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Finance Talent - can you synthesise as well as analyse?
Posted by Helen Lumb - 9 th
September 2013
Understanding the big picture, taking a holistic view of the world rather than a systemised, purely logical approach can significantly contribute to the financial performance of a business.
How do you fare?
Having an ability to put together the pieces, to see relationships between seemingly unrelated data, detecting patterns in place of pure logical answers is becoming a critical skill. In a world that is evolving with ‘big data’ and the need to have skills to interpret what this data is really telling us, whilst maintaining an ability to make strategies as a result is fast becoming an essential skill for the finance professional who wants to succeed.
This is an art form and requires creative, innovative thinking as opposed to a logical, linear approach. Whilst this might be a natural skill for some, it can be developed in others. This can be performed individually (although works really well with a coach or facilitator) or as a team and it should be fun!!
- Throw the accountancy rule book away for a while and allow your creative juices to
flow
- Practise brainstorming around a topic or series of topics with the premise that any
idea is valid and no ideas are wrong
- Capture all of these thoughts and ideas and allow yourself to go off at tangents,
the wider more diverse thoughts the better, your creativity and innovation is being
set free!
- Once you start to dry up of ideas, consider questions like ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘who’,
‘why’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ around the topic
- Then start looking for relationships and patterns and if more thoughts and ideas
are stimulated as a result, capture these too
- Continue until you are exhausted or have literally run out of ideas
- Patterns and validations will slowly emerge -
I find it useful to sometimes take an enforced break at this stage and allow the subconscious to do some work. You can then start to structure and work out which ideas to work with and what to do with them - Finally, and this is really important – the ideas you have discarded, where might
those ideas be used instead? Maybe save this for another day (you will be exhausted
by now) or divide up the ideas between you and go and work on them in your own time.
Go through exactly this process again, but looking for the ‘problem’ that this idea
will solve
Now you have started to develop the skill to not only find patterns but truly understand the big picture and find seemingly unrelated relationships. Practise this on a regular basis, it doesn’t have to be in a work scenario and you will become accustomed to working this way on a regular basis and thought of as an ‘innovator’ or ‘creative problem solver’.
Helen Lumb is director and co-