By Hiran de Silva
There is a criticism frequently made of social media education.
It doesn’t teach you how to think.
I think that’s being generous.
I want to make a more controversial claim.
I think social media can actually prevent people from thinking.
Or, perhaps more accurately, it can condition perfectly intelligent people not to use the thinking faculties they already possess.
That is quite a claim.
So let me explain what I mean.
Watch. Copy. Repeat.
Much of Excel education on social media follows a familiar format.
You see a screen.
Somebody presses a button.
They enter a formula.
They demonstrate a feature.
Something impressive happens.
You watch it.
Then you try it yourself.
You press the same buttons, enter the same formula, and—success!—the same thing happens.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that.
I’ve learned things that way myself.
But notice what has not necessarily happened.
Nobody has presented you with a business problem and asked:
What are we actually trying to achieve?
Nobody has asked you to design a solution from first principles.
Nobody has asked you to consider the people, the process, the architecture, the timescale, the information flows or the management objectives.
Instead, you’ve learned an association.
Problem X → Feature Y.
And if that association is repeated often enough, something interesting happens.
It becomes automatic.
Pavlov’s Power Query
Take consolidation.
There must be thousands upon thousands of videos demonstrating consolidation with Excel and Power Query.
Watch enough of them and you learn an association:
Excel + Consolidation = Power Query.
Then another word gets added:
Scale.
Power Query can consolidate lots of files.
Therefore:
Excel + Consolidation + Scale = Power Query.
Eventually you don’t even need the problem.
You only need the word.
I saw a wonderful example recently.
I posted a challenge involving account reconciliation.
Not one account against another.
Hundreds of reconciliations.
Many-to-many matching.
Thousands of transactions.
And the results needed to be available to large numbers of domain experts, potentially anywhere in the world, so that they could investigate the exceptions.
Someone replied:
Power Query. Power Query can scale anything.
What does that actually mean?
I asked him to show me.
I haven’t had an answer.
But that’s almost beside the point.
What fascinated me was the response itself.
The word scale appeared.
And out came:
Power Query.
Like Pavlov’s dogs hearing the bell.
That isn’t necessarily thinking.
It’s a conditioned response.
Now Let’s Try Thinking Instead
Let’s take another favourite social-media Excel problem:
Budget consolidation.
Suppose we have hundreds of operating units.
Perhaps shops within cities, cities within countries, countries within regions, and regions within a global organisation.
Hundreds of people are involved in creating the budget.
Now forget Excel.
Forget Power Query.
Forget VBA.
Forget Python.
Forget LAMBDA.
Forget every technology you’ve ever learned.
Just think.
What is actually happening in the business?
A large corporate budgeting exercise isn’t hundreds of people filling in spreadsheets for four weeks, followed by somebody disappearing into a back room and consolidating them.
Budgeting is a collaborative management process.
People negotiate.
They challenge assumptions.
They change numbers.
Managers review their subsidiaries.
Country managers review their countries.
Regional managers review their regions.
Finance challenges operations.
Operations challenges finance.
And eventually all those numbers have to aggregate into a plan that the board is prepared to accept as the plan for the following year.
That process might last two, three or four weeks.
And throughout those weeks, management needs to know:
What do the numbers look like now?
Not in four weeks.
Now.
Imagine Running a Budget the Other Way
Suppose the India manager asks all his managers to prepare their budgets.
They spend a week doing so.
On Friday they have a meeting.
The India manager says:
“So, what does India look like?”
And somebody answers:
“We don’t know yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because we haven’t consolidated the spreadsheets.”
“When will you do that?”
“At the end of the budgeting process.”
That’s absurd.
The India manager needs to know the India total because he has to discuss it with the Asia regional manager.
The Asia regional manager needs to know the Asia total because somebody above him needs to understand the global picture.
And if the global result isn’t acceptable to the board, something has to change further down.
That’s what budgeting is.
It’s iterative.
It’s interactive.
It’s collaborative.
The information flows both upwards and downwards throughout the process.
So if someone tells me:
“I can consolidate those hundreds of budgeting spreadsheets with Power Query,”
my first question isn’t:
How quickly can Power Query consolidate them?
My question is:
Why are we consolidating hundreds of separate spreadsheets in the first place?
That’s where thinking changes the problem.
Start With the Business Objective
If hundreds of people are collaborating on one evolving set of numbers, an obvious architectural possibility presents itself.
Collect the data centrally.
When someone changes a number, update the central data.
Then when India wants its total, query India.
When Asia wants its total, query Asia.
When the board wants the group, query the group.
The aggregation isn’t an exercise somebody has to perform afterwards.
It is an inherent consequence of the architecture.
The information is already there.
The latest numbers can be available immediately.
That’s not an Excel trick.
It’s not a clever formula.
It isn’t even particularly sophisticated.
It’s what common sense suggests when you start with the business process rather than starting with the software feature.
And that brings me back to my criticism of social media.
The Danger Isn’t That People Don’t Know Enough
We hear frequent complaints that businesses aren’t training their employees in the latest Excel features.
Power Query.
Dynamic arrays.
LAMBDA.
Python.
And whatever comes next.
But perhaps we should ask a different question.
What happens if we continuously increase people’s technical capability without developing their ability to understand the business problem?
We may actually make matters worse.
Because now we have highly skilled people arriving at a business problem already carrying the solution.
They see consolidation.
They reach for Power Query.
They see a calculation.
They reach for LAMBDA.
They see large datasets.
They reach for Python.
The technology starts determining the problem instead of the problem determining the technology.
And social media can reinforce that behaviour because social media is extraordinarily good at demonstrating things that happen inside a workbook.
The workbook becomes the universe.
The spreadsheet becomes a document.
And collaboration becomes the movement of those documents between people.
Email them.
Put them on SharePoint.
Put them in a shared folder.
Collect them.
Combine them.
Consolidate them.
But why?
Imagine Playing Football Like That
Here’s a deliberately ridiculous analogy.
Imagine a football match.
Twenty-two players.
But instead of putting all twenty-two players on the same football pitch, we give every player his own football pitch.
The midfielder receives the ball.
He passes to the winger.
Unfortunately, the winger is playing on another pitch.
So somebody picks up the ball, drives across town, finds the winger’s pitch and puts the ball in approximately the right place.
The winger continues.
He gets tackled.
Unfortunately, the defender who tackled him is on yet another football pitch.
So someone transfers the ball again.
Perhaps we could automate this.
We could develop an incredibly sophisticated Football Transfer Query.
FTQ.
It could collect footballs from hundreds of football pitches and consolidate their positions.
We could make YouTube videos about it.
“CONSOLIDATE 22 FOOTBALL PITCHES IN 60 SECONDS!!!”
Very impressive.
There is, however, another solution.
Put all the players on the same pitch.
Suddenly, passing becomes rather easier.
So does tackling.
And scoring.
And, most importantly, playing football.
Because football isn’t twenty-two individual activities that occasionally need consolidating.
It’s a collaborative process.
Businesses Are Collaborative Too
The same applies to budgeting.
And account reconciliation.
And order processing.
And inventory.
And countless other enterprise processes.
People interact.
One person’s action affects another person’s information.
Management needs visibility.
People make decisions based on what other people have done.
That interaction needs to happen during the process—not three weeks later when somebody decides it’s time to consolidate the documents.
We already have the technologies and architectures to make that possible.
Excel can participate in those architectures perfectly happily.
But you won’t necessarily discover that by watching another thousand videos showing increasingly ingenious things happening inside one workbook.
The Missing Skill Is Thinking
This is why I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that the great Excel skills shortage is simply a shortage of knowledge about Excel features.
Perhaps there is another shortage.
Thinking.
More precisely:
The ability to look at a real-life business situation without immediately reaching for the feature we’ve been conditioned to associate with it.
Ask:
What are we trying to achieve?
Who is involved?
Who needs what information?
When do they need it?
Who changes the information?
Who needs to see the consequences?
How do these people interact?
What would the ideal process look like if we weren’t constrained by the techniques we’ve already learned?
Then choose the technology.
That’s almost the reverse of much social-media education.
Social media says:
Here’s Power Query. What can we do with it?
Thinking says:
Here’s the business problem. What do we need to make happen?
Only after answering that question should Power Query—or VBA, SQL, Python, formulas, LAMBDA, or anything else—even enter the conversation.
And that’s why I think saying social media doesn’t teach people to think may actually be too generous.
Repeated often enough, technique-led education can create conditioned responses so strong that intelligent people stop asking the most elementary questions that ordinary common sense would otherwise make them ask.
They haven’t lost their intelligence.
They’ve simply been trained to respond before they think.
And perhaps the most important Excel skill we need to rediscover isn’t another feature at all.
It’s the ability to encounter a business problem with an empty mind—and think.
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