The first 10 years of my career were both blessing and curse. A blessing because I had the opportunity to work with truly talented people around me in just about every position. Even those that were complete PIAs had skills that are top 2%. A curse because for a long time I thought that I was in a common organization. When all of your experiences involve talented people, it’s easy to believe talented people are everywhere.
Slowly I came to realize that talent is a rare and difficult thing to find. The group that had been gathered slowly began to disband and change. New people came in that couldn’t live up to the history. I had more experiences with other companies that didn’t have the same talent. I came to reposition the talent that I had seen around me as a truly special occurrence.
Data analytics is a particular skill that was all around me. I was surrounded by many that could look at numbers and instinctively see patterns and know if there were issues. Excel ability was table stakes, most could go several tools deeper as needed. I remember one fun week several of us spent debating the validity of introducing simulations into our standard analytics packages.
Over the past years, I have come to understand how hard data analytics is to most people. Looking at numbers and seeing anything but a wall of numbers is a skill that few have. Even those that can look at numbers and see an opportunity for analysis struggle to come up with the right framework for presenting those results. Knowing how to craft numbers into a story is real trouble.
This all may seem obvious and intuitive to you but my point is that this was a blindspot to me because my experience was skewed in a certain direction. What are your blindspots because of your background? We all have them.