When you come face to face with unfamiliar data, how do you proceed? How do you avoid sending yourself and your shiny “speed of thought” tool slamming into a dead end? Dan Murray’s got a routine — and he’s also got certain music and right-brained books to go along.
Dan’s first rule: “Don’t pre-think.” It’s the hardest thing for people to learn, he says. “If you go into [data analysis] thinking you know where you’re going, you easily miss the granule of gold.”
He’s the chief operating officer and heavy-hitting data analyst at InterWorks, Inc., an Oklahoma-based business consultancy. What seems to me like an unending stream of mid-size businesses from all different industries has kept him running days, nights, and weekends to make sense of each one’s data and unravel old data knots.… Read the rest “How to analyze unfamiliar data: circle, dive, and riff”