The Question That Separates Analysts From Advisors
When I was a very junior analyst a stakeholder came to me to analyze a strategic change they’d made at a few of our hotels. I was excited - it was one of the first pieces of real analysis I was going to do all by myself - and so I jumped in with both feet… And found the data was ambiguous at best. Uh oh.
The stakeholder was fairly data savvy, so I shared it back to him and asked a few questions about what to do next. What followed was a two-week game of whack-a-mole. Could we exclude these years? Could we look at just the top-performing properties? What if we changed the baseline? Could we trim the outliers more aggressively?
Every request was reasonable in isolation. Taken together, they were a series of nudges to make the data say what they’d already decided.
I should have stopped it earlier. I didn’t, because I was new and didn’t want to push back. Eventually, of course, the data supported their point of view. Torture data hard enough and it will tell you anything.
That experience taught me, in a more practical form than I’d ever read it, what the shift from analyst, who takes orders and answers questions, to advisor, who is a partner and makes recommendations, actually requires. One of the single best questions to uncover whether someone is genuinely asking for help or has already made up their mind is asking them:
What would change your mind on this?
If the answer is “nothing,” I’m not being asked to do analysis. I’m being asked to provide cover.
The hidden contract
Most analyst-stakeholder relationships pretend the request is for truth. The real contract is often something else: protect me from blame, justify a decision I’ve already made, help me look defensible when this gets questioned, or buy me time while I figure out what I actually want to do.
None of those are bad things to need. Stakeholders are human, they’re under pressure, and sometimes they really do need a defensible artifact more than they need a new insight. The problem is when nobody names what the work is for. The analyst thinks they’re doing science. The stakeholder thinks they’re getting backup. Both walk away frustrated when the output doesn’t match the unstated need.
“What would change your mind?” forces that unstated need into the open. There’s no pushback in it and no skepticism. You’re asking the stakeholder to imagine a world where the evidence pointed the other way. Their answer tells you.
Why analysts get stuck here
Analysts are trained to answer the question they’re asked. Accurately, on time, with good documentation. Those are good instincts. They’re the same instincts that make us terrible at recognizing when the question itself is the problem.
Advisors do something harder. They check whether the question is the real one before committing the team’s time to it. That’s uncomfortable because it slows things down, and because it occasionally means telling someone senior that you don’t want to do the work they asked for until you understand it better. I find this hard, and most of the analysts I’ve coached find it hard too.
The three questions to ask first
Before you open the data, before you scope the project, before you commit your team to anything, ask three things:
- What decision are you trying to make?
- What would need to be true for you to choose the opposite?
- What are you worried happens if this goes wrong?
The first one is standard. If you’ve read any of my writing on intake processes, you should already be asking it.
The second creates a lot of value. If the stakeholder can describe a condition that would flip their recommendation, you have a real analysis to do. You know what to test, where the threshold is, and how to size the risk.
The third question points to the consequences. The honest answer is rarely about the data. It’s usually about something else: a promise made to leadership, a budget already half-committed, a competing team’s project that has to lose for theirs to win, or a personal reputation tied to the outcome. That fear shapes everything about how they’ll respond to your work, and you can’t help them if you don’t know what it is.
When the honest answer is “nothing”
Sometimes you’ll ask, and the answer will be a polite version of “nothing would change my mind, I just need this on a slide.”
Don’t pretend that’s a research project. Call it what it is: a communication artifact, a risk-reduction exercise, a piece of internal positioning. Then decide whether it’s worth your team’s time, and what level of effort it deserves. A two-hour deck pull is fine. A three-week deep dive with statistical testing is not.
The worst outcome is doing the deep dive anyway, finding inconvenient evidence, and getting pulled into the whack-a-mole game I described above. You spend weeks defending findings nobody wanted, the stakeholder gets frustrated, and eventually you end up putting something together that looks like what they wanted.
When the honest answer is real
A commercial leader once came to me wanting a deep dive on ADR strategy for a set of properties. The framing was “I need to understand the pricing dynamics.” When I asked what would change her mind, she gave a good answer about elasticity thresholds. When I asked the third question, the real picture came out: she’d committed to a number in front of ownership and was worried she wouldn’t hit it without the pricing move she was already planning.
That changed the work entirely. We didn’t need a sprawling pricing study. We needed a tight piece showing the gap between her committed number and the realistic forecast, the contribution she could expect from the pricing move, and what else would have to be true to close the rest of the gap. Two analysts, one week, one decision-shaped artifact. She used it in the conversation with ownership the following Monday.
That’s the form analysis takes when it’s actually advising a decision. You’re not producing “the analysis on X.” You’re producing a clear test: here’s the threshold, here’s what the evidence shows relative to it, here’s the recommendation, here’s what would move it the other way. It’s also dramatically faster to produce than the open-ended version, because you know what’s in scope and what isn’t.
The contrarian take
Most leadership advice says analysts should be “more consultative.” That’s too soft.
The stronger version is that a meaningful number of stakeholder requests should be refused, reframed, or narrowed before anyone touches the data. Not because the stakeholders are wrong to ask, but because the request as posed isn’t analysis. It’s something else dressed up as analysis, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time and erodes the team’s credibility when the output predictably fails to match what was needed.
The harder version of the ADR example above is the one where I push back, the leader insists on the broad pricing study anyway, and I do it knowing it won’t change anything. That’s the move to refuse. Declining to participate in fake uncertainty is one of the highest-leverage things a data leader can do. It’s also one of the hardest, because it requires being willing to slow a stakeholder down at the moment they most want speed.
A little assignment
Pick one analyst on your team and a request they’re currently working on. Sit with them and ask the three questions of the stakeholder together, or coach the analyst to ask them on their own and report back:
- What decision is this for?
- What would change your mind?
- What are you worried about if it goes wrong?
Pay attention to the third answer. If it surprises you, the scope of the work probably needs to change. If it doesn’t come up at all, ask again in a different way, because it’s almost always there.
The shift from analyst to advisor doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen by working harder on the wrong question. It happens one request at a time, by asking what the work is actually for before the work begins.
Some of what I write about here I’ve turned into playbooks. They’re more in-depth, more structured, and more actionable. You can find them at the Penguin Analytics store.