Content Summary

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"[...] one of the overarching goals of all analysis activities is to obtain a clear, unambiguous understanding of all aspects of a problem under consideration." - Business Analysis for Practitioners, Project Management Institute, page 157

What is Analysis? Let's Break it Down

If you spend much time on the Internet, you’ve probably come face-to-face with some bewildering text or image that just doesn't make sense to you. I can’t tell if it’s because I’m getting older or if the Internet is truly getting weirder, but I frequently have to put on my thinking cap to make sense of memes I see out in the wild. As an example, consider the image below, a meme I found at some point this year (source unknown).

When I first saw this image, I had a good laugh at the absurdity of this whole thing before flicking my eyes left and right, up and down trying inexpertly to figure out this low-stakes mystery. If you like, take a minute (I doubt it will take five) to try to figure out where the baby’s head is, and pay attention to your thinking process on how you get there.

What eventually helped me was to define some obvious boundaries and then work forwards to where the baby’s face is. We know the baby’s face must be to the right of the eye and nose we see on the left of the head. We also know it must be to the left of the black hair on the right. After visualizing 2 lines representing these facts, I realized that I could break this problem down into the the much simpler problem of searching the space between these lines for the baby’s face. Although I have gained no new information by simply imagining 2 lines overlaid on top of this photo, this intuitively felt like a far simpler problem to try to beat, and it became effortless to find the baby’s face almost immediately. Take a look below for a picture with a hint (red lines), then a picture with the solution (green line).

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I would like to reflect on some details of this experience. If, like me, you struggled to find the baby’s face at first before finding it through your own version of “detective work,” then you may have noticed that you experienced 2 distinct steps: a definite moment of confusion and then arrival at a rewarding moment of understanding. Now that we know the solution, we can compare back to the original image to determine how sharp our perception needed to be to spot the baby's head. You can see that the edge of this baby's face is an incredibly thin line relative to the overall picture, maybe <10% of the overall pixels. If you personally struggle with foggy vision or color resolution, you may still be struggling to spot the very thin contours.

For the rest of this post, we will use “analysis” to refer to the activity (conscious or unconscious) that led to the understanding. We will study the word “analysis” and its linguistic roots to better understand many concrete examples and meanings of this term, which will shed some light on the experience of analysis we had together.

If you wonder why I might be so interested in getting this explanation just right, try your hand at parsing this next meme. This one will probably take more thought, andI will come back to its core idea in later posts.

What does the word Analysis mean?

Root Words

To further explore what an analysis is, let’s study the etymology of the word. The word “analysis” is used by speakers to refer to many different situations, but there is a root meaning linking them all that is highly informative.

When I was younger, I had the intuitive sense that “analysis” meant something like “studying something seriously” or “thinking very hard about a topic.” I probably learned this from hearing examples in school such as a “literary analysis” or “scientific analysis,” but I don’t think I ever bothered to look up a proper definition. Over time, I got used to translating “analyze” as roughly synonymous to “break something down,” which I still believe is the simplest way to explain it to someone else. Now, I realize that careful study of just the word “analysis” is a worthy investment to anyone who wishes to perform analyses or who wishes to be more skilled at analytical thought. By learning the word’s meanings, we can build up some vivid mental images of analyses, which we help us intuitively predict many of the challenges that will come up in more advanced studies.

Analysis as Untying a Knot

In the etymology available on etymonline, we find that the original Greek root words for analysis meant “to release, unfasten.” This has the useful mental image of a problem being like a rope tangled in knots, and analyzing an object amounts to carefully finding a way to untangle this rope. This is such a powerful mental image. The following are many properties of analyses that we can infer with this mental image alone. (We can later validate that these inferred properties truly describe analyses once we explore the topic more.)

- Even though looking at a knot in front of us may be easy, tying or untying a knot can be an exceptionally frustrating experience

- Some knots are simple enough to tie or untie with “brute-force” tugging on all loose ends, while some knots require serious skill and dexterity. However, an inexpert practitioner may not be able to tell the difference between an “easy knot” and a “hard knot” with just a visual inspection

- Many people learn to tie a basic knot in school (probably for their shoes) but rarely revisit the topic again. As a result, they may find the topic thoroughly uninteresting and may be surprised to find that other people find much depth in it

- In practice, many knots can be untied in multiple different equivalent ways. Some of these alternate ways may be hard to notice on your first attempt. See if you’ve ever tried to untangle a cord this way (I certainly hadn’t, even though I was at least vaguely aware of knot theory)

Analysis as Cutting an Object

Going further back, the root words for analysis further subdivide into roots meaning “divide, cut apart”, giving the image of taking some large object and separating it into more manageable parts. Here, we can infer a few more useful properties that apply to analyses as much as cuts.

- The tool used to cut something must be sharpened occasionally, or it will dull with use

- If you want to cut an unusually shaped object safely and effectively, you should first lay it down and orient it in a way that lends itself easily to cutting

- Before you cut something, you should have some idea of how it’s going to be used. This will affect your decision of how to cut, including how many slices, the size, etc.

- Cutting occurs at the intersection of the object and tool

Interestingly, I learned from this page that the word “analyze” would be best translated at different times in history as either “break something down” or “break something up”.  These are 2 phrases with polar opposite literal meanings of “down” and “up,” which I find to be a funny linguistic moment. I can understand the latter phrase, although I rarely hear it outside of the relationship context of a “break-up” or when someone stops a physical fight by telling everyone to “break it up.” Yet, we’re in the curious situation where these 2 opposite literal meanings both fit comfortably inside a single word. This is a helpful reminder of how much language changes over time. Even if I prefer to use the word “breakdown” in almost any situation where “analysis” fits, it’s a good thing our language has unambiguous words like “analyze” to safely house these meanings.

Applied Uses of Analysis

Now that we’ve looked at the root words behind “analysis,” let’s look at examples of how this word is used in practice. This entry on wordnik.com does a great job of precisely defining the many subtly different meanings of the word “analysis.” Merely trying to keep these meanings distinct is another worthy exercise of analytical thought.

In the first 2 entries shown above, we see 2 nearly identical meanings we’ve been building towards. These refer to the idea of breaking some large object down into smaller parts so that we can study them individually or study the interactions between them. I also really like the included detail that analysis can be applied to a “material whole” as much as to an “intellectual [whole].” Later on this page, this same idea is expressed as resolving either “an object of the senses or of the intellect.” I would bet that most people first develop their understanding of analysis during childhood while playing with physical objects before later developing an enhanced understanding that involves abstract or intangible objects. That is, I would bet many young students first achieve success in something like analyzing the body into organs before succeeding at a more conceptual analysis like a speech analysis. I especially recall memorizing many human bones in the 4th grade for science class, so my own timing isn't too off.

In the 3rd and 5th entries, we see “analysis” used to refer not just to the mental process but also to the written or spoken result of that activity. In order words, "analysis" is the mental activity but it can also refer to the notes we jot down or the ideas we speak aloud. This seems obvious to me, although I don’t think I would have thought to separate these two uses into separate entries (in other words, I would have failed to fully analyze the meanings of this word without this page triggering me to recall more meanings.)

Finally, in the 6th, 8th, and 10th entries, we see a very interesting fact. Although the word “analysis” is purely abstract and capable of being applied to many different circumstances, people often use the word to refer to a very specific kind of analysis, with the specific kind filled in by the context. In other words, people use the word “analysis” to refer to following or applying an established analytical technique, protocol, or algorithm. Some examples include “psychoanalysis” (psychologists identifying behaviors, personalities, or other similar objects), “mathematical analysis” (mathematicians using properties like limits and continuity to break down the space of numbers and functions into groups that have similar applications or behaviors), “linguistic analysis” (linguists breaking down words into roots and meanings, like we’re doing here), and “systems analysis” (IT workers breaking a system down into users, interfaces, behaviors, and other similar objects).

Personally, I’ve struggled with this last set of meanings. In my work as a business analyst, I’ve had situations where my users or managers request an analysis but have been unsatisfied with the result I provided. Sometimes this has to do with the quality of my work, but I’ve had situations that are better explained as essentially a miscommunication of intent. Although what I provided passed as a “breakdown into simpler parts,” they were expecting a specific technique that’s established in industry as the “correct analysis” to use in that situation. With time and experience I’ve come to understand this better and move to prevent its occurrence, but I believe a lot of miscommunication between analysts and users comes down to this point: whether the user wants “an analysis” or “ An Analysis™ ”, such as a SWOT analysis, stakeholder analysis, risk analysis, or other similar examples. Nowadays, I try to sense when my customers have more particular preferences than they’re letting on.

The word “analysis” has come to absorb all of these meanings: the abstract activity, the presentation of the result, and specific forms of the activity. Keeping these straight is key to practice analysis successfully for practical and commercial purposes.

The Power of Developing Analysis

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In the award-winning HBO show West World, humans live in a timeline of our universe where humans can visit a Western amusement park populated by vividly life-like robots called “Hosts.” These Hosts’ actions and behaviors are governed by powerful artificial intelligences, and the show (and the 1973 film it’s based on) leads the audience to wonder whether the Hosts have minds or selves of their own. When the Park Director and creative leader Dr. Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins) wishes to inspect one of these Hosts in his private offices under the amusement park, he does so by uttering the word “Analysis!” to them. This is a special codeword that puts these Hosts into a passive response-based mode where they answer questions or requests from their human designers. It is in this state that Dr. Ford (and we, the audience) can investigate these Hosts thoroughly and learn powerfully precise facts about how they operate, such as where these Hosts go, who they talk to, and their own self-generated explanations for their actions. This Wikipedia page has more information on how the “Analysis Mode” is used in this show’s universe.

This is the most vivid and complex depiction of an analysis I’ve ever seen. We see many different forms of analysis all operating at the same time. It’s a technical analysis, since Dr. Ford is examining the effects of new code updates on his robot and AI (and they decide on a patch or a rollback at various points). It’s a linguistic analysis, since the answers the Hosts give are typically full of double-meanings and subtle clues as to how they think, so they have to be carefully examined to interpret correctly. It’s a psychoanalysis, since the Hosts each have their own personalities and behaviors that change over time with new experiences or simulated experiences. Finally, we see an analysis in the true sense of learning more about the whole through studying parts. Throughout the show we see Dr. Ford using what he learns about his Hosts to derive deep truths about AI psychology, human psychology, consciousness, and the meaning of life. In other words, he is switching between particular types of analysis in rapid fire throughout the show as he develops his plans, but he also has a longer arc of "analysis" where he probes deeper and deeper to make inquiries into some important conclusions.

This is the true power of developing analytical ability. First, we learn specific techniques for analysis through training and practice to solve very defined problems. Then, we gain the cognitive speed and flexibility to combine multiple forms of analysis to solve more complex problems. Finally, we internalize so many forms and mental models of analysis that we move past the need to consciously activate any one form. Instead, we transform ourselves into an analytical being, capable of moving freely through life by cutting through any problem we set our mind to. I believe that anyone who fundamentally becomes an analytical being will be able to break down the field or topic of their choosing. We may differ in our speciality, but our minds are no less sharp.

"The mature person becomes able to differentiate emotions into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones as in the different passages of music in a symphony." - attributed to Rollo May, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, Marshall Rosenberg, Location 877 of 4199 (start of Chapter 4)

In future entries in this blog series, I will continue to explore the qualities of analytical thought and how it gives us the capability to reason about novel, unsolved problems. Along the way, I will expand my own expertise and personal practice by learning new methods and perspectives. I hope you’ll come along on the journey with me. 👋