Frank Buytendijk Blog

Analysis is at the core of business intelligence. Analysis means taking one big thing (like a problem), and take it apart in many small pieces, to understand that whole (and perhaps solve the problem).

Many people call themselves ‘analyst’ (I was one for many years at Gartner), and in job postings people with analytical skills are in high demand. The newest term in BI also is ‘analytics’, which is to a large extent the synonym for business intelligence. Often the term analytics is used, when talking about ‘applied BI’ to a certain type of algorithm or a certain functional domain, such as marketing or logistics.

But analysis is only one style of dealing with problems, albeit the most dominant style in the western world. The opposite of analysis is synthesis. Take two or more pieces and trying to combine or group them. This might lead to entirely new insights, where problems of the ‘old world’ (before the synthesis) do not even occur anymore.

The 18th century German philosopher Hegel introduced this idea in a very easy to understand way. The current situation of anything is called the ‘thesis’. The current situation has its advantages and its disadvantages. But it will always lead to a reaction, towards the opposite, the ‘antithesis’. It solves the disadvantages of the old situation, but also introduces new disadvantages (probably the opposite of the previous advantages, if you still follow me). It takes time to combine best of both world, which is called the synthesis. The thesis and antithesis fused into a higher level. (By the way, the synthesis then represents the new thesis, that leads to an antitheses, and so on). More recently, psychologist Howard Gardner even reserves a central place for synthesis in his book “Five Minds for the Future”.

An example: organizations often centralize, because they were too decentralized. Then they decentralize, because they were too centralized. If you keep on doing this, you’ll never really solve the problem. It is when you realize that ‘standardization’ is the synthesis of both centralization and decentralization, you have progressed. When processes, systems, ways of working etc are standardized, it doesn’t matter anymore if you are centralized or decentralized.

Where analysis focuses on working within the boundaries of a certain domain (taking one big thing into smaller pieces), synthesis connects various domains. Why is everyone so obsessed about analysis?

And another question. why are there no people calling themselves ‘synthesist’?