.
Then Stick trained Matt how to use those incredible senses, how to process everything, how to pick out what was useful, and how to use .
Stick also taught him how to fight, but that’s a story for another day.
Daredevil
This is the Matt Murdock most of you will recognize, because you watch the admittedly cool Netflix series instead of reading comics like a proper fan.
You want to know how this guy ‘sees’ a typical walk in the city?
Imagine being in the middle of a packed concert crowd just as the performer comes back out for the second encore and plays the one song everyone’s been waiting to hear. The music is deafening. People are screaming like idiots, singing loudly and off-key. Dancing. Sweating. Drinking. Smoking.
Add in midday at a tailgate party for your home team in the last round of the playoffs. More people cheering. Cooking. Eating. Drinking. Running around and falling and bleeding. Each one yelling louder than the other..
Finally, throw in the dance floor of a busy club with the bass pounding while people drunkenly dance all around and bump into you. You can feel the heat coming off people who should have stopped dancing three songs ago. You can smell every cigarette and every joint ever smoked in this place. The only thing stickier than the tables is the floor, and you can’t leave.
Put it all together. It’s still less distracting than a calm day for Matt Murdock.
Control
Matt learned to make his senses work for him. It’s pretty useful for a lawyer to always know when you are lying. He hears subtle changes in your heart rate. He feels your body temperatures rise ever so slightly. He hears, smells, and tastes the sweat that never even makes it out of your sweat glands.
Using those signals, he can also determine how you’re feeling right now.
Matt has to process all of that information constantly just to stay sane. His mind is so complex, sophisticated, and occupied that he is effectively immune to telepathy. His mind simply overwhelms anyone trying to read it.
As Daredevil, Matt uses his senses to locate people who need help, as well as people who need their asses kicked. This man stands in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen and listens to the screams. He hears the gun shots. Smells the powder. He hears the sirens going every which way, and he hears people on their way to do very bad things.
So…?
If you work in analytics, I expect you to put real effort into analysis. You need to push to extract requirements from customers, then you need to craft those requirements into a meaningful design.
You have to enjoy, on some level, combing through reports and schema and data and functional specifications, looking for the key points that will lead you to the answers.
This isn’t finding a needle in a haystack. It’s finding the right needle in a huge pile of needles.
By the way, if you ever do need to find a needle in haystack? Burn the hay. Then take the time you saved and figure out where your life went so wrong.
Don’t try that at work. Just take a breath, process each potential source, and determine which sources will be useful and how you need to use them.
So how do I determine that?
Guess what, sunshine? I got no answer for you. Learn to think for yourself.
There are any number of books and blogs and consultants and ‘experts’ who will offer strategies for managing complexity. In fact, there are quite a lot of options out there. But you need to know how to choose the right one…
Look, the world is going to throw information at you as fast as it can. If you ever want to accomplish anything, you need to deal with it. Any analytics project worth the time is going to require sorting through more information than seems possible, and most of it will ultimately be useless.
So be ready. Be steady. Now get to work.
