Schertzer Arts

You hear all kinds of questions about what project methodology to use, and in what situation. Should it be Agile, Waterfall? How does one approach the various project roles within each? What about documentation, is there an approved standard? Is there an approved standard for anything?

Experience keeps telling me that the answer to all of these questions come out of the context we are working in. For instance, my organization tends to manage projects via a Waterfall approach, as sort of an umbrella organizing function over projects. This is because we contract for large, often multi-year software implementations that involve custom enhancements to products, as well as a great deal of integration work. We need to get the project pretty well defined upfront for contractual purposes. Then under the umbrella there may be one or more Agile teams doing their work on separate streams, while some business analysts are working off to the side, writing interface specifications, training, and gathering further requirements, handing things off to developers, and so forth. And even under the umbrella of a Waterfall methodology, there are constant iterations to gathering specifications, writing documentation, specification review, development, testing, reviewing the results, and often rewriting specifications based on those results.

There are always conflicting needs. First of all our clients need to know what they are paying for, how much they are paying, before committing to a project, and at the same time there are also many unknowns. You have to get good at what you’re doing by doing it, and often there are going to be mistakes. Part of the reason why is that the it that you have to get good at, in order to have mastery of the entire process, is not a thing, but only an idea. At best, it’s a moving target.

This is why you need to hone certain instincts, so that you become sensitive to the needs, not only of the client, but to the needs of the entire project, or just your little sliver of it. You have to know when to stop going in one direction, and turn a corner, or start over from the beginning.

There’s a popular assumption that failure is due to lack of organization, or failure is due to people not knowing what they’re doing. Both of those assumptions are false. Very often the cause of failure is over-organization and lack of flexibility. And even more often the cause of failure is an inability to admit that one is always working in the dark, that we don’t really know what we are doing until we do it. These two things work hand-in-hand – inflexibility is often due to believing you know what needs to be done and the best way to do it when you don’t, or perhaps faking it too hard.

Pretending one knows what one is doing, and relying too much on the scaffolding (i.e. project management methodologies, and other things they teach you in certification programs) instead of the process of discovering what the requirements are and creating the solutions along the way, is more conducive to producing content for primetime sitcoms than it is to actually getting the work done.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad the scaffolding is there. When I’m working in a BA role, I’m often so deep in the weeds, into hair-splitting details of a piece of code I’m trying to design, that it’s good to know there’s someone there looking over the whole thing from above, with her map (project plan) of the entire battlefield, so I don’t have to keep track of the next thing I need to do, and the sequence of things, and who the best people are to talk to for that next particular bit of business. But at the same time, I am giving my feedback, and we are rescheduling things, splitting things into multiple tasks, and recombining things where new synergies have been discovered. A project is a living thing, made up of living parts, and like all living things is full of surprises.

So apart from the requirements one needs to meet, that make up the project – i.e. what gets delivered to the client – there are the meta-requirements of the project itself, its incremental discovering what it is, just like all of us.

In my previous post I discussed the value of going beyond the basics of requirements gathering by stepping into the client’s shoes as much as possible. The key is to stretch one’s imagination the way a detective might when solving a crime, or a military strategist when attempting to out-think an opponent. In this case, however, rather than framing the other as the opposition, you are working towards better serving that person or persons. The theory is that the better the model you have of your user’s or client’s experience, the more capable you are of understanding what types of change work, i.e. system enhancements, workflow, your client requires, or changes that would better enable her to do her work and meet her goals.

I am going to borrow from NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) here, because I have some training in the processes and methodologies, although you will be able to find similar strategies elsewhere, for instance in cognitive and communication sciences. I need to add a caveat here that there has been much criticism of NLP methodologies, and it is often labeled as hokey new-age mumbo jumbo. Scientific studies have supposedly proved that the assumptions of NLP are incorrect and that the methodologies have proven to be ineffective, when studied as NLP methodologies. However, when there have been scientific studies of the same processes, labeled as cognitive and behavioral sciences (where researches were unaware that they were also studying NLP processes and methodologies) they have many times proven to be effective, real patterns of human behavior. That’s the politics of science.

These same patterns and methodologies have also become the core of many behavioral and communication programs, i.e. educational, sales, and other interpersonal communication schools, often without the practitioners being aware. If you have ever heard someone talk about how a particular person is a visual vs. auditory or kinesthetic learner or communicator, that is something lifted directly from NLP.

Rapport – Matching and Mirroring

It’s obvious that when you feel as though you just click with someone that you are having a better than average communication, and that the value of that communication, whether for gaining information, or simply for personal pleasure, is far greater than usual, although people are generally at a loss to understand how this happens, and how to purposefully produce that kind of experience.

What the folks who developed NLP observed, when the studied effective communicators, is that these people would naturally match or mirror the people they were communicating with in some way. Sometimes this matching would manifest as a mirroring of body postures, the taking on a similar tone of voice, or the pace of one’s speech. Sometimes it would mean switching the sensory modality of one’s speech, by listening to the type of sensory words one was using, and use them in their own speech. For instance if someone started talking about their vision for their business, one might respond by saying “I see what you mean,” while if they said something like “the market is broadcasting and echoing various reverberations of a particular set of cycles,” one might acknowledge by saying that you hear what they are saying, and use terminology of sound and music to echo back to them. The idea is to listen for words in the speaker’s predicates that highlight a particular sensory mode , particularly visual, auditory or kinesthetic, that she is comfortable with, and use words that would reflect back the use of their particular mode of choice. And of course, the ability to actually think fluently in the particular mode your client is using is a great advantage to communication.

A sharing of similar values and interests is of course a way we may often gain rapport with someone, although in situations where we don’t know much about the person we are engaged with, we only have at our use what we can observe in the immediate present, and we have immediate access to what we can see and hear.

Mirroring the posture of that person can be a powerful way of gaining rapport, although it has be used with a degree of subtlety, else it may backfire. People are often smarter than we realize, and if the mirroring is heavy-handed your client may feel something strange is happening, may feel as though she is being manipulated without realizing what exactly is going on. But if you are careful, you can use these techniques to your advantage. It’s best to consciously practice the techniques in low-pressure and informal situations, not in contexts where a wrong move can botch things up between you and an important client. That way you can gain a comfortable fluidity and not have to think too much about what you are doing, and that way not be distracted from the content of the conversation.

You could very well discover that you may begin to feel a greater connection with the people you are working with. Rather than being the person with all the tricks and leverage in the communication act (which sometimes happens to people when they discover these techniques), you may find yourself feeling more comfortable and better connected, which is an appropriate way of using these strategies. You will also find that the way you are interpreting the information changes, that you will feel more in synch with the other, since rapport is never a one way street. It will be more than mere words. You will feel as though you both “get” each other. And what could be better when creating solutions for that person?

For those of you who are involved in systems implementation and change processes, understand that the actual meaning of your implementation project is the net sum experience of all users involved. That means that the quality of your work is a direct reflection of the change in quality of user experience. Ga!

Frightening, right? We all know that there will be a bit of aching and groaning and gnashing of teeth, so the onus is on us to make it more than worthwhile. We are in this world to provide value.

I often take inspiration from a trend that seemed to take place during the late 1990’s that involved a study of the way users and would-be users of applications experience things. Tech companies, or one company in particular, were hiring students out of social science grad programs – instead of IT or business, go figure – to study user experience to best shape application and user interface design. The practice was called Experience Modeling, sort of the Avant Gard of IT development at the time,. The word was out that the Information Age was over, and the Experience Age had begun.

I’m not sure what happened to this trend, or what past experience modelers are doing now, but if you look closely enough, you’ll see its subtle implications everywhere, and an overall mindset among tech companies to provide the maximum best experience, whether the most pleasurable, most convenient or most useful, or any combination of the three.

When I say I take inspiration from this practice, I mean it helps to form my whole approach to dealing with clients. Whether I am scoping a future implementation, streamlining current user processes, providing training or demonstrations, or actually gathering requirements and writing specs for a specific client-requested enhancement, I try as much to enter that person’s world, to step into her shoes and see things the way she does.

So we’re not talking about simply sitting down, asking a few questions about what a user wants to see on a screen, what buttons they want to press, and what results they want to see as a result of that. This goes beyond simple requirements gathering, beyond best practices and rote procedures. It is more of a holistic approach that requires all our interpersonal skills, imagination and other “soft skills.

The good news is that the basic set of core soft skills are things that are natural to you as a human being, i.e. the tendency to connect social, share experience, learn from each other. It’s written into your DNA, and manifests in our mirror neurons, and their activity. And though they are implicit skill sets, they are also things we can develop further by tuning into them more, as artists might do with the subtle connection between their visual and emotional functioning.

For a business analyst, this could mean gaining an intuition for the right types questions to ask, to gain high quality information about her client’s experience, to not only get an image of what a the flows might look like, but the experience of eye and hand movements, the sense of time passing, the adrenaline boosts that might lead to decision making. As you flesh out the experience and create a detailed fictional model in your own experience, more will come to light. You will begin to understand better what it is she is grappling with, and from that you can go beyond the mere gathering of requirements and begin partnering with her to design something that truly adds a bounty of surplus value.

My next few posts will provide approaches to developing and utilizing these intuitions and soft skills. However, in the meantime, practice by imagining what it would be like to be your client in the midst of her workday. Imagine what it would feel like to be her using your application. Ask yourself while you do so, what is it that I really want and need right now?

The more I talk to people, especially those who have been at their careers for a number of years, or decades, the more there seems to be a disconnect between what they feel is their actual performance, the value they produce, and what their management tends to see. And this seems to be more than a pattern with merely noticeable statistical consistency, but is actually quite ubiquitous. In recent years, I have seen a number of articles in business magazines about companies that are eliminating the entire annual review process, and I’m starting to understand why. It’s kind of a farce, at least to some degree. I don’t know if there’s any management school fix for something like this, a newly developed methodology of sorts, since the greater the expertise of the person being reviewed, the greater the chance that large parts of it are going to fly over their manager’s head, just as many pieces of the manager’s job would elude the understanding of those who report to her . I’ve begun to call this disconnect the Peter Parker Syndrome.

As a kid I read reams of Spider-man comic books, and I know there are different versions of the story, a TV show some decades ago, more than one animated series, and a more recent film and sequel, but it’s the Tobey Maguire Spider-man I’m thinking of, or perhaps his Spider-man II.

Peter Parker looks ridiculous on his moped in midtown Manhattan traffic, trying to get a stack of pizzas delivered on time. Suddenly something happens, there’s some crisis, and he’s off in Spider-man mode, swinging on webs, saving lives, getting the bad guys, you name it, finally snatching a slice before someone on a balcony, where his pies have landed, bites into it. He makes his delivery almost in time, but he’s minutes late, and oops, it turns into free pizza day for the customer, and because of that he loses his job.

Out of desperation Peter brings photos of Spider-man to one of the biggest city papers. The editor, J. Jonah Jameson, is like a younger, American version of Rupert Murdoch. He doesn’t care about real news, per se, but in selling papers. He’s really rather incompetent at understanding what’s really going on in the world, what real news is, and distorts everything to conform with his personal ideology and a narrative that will drive paper sales. Where his competence lies is in marketing.

Parker sells photos to him at a pittance, though he is providing a tremendous value to the paper, not only because of the exclusivity of the images, but by actually being the content of the news that is driving sales. Jameson is not only an incompetent news editor, he is completely at a loss as to this value Peter Parker is providing him and his business. Even more absurd, he is making our hero into an outlaw, the cause of the crimes and crises he’s been alleviating, representing him even as a terrorist.

Okay, the Spider-man analogy is a bit of an exaggeration, but people I’ve been talking to have come out of their annual reviews feeling sort of the same way. And this is nothing new, as I remember my father complaining about the same thing back in the 1970s and 80s, although it’s more than likely that with the explosion in technology, our jobs are more various and bewilderingly complex than they were during the later decades of the twentieth century.

At the same time, there’s more than likely an equal opportunity to be over-appreciated, rather than under-appreciated, to take credit for producing more value than we are personally responsible for, taking credit for things that occur due to happenstance, or even value that belongs to others. There are plenty of people whom I’ve known who have a talent for that sort of thing, although they have tended to vanish into thin air, after a while, seemingly without a trace. You hear stories of people who make their entire careers out of skipping from job to job, continuously, like a stone on the surface of a pond, until they eventually go plop, down to the bottom, and you never hear from them again. Maybe they’ve gone off to sell vacation shares in the Caribbean, or wall-coverings at Walmart. Who knows? But what a waste of a Wharton education…

Don’t go that route. You have the perfect right to be who you are, to be misunderstood and under-appreciated, and to provide massive value, in spite of whatever you think it’s doing to your career. The thing is, over time you’re going to accrete more experience producing excellence, doing good stuff, and it’s going to pay returns on what you are going to be able to do as you live into the future. If at some point you have to solve some ridiculously difficult problem, or perform some other absurd miracle, and you accomplish it, with perhaps a limited amount of fallout, then you have acquired the experience of performing those miracles, and nothing of that complexity will ever be as difficult again. And if you feel you are still unappreciated, take comfort in the hole you’ll leave whenever it is leave, for whatever reason.

But it’s your own integrity you’re building all the while. No matter what your manager does or says, as long as you know what you are worth, and remain the primary judge of your performance and value, you will be rewarded. If you cheat, there is something inside of you that will cheapen. If you produce gold, you’re filling yourself with gold. Feel it. It’s really up to you.

At some point, Peter Parker gives up on being Spider-man because he’s frustrated about what it’s brought into his life. He just wants to be a normal person, with normative rewards. He doesn’t want his life to be so hard. But he realizes it doesn’t work for him. It won’t work for you either. Believe me, I’ve been at this longer than you think.

Go get’m tiger.

Within the context of the way change occurs in nature, what we call “being stuck” is only a perspective of a temporary state within the oscillations of difference and repetition. Okay, before you fall asleep or flip to the next post, hear me out a moment. This has to do with managing yourself in your career, your life, your relations, what have you.

That’s right, in the overall flow of things, your work in a stuck state is only a single consistency, perhaps a grip or foothold, in natural system of random variations. It is important to the overall system for you to stay stuck so that its random generation of novelty does not go completely off the rails.

But that also means that your best practices and content of your certifications, as well as all of your current expertise, are mere grips and footholds already collecting dust as they are formed. All of this material was most valuable as it was being generated from the process of discovery, before someone isolated a set of skeletal variables and produced a methodology. We are ever taking pieces of these artifacts and attempting to gather what was suitable and valuable in a past that produced them, and applying them to a present and projected future that may have left their relevance behind.

Gregory Bateson suggested that both mind and nature proceed in similar ways, in that both produced novel material randomly, and then kept a storehouse of things that worked, or survived. Gene pools, that are constantly innovating themselves through reproduction and accidental deformities, or mutations, will be more or less useful in various contexts. It’s not so much about the survival of the fittest in the sense that the strongest animal gets a more reliable source of nutrition and reproductive opportunities, as in classic interpretations of Darwin, but particular features, as in the specific shape of a sea creature’s fin that may make it fleeter at certain  depths and levels of pressure, and not others, or the formation of an eye structure that may be more sensitive to a particular segment of the light spectrum that occurs in predators in a particular forest.

Your mind too, is a randomness upon randomness in a similar way, since it is, like the fin or the eye, that randomly, or what Bateson called stochastically, produces novelty upon stored patterns, except that it is also a bit like a complete natural system in itself in that you have the opportunity to generate endless novelty during a single lifetime, whereas the sea creature only gets a single life with a single fin.

As we amble on we need both feet. We need the foot that is rooted in the ground, the one that is stuck, and the one that is travelling through the air, unbound. They take turns. The foot freeing itself is reliant on the foot that is currently stuck, and vice versa. The pattern will then repeat itself, and we will walk ahead, make progress. The feet will also then need to know when it is time to change direction, turn a corner. But the feet cannot know when to turn a corner, something else must do that.

We are ever the feet, sticking to our familiar systems and practices, following the footsteps of others, which is good, but we are sometimes also the thing that turns the corner.

The walking that moves us ahead, the one foot before the other, the switching, these are good habits to get into. We can follow them in our sleep.

Until they are no longer good. You wake up one day and you realize that so much you have grow accustomed to, sets of patterns or behavior and knowledge that have worked for you for so long, are no longer good habits, maybe even bad habits.

But you identify with them so, after all, they are you, what you have become, and it may even be a painful realization. And to me, that’s all the Buddha meant by ego and attachment. It’s that simple, and you don’t have to burn incense and sit for hours by a golden statue to understand that. The incense and the golden statue are maybe more habits and attachments, just more steps in the same direction when maybe you need to turn a corner.

The doggy tricks you’ve learned that have made you useful, desirable, up until now, that are no longer helping you satisfy your needs, were things you had originally put on, but you have may have confused the garment for the thing the garment is meant to conceal, to cover, to protect from the cold.

I’m not saying this for the sake and hope of some greater salvation, only that we need to work, and sometimes need to be the foot that is rooted to the ground, and sometimes need to be the foot that is flying through the air. And sometimes, maybe more often than we think, we need to be neither foot, but the thing that can turn a corner.

Getting stuck is what we do best. We’re so good at pyramid building, corporate protocol, policies that outlive themselves. It manifests in our expectations of ourselves and other people, our routines, what we consider our sensible ways of looking at the world. Yet there is this fluidity of things and people we tend to admire, what we often misinterpret as rarified genius, magic even and sociopathy. Our systems, even those that are most rigid, are found to have leaks that will let minute tinctures of this substance in, this loosener of things, just to keep their bones from cracking when the ribcage needs to expand and contract just enough to keep its animal alive.

After all, innovation drives the economy. Whether it’s tablets and smartphones, and the technologies that connect them, give them something to do, as in the countless apps and games ever in production to keep them busy. A couple of decades back it was the Internet itself, the WWW, e-Commerce, operating systems that would allow you to run several applications simultaneously on your personal computers.  Before that, the game changer was the mere fact of personal computers, not to mention the technologies that underlie all of it, integrate them with larger networks of systems, secure and efficiently. And not least of all, the brilliant and innovative marketing behind it all, and all the new technologies in healthcare, sustainability, financial systems, homeland security, entertainment, infotainment, soft technologies of personal performance and achievement.

It’s dizzying to think about. It really takes one’s breath away. But how can these two tendencies exist so comfortably side-by-side, this anal retentiveness, on one side and on the other, that fountain of ever-expulsive novelty?

To Gilles Deleuze – likely the most important philosopher of late twentieth century Western Civilization, dead for two decades now, but yet to be discovered by the world at large – this sort predicament is to be expected. All of nature, he says, is made up of this relationship of difference and repetition, difference being the predominant principal, and repetition being the tendency for the flux of things to form habits. We therefore find the ever expanding and entropic universe generating patterns of star systems that begin to behave with a degree of predictability, things orbiting other things in regular spatial and temporal arcs, planets that can sustain life because they maintain consistent distances from their suns, the accretion of life itself, the repeated shapes and patterns of leaves on plants and trees, quadrupedal and bipedal forms that continually go back to the same nest, hole in the ground, home that they or someone else built for them.

Habit and structures of repetition sustain life, but life is in a sense a chaos of nonliving forms, a thinking-outside-the-box of the basic elements that might otherwise just sit there dead, like a number of businesses and ways of doing things we thought would always be there.

To be continues…

Who is the great magician who makes the grass green? – Zen Koan

Getting stuck is what we do best. Another way to put it is being consistent, or creating consistency, however you want to phrase it. We are often appraised for how well we do things the same, create sameness, get the same results, and we are often appraised by how well we maintain a level of sameness, not deviate from our course, stay focused, and so forth. It’s like a thing we worship, this habit-making adventure we call our lives in which the prizes go to the folks who become experts and masters of things by forming rigid patterns we identify as sticking to it or best practices, and even that elusive quality we call character.

But then again we also like when people create new ways of doing things, or new things entirely, and we don’t often look at how these two tendencies, that of generating consistency and difference, are essentially contradictions, and what we must do to allow for both modes of being.

Getting stuck is what we do best, at least in part because it is a thing we highly value. We build our floors in our homes with solid materials so we don’t fall easily through them into the basement or the home of our neighbor below. We put up walls to protect us from the weather, other people who threaten us, who might want to run off with some of our stuff, or our family members. We create imaginary attributes such as skill sets, knowledge, experience, and job performance, so it is less easy to steal our jobs from under us.

And yet there is this tendency in us to go breathless and giddy over words like innovation, and the English Language’s newest gumball: disruption.

I remember when disruption was a thing I would get kicked out of class for. It is also decidedly not the thing to do when meeting with a client, in suits and ties, when you’ve got something serious to do or talk about. You don’t just start singing RnB songs when you feel the pressure mount and you think conversation’s going in the wrong direction. You don’t blurt out and do your Michael Jackson moves on the conference table top. And I suppose there’s good reason for that.

But still: disruption. What a maggot that word is, that quality of letting the system breathe, bringing life back in, the starting-over-again-with-fresh-ideas approach we have been agitating against all along.

To be continued…

There is a lot of talk out on the Internet about how to achieve the best results in life and in business by having the right approach, everything from building the most useful habits to internalizing the best thinking strategies. There are exemplars, and those who can seemingly discover their patterns and articulate them for a wider audience, those who would be the beneficiaries of these new power tools. But it’s the exemplars, and those who model the patterns, who benefit most of all, since the further you get from the original model, the less precise and the more mainstream it becomes.

That’s not to say that people have not benefitted from unusual trainings and books with ideas about how this or that exemplar did what they did. But there is a difference between being the originator of a set of thinking and behavioral patterns, and those millions who later pick them up and add them to their tool box. Be careful when casting aside one’s organically grown sets of tools and beliefs, those learnings that have taken your life up to the moment to develop, for some other set of contradictory patterns, expecting some magic carpet ride into graceful living and career growth. Take it from someone dumb enough to find out for himself.

But there were a pair of books I read during the 1980s, and a couple times since, written by an artist Gianfranco Baruchello and art critic Henry Martin, who went to Italy to interview him. They were How to Imagine: a Narrative on Art and Agriculture and Why Duchamp: An Essay on Aesthetic Impact. Both books gravitate around the influence of Marcel Duchamp, not only in regard to 20th century art, but also in the way his ideas have bled outward into the very meaning of objects and processes that we take for granted today. The whole way we think of innovation, for instance, would likely not be what it is without Duchamp’s somewhat outrageous experiments during the early 20th century.

Baruchello is an artist, a painter, who was somewhat of a disciple of Duchamp, but who had also had become a farmer, utilizing a number of ideas he had derived from his explorations of Duchamp’s inventions. These were, oddly enough, extremely practical adaptations of the ideas of an artist who was generally categorized as a Dada artist (who set out to destroy civilization by poking fun at mainstream art and the gravitas of its historical accretion), but also a conceptual artist, whose work was largely a series of questions, puzzles and language games.

One thing Baruchello said that stood out for me, was he would regularly look in the mirror and ask, “have you been Duchamp today?” It was his way of asking himself, not only whether he has thought outside the box, but whether a leap outside even the construct that created boxes was a possibility.

When I say that Baruchello was a farmer, I don’t mean that he grew one particular crop, the way most farmers of the 20th and 21st centuries have, in order to optimize production. He grew a variety of things, and kept animals as well. He was attempting to break the mold, to create new systems of farming and animal husbandry, and at the same time recreate farming practices of previous era, while using modernist aesthetics to make it work. It was quite a task to take on, and he actually did make it work, at least for a time.

The whole “have you been Duchamp today?” thing became a practice for myself and a colleague, who is himself an artist, and somewhat of a Duchampian. We would continually asked each other Baruchello’s “have you been Duchamp today?” question, half as a joke, whenever we found ourselves in a particular sticky situation or rut, something seemingly unresolvable or unpleasant. This would often help us pop out of the situation for a moment and see things with more of a fresh outlook.

But the main thing we did that perhaps made a difference for both of us, was that we forced each other to submit creative work to the other, some sort of strange piece of writing (I, playing the part of the poet) or drawing each day, something that took perhaps only minutes to produce. And of course, this was all in the spirit of Duchamp, and would demand some sort of disruption of our regular thought processes to produce, very often something preposterous and of little artistic merit, but something well worth the making.

It was a practice that flourished and grew in our lives in numerous ways, as well as creating energy, enthusiasm and lubrication enough for us to forge ahead and produce value for multiple decades, and likely helped us to survive multiple organizational changes and cutbacks, while others who had followed a much safer and saner approach to career growth, of gathering certifications and MBAs, fell to the wayside, ended up being less resourceful, and it showed.

You see, Duchamp wasn’t the kind of innovator who was going to argue about what kinds of images one was going to paint, what kinds of perspectives to invite into the painting, or how to apply the paint to create a sense of difference and energy, like the Picassos, Van Goghs or Kandinskys of the time. Nor was he deciding between painting and sculpture. The questions he began asking were on a whole other level: why paint at all? Why not just call this urinal “Fountain” and sign it R Mutt, instead of his own name? What’s in a name, anyway, and what is art?

When I hear about the folks who are prescribing specific methodologies to manage innovation, I go back to Duchamp for relief. Yes, Picasso was an innovator, because he followed particular impulses, but Duchamp shook the things up and changed the art world in ways that have changed it permanently. Picasso may have awakened trends and opened our eyes, but Duchamp gave birth to a new world.

Tesla, the man, was a Duchamp, and Elon Musk, the creator of the Tesla car, among other things, is perhaps a Picasso. Those of you trying to decide which methodology to follow could learn from either one of them. And for those of you who are still trying to decide which cert is going to provide you with a skill base that’s going to make a difference, or who are looking for an easy, paint-by-numbers approach, fine, get your certs, but don’t stop there. Those skills are an arbitrary set of ideas constructed to provide mere competence – please aspire to more than that.

Don’t afraid to be strange, and follow your impulses into less frequented areas of thought, things that seem foolish or a waste of time. Make your own path, have fun, make meaning. Ask yourself now and then “Have I been Duchamp today?” And find out for yourselves why that may be of value.

The skills and finesse one needs to do just about any job well are about all one needs to do just about anything. The difficulty is in figuring out precisely what that anything might be. That’s where we all get stuck, except for a odd few people who either because of some weird luck or insight, or perhaps even mental derangement, do something different, and in a way that may be almost shocking to most of us, perhaps even inspire self-loathing for not doing the same.

There is a lot of talk about how they are the true leaders of the world, the makers, who steer the course of history in ways even our political leaders cannot, and we often wonder how they got that way. What one thing did they have to their advantage that other did not have? Family money? An amazing mentor? Very often we find there’s no one answer.

When you look for what may have made the difference, it surely wasn’t certifications or any kind of well-trodden path in pursuit of mere competence. It’s more likely they weren’t following anything that resembles common sense at all, but uncovering a path as they went, picking up their skill set and ideas as if by a chaotic trust in their own enthusiasm. And perhaps it was all mere luck, since for every Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, there are likely thousands of others we’ve never heard of, with perhaps equally good or better ideas, but who never bumped into the right people, or whose experiments failed and and never succeeded, who went unnoticed for other reasons. Perhaps it’s just that they didn’t play dirty enough, didn’t have the enormous charisma and socio-pathological traits to bring their work to the attention of millions of people.

You can take a number of these masters of reality and reverse engineer how they got where they did by digging into their personal histories. There are endless reams of books claiming to have the power to help you attain, at least in part, the cognitive prowess of Leonardo DaVinci, Nikola Tesla, Einstein, all the iconic masterminds of the past centuries. You are taught to practice visualizing the way time passes when riding on a photon at the speed of light (which is generally the speed photon’s travel at), or how to build and run objects in one’s head. And all of these things are great practices, I honestly believe they could help you become more intelligent, but one does not become Einstein by repeating what Einstein did. Einstein, of course, may have done similar exercises, though what he did that led him to inch out and away from the masses who were essentially doing the same thing, was he followed his own curiosity and questions into unknown regions most of us don’t ever consider traveling.  But how did he know to trust those impulses, and how do we learn from his experience.

Maybe we don’t. Or maybe it’s more obvious than we think. The poet John Keats observed something very interesting about William Shakespeare, something he believed was the essential trait of his greatest, and something that I try to keep in mind whenever I find myself asking that last question. It is what he called Negative Capability, or an ability to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.”

And though living in that kind of ambiguity seems the opposite of what science teaches us, as well as our hunger for certainty, for measurable results and answered questions, it is that extended state of unknowing that scientists and innovators alike tend to live in. And it is something to keep in mind when conducting ourselves through our careers as workaholic makers of change, as well as the minutia of our every day choices.

I have worked as a business analyst since before being a Business Analyst was a thing. At the time people made up all kinds of names for it, and the most common job title I had used at the time was “systems liaison,” since I ended up being the guy who liaised between the people in the business side of things – the “users” – and the developers of the applications they use.

I had been running a junior securities lending sales desk at one of the bigger broker dealer firms for a short period, and it didn’t feel as though it was a perfect fit for me. But something else was emerging in the business, and that was that a lot of the manual processes were beginning to be automated. In other words, instead of looking up inventory on a thick wad of computer printout, writing orders on paper forms, and having someone run those sheets down to a key punch operator, we were building terminal screens that the traders could use to query and enter data and cut out all the looking up and running about. Very exciting.

At first there was very little formalized discipline involved. It was very much a seat-of-the-pants kind of process. People asked for stuff and we’d delivery it, one way or another, and things sometimes got messy. At some point it became obvious that we needed a more formalized approach to testing, and so that became part of my role as well.

At the same time I was learning to do some very basic coding of my own, utilizing rapid-development tools and report writing software to take up some of the slack left because, in the early days, we were working with a limited number of developers and efficiency tools. This helped me understand better what the people on the development side were doing. And as it turns out that most of the BA’s that I have been working with over the past several years have mainly come from two backgrounds: either they were developers in a previous life, or they were very hands-on operations people.

Of all the BA’s I have worked with over the past few decades the best have had certain sets of qualities.

Domain Expertise

It may not be necessary, but it’s useful if you have a practical knowledge of the business in which you working, primarily because the conversations you are going to have with the users of systems you will be developing or enhancing are going to be a higher quality. There will also be a great deal of information you will already have at your fingertips, and will not have to going seeking it either from the users themselves, with whom you may have limited access, or by reading various reams of domain-related documentation, which is often badly written and nearly impossible to understand out of context.

With domain expertise, you will also eventually gain SME status (subject matter expert), which is in itself a useful thing to have on your resume, and valuable, of course, to your employers and that sales staff who are selling your skills to their clients and prospects, if you are in a consultative role.

Ability to Learn Well and Quickly

One’s education never comes to an end for business analysts, even if one has been a subject matter expert in one’s field for quite some time. There will always be changes in the market, people experimenting with new products and services, and even some requests that may seem odd and unreasonable at first. Newness is never in short supply. If you are working for a software or services vendor, your clients and prospects are going to expect you to understand what they are talking about without wasting much time. So keep your brain in good repair, challenge it often, and don’t watch too much TV, or hang out on social media. Read and/or do cross-word puzzles, Rubix Cube, Luminosity, whatever. You’re going to need a well-greased engine under the hood, so aim to tax yourself mentally in your off-hours at a higher level than you’re taxed on the job. I happen to find reading and writing ridiculously difficult modern poetry and playing jazz guitar works for me.

It turns out people with musical backgrounds are generally well-primed for this kind of work. Some of the best developers and business analysts I’ve worked with – the real genius types – have been through a rigorous musical training. In fact a business owner I know, whose company produces educational iPhone apps for children, once told me he will only hire developers with a musical background. He really believes that musical training produces the kind of brain wiring that best suits developers. I believe the same can be said for other art forms as well.

One of the best BA’s I’ve worked with is a real science fiction buff, and it is my opinion that quality speculative fiction also challenges and stretches one’s belief systems and cognitive skills in a way that helps him generate solutions like very few BA’s I know.

The key is, I believe, if you have a side passion, something that challenges you, then definitely give it your time and energy, as there will be a residual cognitive benefit on the job, even if there seems to be no obvious connection.

Curiosity

Some of the best BA’s I’ve worked with must have been the kind of kids that mixed the wrong chemicals together in their home chemistry sets, and either blew things up, or ruined the furniture. Or perhaps they took apart all the clocks in the house and put them back together wrong. The drive to understand, to want to experiment and explore, take things apart, will sometimes get you in trouble, but it will also benefit you greatly as a BA, so don’t stifle it. Feed it good materials and let it grow into the monstrosity it deserves to become. Many of the tasks you will take on will draw on the same inclinations that cause trouble in other contexts, and they can naturally help you to absorb more easily and fully the material and requirements you are dealing with, and will also motivate you to think outside of the box.

Analytical/Critical Skills

This one should go without saying, but I’m going to mention it anyway, as there is no over-emphasizing the fact that a well-tuned rational mind, equipped with analytical tools, is not only a great asset for a business analyst, but is wholly a requirement.

Not only will you be faced with a lot of material and half-baked ideas, but you may often need to gather requirements from the users themselves, and not everyone you talk to is going to be able to present a cogent picture of what it is they want you to do. You will get a lot of fragments of ideas, and things that need to be done, but there will be plenty of detective work, piecing things together, in order to form your own representation that you can then play back to the client or user.

Along with the obvious tools and certification trainings familiar with in the market, for those of you who are often in the position where you are interviewing clients and users to gather requirements, I recommend Jonathan Altfeld’s Knowledge Engineering training course. Jonathan was an Expert Systems programmer early in his career, which means he built artificial intelligence systems that imitate human decision making, particularly experts in a particular functional domain. Jonathan has taken this experience to help produce rapid learning systems, by extracting the key cognitive patterns that make up domain expertise, similar to what is discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, so that people can learn in a few weeks what usually takes years of experience working in that domain. Why this will be useful for you, is having an understanding of the Jonathan’s modelling process, or the like, will help you develop the ability to build better models, in real time, of what and how the user is thinking, and what kinds of tools would best suit the thinking strategies they use to get the best results. In other words, by making a study of the way your users think, you can create the applications and enhancements that will best compliment their reflexive skill sets and expertise.

Creativity

Great BA’s are the great under-appreciated geniuses of the tech world. They may be the undiscovered Steve Jobs’ or Elon Musks, generating solution after solution without the big rewards or celebrity status. You might not have the big, world-altering ideas (at least not yet), but you are possibly just as brilliant for the number of smaller solutions you generate in a single day or week. There’s something to be said for that as well.

This is a huge topic that there is really no end to discussing. In some ways, creativity sits side-by-side with learning and curiosity, since all learning is a creative act of building internal representations of things in the world that are new to you. And of course, curiosity helps make that more natural and efficient.

I attempt to address creativity in a number of my posts, and will continue to do so. I give different perspectives on developing creative habits here, here, here and here, as well as in a number of other posts. At one point, I taught college creative writing classes at The New School, in New York City, so this is a favorite topic of mine.

There are of course endless selections of books about how to develop creativity, about what it is, and what types of people end up being the most creative, and some of them are useful to read. My opinion is that you are likely already as creative as you need to be, otherwise you would not have survived and flourished as well as you have. You may not be aware of how creative you are, however, and there are things you can do to take notice, and better utilize that ability (if it can actually be considered an ability at all, or a collection, perhaps, of personality quirks). I also tend to believe that books about creativity are not as good as experiencing actual creative artifacts, i.e. great creative works of fiction and poetry, music and other works of art.

And of course, it helps to be exposed to the work of some of our best creative entrepreneurs, scientific geniuses, and so forth, i.e. the Elon Musks, Teslas (the person, not the company), the Einsteins, Jobs’ and David Bowies of the world.

Communication Skills