“Understanding” – the hardest part of an Analytics Ninja work

Posted on | January 6, 2010 | Comments Off

One of the critical parts of an Analytics Ninja work is related with the way humans interact. Analytics Ninjas must understand what people need to make decisions and what they don’t. However, this task that seems to be pretty simple, in fact it is not.

First of all every human has a different mental model which process the information in a very particular way. The communication also differs based on gender, man and woman communicate in a very unique way.

Culture is something that pushes the differences among people. People from Argentina process the same information different than someone from the States (look other posts like “What’s a Latino?“, “Analytics, Focused on People?” and “Is time Just money?“.

All the above mentioned differences make our job very complex. Why? Because the first part of an Analytics Professional work is understanding the “System” and you wont be able to do that if you are not able to understand the way people communicate it to you.

So my suggestion is using the kid’s very same technique…the Why? Why? Why? Technique. Normally the less people talk the more they agree. This is usually desvastating…

I Leave you a very interesting video from the Monolog of Mark Gungor called the Tale of Two Brans, enjoy it!!!