A key thinking style for business analysts is what I call opposite thinking.
It’s is also called being a Devil’s advocate, but sometimes that role takes on a “bad guy” approach and doesn’t look at all aspects of a situation. In politics I see the opposition playing the Devil’s advocate role. They are trying to tear down the other side rather than trying to get a better overall view of an issue.
How do you apply opposite thinking?
Once you have created a business process, product, or service you want to evaluate it from the opposite perspective from hwo it was created.
You can ask questions such as:
- How can someone take advantage of this?
- What could go wrong?
- Why is this a bad idea?
- What are all the risks associated with this idea?
- How can someone game the system with this idea?
- How would different stakeholders view this idea?
- If I am a certain type of stakeholder is there an inherent unfairness in the system?
- Are there feedback loops in place to keep the negative consequences in check?
For a SAS (Software as a service) you can ask questions such as:
- What if only 1 person bought it?
- What if a million people bought?
- What is the return on investment?
- What assumptions are being made about the value being delivered? About potential clients? How are the assumptions being measured and tracked?
- What are the customer’s economies of scale? A 1% increase for a business that makes a million a year is only $10,000. A 1% increase for a business that makes 100 million is 1 million!
- What are the alternatives to this service?
- What is the client’s ROI of the alternatives?
To be able to use opposite thinking effectively you need to cultivate the mindset of every idea has a chance of being the best idea.
A great book for this type of thinking is Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke