Why ‘It depends’ might not be a bad answer

How often have you heard the term, “Well, it depends” and felt that it was indicating that the person telling that might not be confident of a good answer and is just making up a fluffy cloud with ‘it depends…’.

Until I went knee deep in the field of Data and Analytics, I tried to make up answers for almost every situation. I had the tendency to search for one single rightful specific answer which had to be given to anybody who asked me a question. It all changed. And, I believe it was a good pivot to make.

I was in a classroom one afternoon of my Masters, and all I kept hearing from the professor was ‘It depends if you ask me’. It then struck to me that knowing one best way and sticking to it is not the right approach. Instead, knowing that a plethora of possibilities exist, and finding a way to sift and wade through them shows more maturity in thinking and understanding.

Taking the example from the field of Big Data, on what is ‘real-time’ latency. Some might intuitively say 1 second. Which might still not be real time for mission critical applications such as cyber-security, for example. At the same time, for a bakery which wishes to see the previous week’s operating performance, their ‘real-time’ might be 1 day. Delving into the nuts and bolts of the domain, before fully answering a question was one key takeaway I learnt from my recent masters degree.

Just though I should be putting this out there, as I find it quite intriguing and much of a change, to be able to hold a wide variety of cards closer and play them as needed. Of course, the context of this blog post totally depends on the situation you are faced with.