One worth sharing
The funniest person on the internet: Corporate Natalie
I first came across Natalie on Instagram and was delighted to find she also has a LinkedIn account (because let’s be honest, LinkedIn has taken over my life).
If you love relatable work humor, get ready to have your mood instantly lifted. Start with these three posts:
A giggle out loud impersonation of your boss visiting you in your dreams.
A humorous but important pep talk about delusional confidence.
Your go to answer the next time you’re asked a question but aren’t paying attention…
And if you know of other funny creators, PLEASE send them my way. I have way too much fun sending them to my coworkers.
QUICK TIP
When it comes to delivering recommendations and informing decisions, there is one tool I think every analyst and data professional should know because it’s just so dang good.
It’s called force field analysis, and it helps answer one of the hardest questions analysts face:
“Why would a leader say yes to this recommendation… and why might they say no?”
Most recommendations fall flat not because they’re wrong, but because they don’t account for the invisible forces that make leaders hesitate.
What is Force Field Analysis?
Every recommendation has two sets of forces around it:
Driving forces → the reasons to say yes
Restraining forces → the reasons to say no
If you don’t consider both, you’ll experience more pushback than you expected. If you DO consider and account for both, you create clarity, confidence, and forward momentum.
Driving vs. Restraining Forces
Here’s what recommendations often sound like: “Based on the data, we should improve the onboarding process.”
That’s fine… except leaders are immediately thinking:
How hard is this going to be?
Do we have the bandwidth?
Will it disrupt other priorities?
What does this cost?
What happens if we wait?
Those are restraining forces. And when they go unaddressed, good ideas are quickly overlooked or tabled for later (aka never).
Now compare a recommendation framed through force field analysis: “Improving the onboarding process helps us get new hires productive two weeks faster (driving force) while requiring only a small process update that our HRBP team has capacity for (addressing restraining force).”
Driving forces often look like:
Saves time
Reduces cost
Prevents a known problem
Supports an existing priority
Improves quality or accuracy
Reduces manual effort or rework
Helps a team hit a target or relieve pressure
Improves customer or employee experience
Restraining forces often look like:
Political friction (“This isn’t our team’s call”)
Cross-team dependencies
Leadership skepticism
Implementation effort
Competing priorities
Limited bandwidth
Timing constraints
Change fatigue
Unclear ROI
How to Use Force Field Analysis
Here’s a simple 5-10 minute exercise I teach in workshops:
List your recommendation in one clear sentence.
Write down 3–5 driving forces — what makes this worth doing?
Write down 3–5 restraining forces — what would make a leader hesitate?
For each restraining force, write one line to reduce it.
Reframe your recommendation using both sides.
Example
Recommendation: Invest in a manager onboarding toolkit.
Driving forces:
Reduces early attrition
Improves ramp-up time
Supports a top executive priority
Low cost, high impact
Restraining forces (and how to neutralize them):
Bandwidth: We can leverage materials we already have.
Competing priorities: This directly ladders into the Q2 retention goal.
Unclear ROI: Pilot results with Team X showed a 10% improvement.
Cross-team dependencies: Only two teams are needed for launch.
Final framing: Launching a manager onboarding toolkit supports our Q2 retention goals, improves ramp-up time, and builds on materials we already have, making it low lift, low cost, and immediately impactful.
Much better, wouldn’t you say?
Give force field analysis a try this week, then let me know how it goes!
Cheers,
Morgan
P.S. If this was helpful, would you send it to one person who’d get value from it too? It means a lot and helps me continue growing and supporting the analyst community.
P.P.S. Don’t forget to start practicing your end of year one-liners to punt work until the new year!