Data Leaders Series
Jim Gordon on Tough Truths in Analytics
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Well, there's always an awkward conversation of whether or not we're a cost center versus a value generation center. That's a really awkward one that we often try not to address. We'll probably cut that one out. I think honestly, honestly, I think it's, I think it's, it's going to sound ridiculous. His business value is overlooked. I don't talk to, I talk to a lot of practitioners who are really good at articulating technically how things work. But I think there's like a fundamental, there's a missing piece there. You know, where we operate on positive feedback loops, often, like I operate to an extent, everybody operates to an extent on positive feedback loops and the positive feedback loops that implementation analysts or even just analysts in general, they see the most positive feedback loops from saying yes to things by saying yes. When you say yes to stuff, you get this dopamine and that dopamine makes you feel really good when you're helping somebody long term, you're stressing yourself out. But the thing is, is what it's doing is it's training your brain to get into this pattern of like, well, a I'm not going to push back B I'm helping the business by just helping my colleagues and saying yes. And I don't think those two are, I think they're at odds that dopamine, fix that you get from saying yes to stuff and that fix that you get from just like accommodating, accommodating the business as opposed to stopping thinking and doing what's right and doing what's right by the business. I think we often question ourselves as analysts like I can't be right. There's no way I can be right. I mean, they got to this position for a reason. They think this way for some reason, I'm clearly missing some key piece of context and I think what goes overlooked is analysts having confidence in themselves and understanding that their suspicion of, hey, I don't think this is right for the business. I think they're asking the wrong thing. I think they're making the wrong move, they're implementing something in the wrong way to have the confidence to go to your stakeholders and say let's do it the right way, like let's stop and let's do things the right way and be able to push back and not focus so hard on that dopamine fix, which is very tempting. I think that's one thing that goes way overlooked and it's really hard to break people out of that habit, really, really, really difficult because they want to make people happy and that's great and it's not like you're going to make people mad, but you know, it's more challenging to challenge others.