Before the tools, observe: three answers about data

Hanna Back Pyo asked me these 3 things. I'm answering them from the angle of humanizing data, which is what I'm passionate about, so I'm sharing them for anyone who finds them useful:

Share one piece of advice for someone just starting out in your field:

Don't start with the tools. Start by observing. People don't behave the way they do in reports or according to "common sense," they behave the way they are: with contradictions, emotions, habits and gaps. If you don't understand that, everything else is garbage dressed up as strategy. It's not about "seeing data," it's about seeing who's behind the generation of that data.

What do you always do because it gets good results?

Really listening and seeing the environment. And not just the customer, but the context. I watch customers a lot, interacting at the point of sale, and I try to see what nobody wants to see. Then translate that into clear decisions. Data on its own is useless. A client swearing to me that their staff spends 5 minutes with each customer, and me empirically proving that's nowhere close to reality, could save companies a lot of energy and money...

What did you stop doing because it makes no sense?

I stopped forcing standard solutions. Stopped assuming that what worked on one project will work on the next. I also stopped romanticizing data for data's sake. These days I'd rather focus on less data that makes more sense than on tons of information with no direction. Complexity isn't the same as depth. And real impact never comes from copy-paste.