FORUM
What you need to know if you are
dating a right-brainer: Left-brainers,
you need to go to charm school and
forget about impressing others with
your level of preparedness, intelligence
and impeccable logic. Okay, we get it;
analytics is subject to uncertainty. Now
start socializing analytics so it is not so
threatening.
Making other people feel stupid
does not make you appear very smart.
Stop qualifying your results. You dwell
much too much on the fact that if your
analysis is correct, then there is still
a chance that the conclusion is wrong
– incomplete information being what
it is. Finally, if you are in a non-analytics culture, then you need to do more
than write a glossary of acronyms and
speak the local language. You must
walk the walk, too. You need to behave
as much like the right-brainers as you
can stand – conform a little, sadly. Just
deal with it.
What you need to know if you are
dating a left-brainer: Right-brainers,
you need to appreciate that the leftbrainers have the lonely responsibility
for getting the facts right in the face of
messed-up, incomplete information.
Going forward, you need to evolve,
to accept more of the communication
burden, to think differently. Is this so
threatening? You want to embrace or at
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A N A LY T I C S - M A G A Z I N E . O R G
least accept uncertainty. When reading
analysis, you should interpret signs of
intellectual humility as signs of intellectual humility and not weakness. If you
want the left-brainers to explain things
simply, then you can help by reminding them that you realize their work is
complex. Keep asking them the same
question until you get it. Do not give up.
However, you cannot expect them to divulge their secret techniques.
If the above was not enough for you,
left-brainers will want to share all of the
bad news they have discovered. Just
deal with it.
What we all need to know: In practice, we all have left- and right-brain
behaviors, and anyone who thinks that
some group of people is homogeneous
does not know much about them. Now
that we are in the Information Age, it is
no longer wise to run a company with
half a brain. Today, our medieval corporate cultures from the Dark Ages place
too much of the burden on the left-brainers to get the numbers right and explain
it so that a right-brainers can understand it [3]. This is unreasonable – or
at least not optimal. Instead, we should
ask for the caveats and accept the “I
don’t knows” on our way to cashing in
on analytics. In analytics, there can be
something suspicious about someone
with all of the answers; they are not
W W W. I N F O R M S . O R G