Professional Business Analysts / The politics

Neutrality is a useful pose, not a real position

You have views. Pretending otherwise costs you influence.

Analysts are often trained to present options impartially and let the business decide. As a discipline against imposing a preferred solution, that is healthy. As a literal practice it is unhelpful, because the analyst is usually the only person who has spoken to every affected group and therefore holds information nobody else has.

Withholding a recommendation in that situation is not neutrality, it is declining to contribute the one thing you are uniquely positioned to contribute. It also tends to produce decisions made on the loudest input, which is the outcome impartiality was supposed to prevent.

The better practice is transparency rather than absence: here are the options, here is what I would choose, here is why, and here is what would change my mind. That preserves the decision with the people who own it while making the reasoning available to be argued with.

The genuine discipline is being willing to be publicly overruled and to implement the decision without sulking or sabotage. That is what makes the recommendation safe to offer.

There is a limit to transparency that should be observed, which is that a recommendation carries different weight depending on who is in the room. Offered to a peer group it is a contribution. Offered to a junior team by somebody the organisation treats as the expert, it can close the discussion before the people with the best information have spoken. The technique is to ask before recommending, and to keep the recommendation until the room has produced its own view.