is it needed, how does it manifest itself and how to develop it

Does an analyst need creativity? Employers seem to think not, or that creativity is not important. For example, on hh.ru there are only 10 vacancies “with creativity” throughout Russia at the time of writing. And only two of them (Ozon and Rostelecom) say directly that creativity is needed.

I have been working with data for almost 20 years, and for seven of those years I recruited and trained juniors, and for three years I was a mentor in the Workshop on the course. “Data Analyst”. I suggest we think together about whether we need creativity, how to check if it is there, whether it can be replaced with something, and how to pump it up.

What is creativity

I suggest starting with a data analyst 🙂 Let’s assume that this is a person who is able to somehow answer the question “who is the typical buyer of store N.” It doesn’t matter what tool, it doesn’t matter what questions this person is answering now. Important: he knows how to clarify the request, understand what features he needs, evaluate the quality of the data, choose the appropriate methods to answer the request, show the results of the work appropriately at the moment (plate, presentation, project in Jupiter, etc.). Deal?

Creativity will be more difficult. It has many definitions (Donald J. Treffinger counted more than 100). In the everyday sense there are even more of them.

To talk about the same thing, I suggest focusing on 4K model to evaluate product creativity. In my free interpretation “for data analytics” it will look like this:

mini-K. At this level, something new and original happens only for me and only for me has value. For example, I did my first teaching project;
small-K. Here, novelty and originality are assessed by others and, perhaps, have a comparative assessment. For example, I made a technical assignment that included divergent tasks, and passed a competition for a vacancy. Examples of such tasks from real technical specifications: propose metrics for analyzing the payment discipline of subscribers; offer personalization options for each buyer cluster; come up with additional signs; propose the principle by which the promotion budget will change; Based on the specifics of our product, select and display on the dashboard 4 main metrics for the company’s financial director; suggest measures to deal with missing values; and my favorite and common one – find insights;
pro-K. As a rule, it manifests itself at a high professional level and carries value at the level of the market and profession. These could be analysts / groups of analysts who are the authors of something new: frameworks, libraries, research, etc., recognized by other analysts;
big-K. Outstanding works that will go down or have already gone down in history.

How to test yourself

If you dissect creativity and try to evaluate the analyst, and not his product, it might look something like this (roughly, because there is no single opinion on this issue):

Do you have an interest in divergent tasks? In my opinion, this is where a potentially great analyst begins. I recruited juniors at a time when the profession of “data analyst” did not yet exist and the most you could write in a vacancy was “willingness to learn SQL” (not even “know”, because at that time only people from development). Only during the probationary period did you and the applicant begin to understand whether he had arrived there. Years later, having reflected on my mistakes in hiring, I can say that only people with an interest in divergent tasks got the job (passed the probationary period, moved along the professional ladder). Everything else, even if it was not there at the time of hiring, was added over time.
How to test yourself: the next block in your educational project sounds like “find something interesting, explore” – how do you feel?
Originality of thinking – the ability to come up with non-standard ideas.
How to test yourself: On our initial request (who is the typical buyer of store N?), the customer says that he already has all the standard features – social media, purchases – and needs to find new insights. Can you think of one?
Thinking productivity is the ability to come up with a large number of ideas.
How to test yourself: did you settle on one idea in point 2?
Ease of association is the ability to fluently retrieve and combine distant associations. Flexibility of thinking is the ability to use a variety of strategies to solve problems.
How to test yourself: If you have more than one idea in point 2, are they different or are you digging in one direction? Are they close to the original incentive I gave (social welfare, shopping)?
Tolerance of uncertainty is the ability to think about a problem, even if all the facts and possible consequences of the decision are not known.
How to test yourself: Were you confused by the lack of clear introductions?

Of course, there are various tests with their own advantages and disadvantages:

based on the process (complete the drawing, come up with associations, etc.), for example, the Torrens test;
creativity self-assessment tests;
assessment by others (colleagues, fellow students);
assessment of the creativity of a product (for example, your project, dashboard, etc.) by experts.

How to “replace” creativity

Okay, I checked myself and realized that I lack creativity. Boss, everything is gone. Of course, we will talk about specific situations, not about replacing creativity as such, but there is a way out:

Banal: look for a job without creativity. Our initial question may be answered by a customer who will clearly formulate the task. I have an assumption that when employers write the word “ad hoc” in a vacancy, they are hinting at the need for creativity. As we have already seen, no one writes directly about creativity. And based on the technical assignments for junior vacancies that I have, it can be estimated that only about 30% of employers provide divergent tasks (as a place for creativity).
Take a huge amount of knowledge: study business cases and scientific literature. If you are a person from retail, most likely during our task you remembered so many options from your experience that you didn’t even have to get creative.
Be curious. For example, a marketing analyst should look at other types of analytics (product, behavioral, product, etc.) and adapt ideas from there.
Communicate. While I was writing this article, I visited Data Fusion. One of the speakers suggested communicating with mathematicians to find ideas at the big-K level. For ideas at the small-K level, I will suggest communicating with users. The Workshop graduates and I once took 1st place at the geo-hackathon from Wildberries, without being geo-analysts. Perhaps someday I will write more about this, but one of the important milestones of our participation was precisely communication with PVZ users (our friends from different cities). This allowed us to both generate ideas and get high emotionally.
Use creative methodologies: CRAFT, Lateral thinking, JTBD, Design thinking, TRIZ.

My two reference books:

“Think of it. Do It. Break. Repeat. Handbook of design thinking techniques and tools.” Martin Tomic, Kara Wrigley and others.
“Find an idea: Introduction to TRIZ – the theory of solving inventive problems.” Heinrich Altshuller.

Download creativity 🙂

How to boost your creativity

If we look at creativity in its dissected form, perhaps the greatest difficulty is caused by interest in divergent tasks and tolerance of uncertainty. Forcing yourself to do something without forcing it is a real challenge.

Interest in divergent tasks can be increased through strategies to stimulate curiosity, motivation, and engagement:

Tailor tasks to suit your interests. In the real world: searching for an employer you are interested in.
Give yourself autonomy. Give yourself the opportunity to solve problems on your own, at least in everyday life (how to celebrate a holiday, what to give as a gift, where to go).
Praise yourself for every thing you come up with. Find a way to shout “I'm awesome” that works for you and is appropriate for the moment. My favorite option is to put it in the “what I will tell you at the interview” box.
Create a favorable environment for yourself. At first, bring your creative solutions to a supportive environment with constructive and positive feedback. Where you can find it: in your close circle (family, friends), at school (an interesting case: a student started running a Telegram channel for her friends and herself), brainstorming in any environment (here the method of generating ideas itself does not imply criticism).

Important: create such an environment yourself! As an introvert to introverts: don’t hold back, praise what you like, your impulse can work wonders.

Make solving divergent problems a habit. For example, come up with “5 impossible things to do before breakfast.”

About tolerance of uncertainty There's been a lot of talk lately, so I'm just a little bit closer to analytical:

Take it for granted that uncertainty exists in our profession. Try to love her. We analysts exist and stand well, partly because there is uncertainty.
Give yourself time to be creative and only then start critical thinking. For example, the first 20 minutes after I get acquainted with the task, I imagine that I have all the resources in the world, and I fantasize from the heart.
Develop adaptation skills. It’s great if something changes in your studies or work (there are different data, tasks, teams, customers). The skill will come with experience.
Try to understand your scale and learn to decompose the task into subtasks that are comfortable for you. These can be either subtasks “in a large cell”: loading, preprocessing, research, result for the customer, or as small as possible. Using preprocessing as an example, we set a separate subtask for each feature: data type, omissions, outliers, outliers up, diversity, derived features, etc.

Conclusion

So, does a data analyst need creativity? One gets the impression that you can’t do without small-K?

I would approach this question from the other side – what do you want? In the end, we are changing professions here to find ourselves, and not someone else. Do you want to invent something new or not? I think there will be both, and more often than not there will be a mix (I’m afraid it won’t be possible to rely solely on creativity).