Lately I’ve been asked a lot: “What do you do?”

It’s a tough question to answer. My job title, my current project, my current employer, my website all display parts of me and my interest, unaggregated over time, experiences and contexts.

So, what do I do?

I solve user and business problems by connecting ideas and people across disparate industries and experiences.

How do I do this? To borrow a phrase, I import and export ideas.

What I am is an importer and exporter of ideas. I import ideas from one marketplace to another. And I can see general trends that the average manager doesn’t see, because I see what’s going on in one industry and another industry and another industry, and I pull them together.

But this doesn’t mean I’m a generalist.

I’m a specialist at connecting ideas from different industries.

It’s about using data and inspiring ideas…

Data is not absolute – it’s power and effectiveness comes from how it is interpreted, applied. If you are setting out to inform then one metric for success is ensuring the interpretation is close to it’s intended meaning. If it’s more important to inspire then the opposite might be true – other peoples’ reinterpretation and discovery of tangential links is an important part of that creative process.

… and mixing the quantitative and qualitative to form complete insights…

… A key strength of quantitative (numbers) data best is illustrating how people behave whereas qualitative (not numbers) data is better at illustrating why people behave in a certain fashion.

… and to ask the right questions, helping remove the blinders of our desires and fears.

In the mass of numbers, we are instantly alert to whatever points in the direction we want, or indicates what we already fear.

There’s the problem. The dangers we see are the ones we already understand and half expect. What we don’t see are the unexpected problems and the areas of our own ignorance.

Why is this important?

“You cannot have innovation,” she adds, “unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”

And that is what importers and exporters do: we help take people through the unknown, to inspire or refine their curiosity, to open their sharp, seasoned minds, refocus their lenses, to bring back the wonder.

Can this be replicated by the computer? Can we use Google and the power of search to draw answers from disparate sources of information?

It’s more important to know the right question than to know the right answer.

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EDITED: Rather than being more important, it’s probably equally important to know the right question. The right question is necessary to focus on the most important things, but the right answer is what is needed to execute and succeed.