It takes a lot of work

I’ve had a conversation with a colleague recently, in the context of running a complicated analysis on a complicated KPI (key performance indicator, but I sometimes call them “keeps people irritated”, as they tend to only be brought up when people are in a bad mood, and correlation in this case might imply causation). As we were discussing the “cost of entry” of gaining any knowledge from the analysis (and, by extension, of the levers that affect our KPI), my colleague said a phrase I found profoundly interesting, and one that I have disagreed with for most of my life:

“This is a difficult subject, that required all of my attention and understanding, so the explanation will also require all the attention and understanding of my listeners.”

Over the many things I have thought my job to be, one thing I’ve kept as a constant was assuming that my role was to simplify. I will now enter a small ramble before continuing with the main point I wanted to make. Feel free to skip it.

The ramble (or why shorthands in language are dangerous)

The corporate world is relatively new in terms of fields of human activity, so it’s still developing its own language. In the meantime, it borrows freely from neighbors.

We take from the military: our trainings are boot-camps, we capture the market with our product strategy, we differentiate our offer from others via competitive advantage, our project mandates are ‘mission-critical’ and when shit hits the fan, we meet in the war room to discuss strategy. And we should hope to gain a foothold to achieve our targets.
We take from science: What we develop requires a Proof of Concept, and a company’s DNA is the very structure of it’s core principles (whatever that may mean). And if you have too much work, you certainly don’t have the bandwidth to deal with something new. Hopefully your work will allow you to differentiate noise from signal.

Meaning, in communication, comes as a social agreement. As words are used to convey meaning, we try to save time by shoving as much pre-chewed thought with specific words.
We don’t say “the idea that I have in mind that I am trying to prove is actually true or false”, we say hypothesis.
Because we have agreed upon what hypotheses mean, we can shorthand the exchange. The specific language of corporations hasn’t had the privilege of establishing this preliminary agreement between parts, which leads to unfortunate situations like “discussing the key KPIs”.
I am particularly fond of this example as it reveals two big issues with a business:

1. It has created key performance indicators that were not key.
2. It does not understand the language it’s using.

Point 1 shows that mimicry is a common way of attempting to achieve success. Seeing other businesses that have succeeded, and seeing how those have “KPIs”, a new business could stop the chain of thought at “by having KPIs we are successful!”. There is no need to undestand that some indicators are’nt key to what was is trying to be achieved. There can be other reasons, like feeding into the paranoid delusion that we are able to control everything.

Point 2 shows that corporations adopt things rather quickly but they don’t spend much time reaffirming things internally. Like Durkheim did in the early 1900s when comparing societies to physical organisms, corporations view their own functioning as organs within a system, in which alignment of thought comes from the “brain” (founders unit, C-level, leadership, or whatever name we’re giving our decision makers because “boss” is too rude). As terms come to be adopted by the brain and spread throughout the organs, these seldom come with the long explanation that aligns meaning. Each organ (department) is left to its own devices on how to interpret the new words that must be used in internal communications.

The point I am rambling on, the main idea I want to convey is that language is complex, and there is a pitfall in the search of efficiency, when we don’t spend enough time ensuring that all parties involved in dialogue understand specific terminology in the same way.

Speak friend and enter.

So why did I disagree with the observation my colleague made?
Because, as I’ve explained before, the work of an analyst comes as a layer after a productive endeavor has started, and it mainly consists in providing clarity and understanding.
If there was a single guiding objective for the oxymoron that is Business Intelligence, I’d say “allowing decision makers to make informed decisions”.
So we go back to the difficult analysis, and the difficult understanding. If I’ve spent a considerable amount of time observing something to glean its properties and functioning, the second part of the task becomes that much more important. I need to be able to convey these learnings into tangible outputs.
My work needs to be the shorthand that allows decision makers to make decisions with some notion of understanding of “what will happen if I press this button”.

A picture of a decision maker in the wild

I believe there is an important role in new research and development, a most vital one. But a data person isn’t engaging in the creation of completely new stuff most of the time. They’re engaged in translating.

In a previous life, I thought my path was in academic pursuit. A problem I encountered as I studied, one that I shared with many teachers without finding a solution, was that many researchers in different fields seemed to thrive in making their ideas as obfuscated as possible. I admit I am bringing a rather perverse intention in what could just be explained as a writing style, or an initial jab at a new field of knowledge (from which there hasn’t been any effort done into making these ideas accessible yet).
Whatever the reason, I disliked these authors. I disliked the premise that the expectation in communication was on the recipient to rise up to the level of the sender.
Humans exist as a collaborative species, and collaboration can’t be achieved successfully without mutual understanding. I’ve argued before that all communication is flawed but this doesn’t mean that the endeavor is doomed from the get-go. It only means that we should spend much more time ensuring we are conveying the most meaningful parts of our thoughts in a clear way.