I love data.

Raw, naked, unorganized and unfettered data.  Give me a pile of data and ask me to find something meaningful in it and I’ll be over the moon.  Stand aside League of Legends, World of Warcraft, and Minecraft, even you are no match for a data set in the thousands.

Perhaps it’s fitting then that I’ve chosen a career path finally. A career. It’s amazing that word even exists in this modern age where job turnover is high (3.4%), even in fields where it’s been traditionally low. I truly believe though, that what I’m doing now, I could do for the rest of my life.  Collecting and analyzing data is a staple of engineering, something I’ve proven to be competent in, but it’s also a hell of a lot of fun.

Maybe I’m weird. I understand that a lot of people really don’t like math and anything associated with it. Learning how to get across to those opponents is a challenge, but not as much as it used to be.  Today, anyone can look at countless charts and visualizations on commonly used websites like www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful and better yet, anyone can submit content to the same. Enabling people to experiment and be quickly judged based solely on their presentation of data is an amazing feedback tool and I love it.

I digress.

I admire the statistician Nate Silver. He’s built a brand around being able to prove anything using a little research and a lot of data.  For example: to become elected as the President of the United States, you need to secure a majority of the 538 electoral college votes. The only reason I know this is because fivethirtyeight.com is Nate Silver’s website. One of his most recent claims to fame was accurately predicting the outcome of the 2008 Presidential Election.

I’m not Nate Silver, I obviously lack a PhD in statistics, have no large fan following, no job with ESPN, The New York Times, or any government agencies (okay, maybe a couple government agencies). But when I read his lengthy and boy do I mean lengthy blog posts about whatever he’s chosen to look at that day, I just can’t help but admire the work he’s doing.  Is it ground-breaking? Sometimes, but not frequently. Do people value his opinion? Definitely, he’s appeared on many network and cable news broadcasts, sometimes even being described as a wizard.

My current role, my current function in the corporate machine that I give me 45-50 hours a week to (I should track this!) is to take a team of employees and guide them through an analytical process to determine a better method of whatever they want. Lean Six Sigma (boo, hiss). It’s a terrible name in itself because of the fact that it obfuscates the true meaning of the “process”. Lean is a philosophy. Six Sigma is a mathematical approach. So together, logically, it would be a philosophy of mathematical approaches.

“What? How does a philosophy of mathematical approaches help me put labels on a box of stuff?”

Slowly. Unfortunately, changing a process is never easy, unless it is easy, such as moving the box of labels storage closer to your station so instead of walking 6 miles a day, you only walk 3 miles. The norm is a slower, iterative process.  This part of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is not something I enjoy. But, one of the driving factors behind that slowness is the drive of the individuals on the team.  Drive too fast, you miss something or crash and burn. That’s good though, the crashing and burning, but I suppose only in a metaphorical sense. We don’t hesitate to kill a project that can’t succeed, it’s better to work on stuff that can work, than waste time on something that might work.

Drive too slow and you lose focus, you lose the support of the people around you, and you lose your ability to change.  This happens a lot in politics, hospitals, engineering firms where everything has to be tested and approved. And for good reason! Changing the flow of a highway or how a medical procedure is performed should not be done overnight without extremely good reasoning! But if you drive slow, you can avoid those pot holes, avoid those rear end collisions with the people around you, and have time to take in the scenery as it blows by your window.

Change isn’t something that happens overnight, but when change happens, it’s an amazing thing.

That’s just my 2 cents.