The tortoise and the hare
“It is so much more fun to be a little richer than you were yesterday, than merely to be rich.” — Alice Wellington Rollins
I'd restate the above quote as "velocity is more important than position".
Analytics overemphasises position and neglects velocity.
Position is the number of staff (too many), how much you pay them (too much).
Velocity is the improvement in work from last month.
I could measure this for you, but I don't need to.
If you're not certain that the quality of the analytics work is improving, you've all but admitted that you value position over velocity.
It's well-accepted that if your business isn't growing, it's dying.
An early indicator that your company is dying is the lack of velocity of your analytics team.
If I can come up with better ideas in few minutes than your team has come up with in months, you should be worried.
---
If you want the highly simplified maths as to why no matter how good your position is, velocity will always win, refer to the graph from James Clear. Whilst not quite right, the story of the tortoise and the hare is another way of thinking about this.
No one improves their analytics output by 1% per day for a year. I could easily achieve a 10% improvement each month for a year. This triples the output, and as a bonus, you keep the improvement.
Why is this hard to implement?
Among the 'intellectual' class, there are a few competing theories as to how one achieves success. 'Doing the work' is one of these theories. In a recent Farnam Street blog, the comedian Cameron Esposito is quoted as saying:
“There is no formula for success—you just begin and then you continue. I’m often asked how to have a career in stand-up and the answer is confoundingly simple: Do the work. Over and over again, just do the work. After you build the courage to get onstage that first time, it’s all about repetition.”
Anyone who writes about 'thinking' doesn't understand that statistics doesn't follow the physics model of teaching. The physics model is the idea you can take something complicated and simplify the concept to be basic without losing the key concept.
The example I use is of a block sliding down a frictionless slope. A young child quickly grasps what's happening without knowing calculus. The steeper the slope, the faster the block moves. You can then build complexity into this over time.
Statistics doesn't follow the physics model; which is why 'smart' people stumble over the concepts of standard deviation and standard error of the mean. Both sound more complicated than they are. Using this correctly is a litmus test of understanding the difference between mean data and individual data.
As is evident by the number of examples I've provided in the past few weeks, incompetence knows no bounds. Irrespective of the company you work for or title you hold.
You could write a 1,000 survey questions and never write a decent one. Just ask Harris Farm.
Speaking, writing, and even managing people can improve by doing the work if you use the feedback.
Without skill, expertise and understanding, you'll never produce a visualisation in Excel that doesn't suck.
If you want to be a comedian - write, practise and perform your show. You'll get better.
If you want to be vaguely useful in analysing data, you'll need to know when to use Fisher's exact test and a paired t-test.
Unlike comedy, there is a formula for success; you just need to understand probability theory. This is much harder than 'smart' people realise.
You're not going to be able to move to velocity over position because there are no obvious models and no clear feedback mechanism. There is a feedback mechanism - do people use your work more often than previously? If yes, you're improving.