Great BA Fallacies #4 - Non-Sequiturs: it does not follow

Here's a crazy idea: drive with a gorilla in the back of your car because it is safer - how do I know? Have you EVER heard of a car accident where there was a gorilla in the back of one of the cars?

So why is this crazy? Because no causality has been established between the two premises to justify the conclusion - namely: the number of car accidents and the number of car accidents with gorillas in the back on one car to justify the recommendation to drive with a gorilla in the back of the car. Of course no-one would ever justify anything on two or more unrelated premises would they?

Summary of real news item: being rich makes you intelligent - a study has shown a positive correlation between academic achievement and a family's income.

Advertising of course is littered with these Non-sequiturs to try and dupe the unwary.

What relevance has this to Business Analysis? Heard the one about the project that was initiated because of low staff achievement levels and had an objective to increase sales per employee hour worked and a functional requirement to record employee time and attendance? Here is the non-sequitur: "our staff are not achieving what we want and what we want is increased sales per employee hour worked and therefore we will monitor staff time and attendance".

As a BA I am always on the lookout for non-sequiturs and until I have a demonstrated causal link verified by the subject matter experts between the premises and conclusion (and there may be one!) then I have to be wondering just why anyone would think that knowing how much staff are in attendance at work will increase sales per employee hour worked...I'm not saying it won't, I'm just saying that until the causal link is defined and agreed we are hoping and guessing instead of predicting...

Non-sequiturs hide. They lurk in such things as Great BA Fallacy #2 Proof By Verbosity and statistics and when said with authority by A Named Authority they often go unchallenged. The best way to identify them is to make them stand out by stating as plainly and simply as possible the premises and the conclusions - and they best way to do that is to do Analysis: break down a project's changes requirements in to their component parts so the logical inter-relationships can be examined. The component parts are Drivers, Objectives, Scope, Functional Requirements, Process and Data models and specifications.

If you do that and avoid all the other Great BA Fallacies then you will be richer.

Whoops - that may be a non-sequitur...