Insights
Insights are foundational to building our relationships. Depth of any relationship is based on how well you know that person.
Insight is one of the most abused and overused terms in industry. We are asked to share insight, but we have never been taught how to uncover it.
The use of insight has been practiced in marketing since 1960s and began primarily with the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry.
An overview of insights
Insights are intuitive sentiments that connect with you or the people you care about at a deeper level. Insight is the bridge between the past and the future.
Analytics alone is based on examining past behavior data, whereas insights characterize the present state.
What is an insight?
Insight is a deeper truth that describes behavior.
Do insights require emotional component. Most of the time, they do.
Insights are the non-obvious obvious. They are simple yet have deep meaning.
There is one notable profession however, that is arguably the best at uncovering insights – comedians.
Greg Christie: “Apple is best when it’s fixing the things that people hate.”[1]
Why are insights so hard to find?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups, according to George Carlin.
In the absence of real knowledge, our imagination takes over. We impute points of view, perspectives, and motives to the people we study. We give embedded meaning to things without our awareness.
Our brain have created shortcuts without our awareness. Shortcuts can be helpful and dangerous at the same time. People can get trapped by the initial framing of the problem.
Some common barriers to finding insights:
- Mental fixation.
- Ignoring habits.
- Groupthink.
- A desire for perfection and predictability.
- Over-reliance on process and schedules.
- A lack of training.
Curiosity is defined as a state of active interest or genuinely wanting to know more about something.
A common misconception is that insight is directly related to intelligence. Actually, intelligence can be another barrier to insight discovery. Being intelligent – and knowing it – means you have a blind spot to accepting another point of view. The better you are at crunching numbers, the more spectacular you fail at analyzing patterns that contradict your views.
Insights are important and difficult to uncover. In insight discovery it is important to seek people who think differently from us. Debate is good. Conflicting ideas are critical.
So what’s your problem?
When we don’t accurately understand or define the true problem from the start, we are sent down the wrong path for a solution and gather the wrong information.
What problem you are trying to solve? Human-centered design is an approach to problem solving that focuses on customers’ underlying needs. Needs are unsatisfied actions, behaviors, or beliefs that arise from an unsolved problems, which often remains unnotices, undiagnosed, or unarticulated.
In 1960s Jacob Getzels wrote that problem with complex matters typically appear in three forms:
- An ill-defined mess or pain point. Where often the cause of pain is unclear.
- A goal we don’t know how to reach. When facing a pain point, you at least know where to start.
- Someone fell in love with a solution. Sometimes people fall in love with an idea with zero to minimal evidence that the solution solves a real-world problem. The solution is often disguised as a problem.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg wrote that the process should start with creating a short problem statement by writing the problem down as a complete sentence.
The authors suggested that we use six-step framework:
- Write a problem statement.
- Identify the ‘Givens’.
- Generate questions.
- Develop hypotheses.
- Prioritize.
- Reframe the Problem.
A good problem statement clarifies the current situation by specifically identifying the problem and its severity, location, and financial impact. A problem statement should be concise and include: a brief description of the problem and the metric used to describe the problem, where the problem is occurring by name and location, the time frame over which the problem has occurred, the size or magnitude of the problem. The problem statement must not include any indication or speculation about the cause of the problem or what actions will be taken to solve the problem.
What do I already know that could help me ensure this is real problem of magnitude that others are seeking to solve? Authors use the term ‘universal truths’ to represent the fundamental facts that support assumptions and decision. The usual test for a statement of fact is verifiability, that is, whether it can be proven.
IWIKs – I wish I knew. These are simply your unanswered questions. Next explore some why questions. Why is this happening? Start gathering your evidence. Start with data that you use to define the problem. Add any data you have that connects with your assumptions. Review the data with cross-functional team. Have a document available for the team to write questions. Create a live document. Share all the data. After gathering session, prioritize. Three categories: easy, critical and nice to know.
Developing hypotheses is a critical component of the insights process. The following framework is the most effective in developing hypotheses:
- Because: What evidence is supporting our hypothesis?
- Belief: “We believe …”
- Behavior: What you will do if your hypothesis is proven to be true?
Then prioritize. Both IWIKs and hypothesis.
Wedellsborg says that reframing is about seeing the big picture and having the ability to consider situations from multiple perspectives. He suggests five strategies: look outside the frame, rethink the goal, examine bright spots, look in the mirror, take their perspective.
The four pillars – tools to finding insights
Insights cannot just be taught, they must be practiced. Finding insights is not formulaic or linear. There is no standard process.
The 4 Pillars that author propose are: Pattern, Pain Points, Perspectives, and Perplexities.
Patterns refer to the ability to uncover consistent conclusions across multiple data sources.
Pain Points refers to a term often considered synonymous with insights: unmet needs.
Perspectives refers to more than just the emotional element of insights.
Perplexities refers to embracing disconnects. They help us avoid confirmation bias.
Patterns
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking, according to Steven Wright.
Re-analyzing data your already have is essential to proper problem definition and insight discovery. Reanalysis requires uninterrupted time that is not conductive to our “meeting-heavy” corporate cultures. Re-analysis is a discipline.
- Create a list of go-to sites for you.
- Find the original source.
- Set a limit.
- Create a data directory.
Patterns refer to the repeated ideas within and across your sources. Universal truths are the fundamental facts that support our assumptions and decisions. Patterns are not limited to quantitative data.
Pamela Maykut and Richard Morehouse propose this process of analyzing data: codify data into “units of meaning”, place each unit on index card, start with idea you had when obtaining your information, go through cards to see if any of it fits the category, create new categories, repeat the process, re-check if information fits the category, check if there is a better category, look for relationships between groupings.
Key themes in insight discovery are debate and asking new questions rather than perfection and expertise.
Disciplined googling:
- Step 1: Set a limit of how long you will allow yourself to search.
- Step 2: Once you hit that limit, summarize.
- Step 3: Share what you found with someone else.
- Step 4: Re-investigate based on a new question from the debate and repeat the process.
- Step 5: Evaluate the process.
Pain points
There’s got to be a better way.
What makes pain points difficult is most people can’t tell you what they need.
Two thinking frameworks to help structure your pain point discovery. These are customer journey mapping and jobs-to-be-done.
Customer journey mapping (CJM) is a diagnostic tool that has been used by many businesses as a strategic exercise to help identify how a customer views an organization, product, or service.
- What they are doing at each stage of the journey: needs, actions, and decisions.
- Why they are doing or not doing things: expectations.
- How they feel: emotions.
In this journeys they are MoTs – moments of truths and MoMs – moments of meaning. These are critical moments in the journey. Emotional revelations or physical events. They may be characterized by tension, frustration, realities or unmeet needs. This is where potential insights live and where hypothesis generation begins.
Company may influence such MoTs, but you should prioritize them, based on:
- The magnitude of the related customer’s tension/needs and whether you have defined a problem that is worth solving for them.
- Your ability to resolve it.
- The potential to generate the revenue needed for viable business operations.
People are more likely to remember a picture than a statement. The MoTs are supported with quotes.
For collecting pain points you need to have skills like observation techniques. Ethnography research is important and difficult. Stay true to their language. Look for inefficiencies. Make note of the outliers. Notes should be words and visuals. Don’t jump to a solution but explore it. Observation skills take time to build. They also require a suspension of judgment.
Perspectives
Generally, judgment happens when someone’s behavior or beliefs are not consistent with either your own or the way you think or want that person to behave.
Human-centricity means thinking of others as human first.
How to get perspectives:
- Seeing how others experience the world. Our goal is empathy not sympathy.
- Feelings vs. emotions. Feelings are a conscious experience. Emotions are not conscious but instead manifest in the unconscious mind.
We are not all the same. This six words speak volume.
I never learned anything while I was talking. Larry King.
Key principles to become a better listener:
- Minimize distractions.
- Repeat and summarize.
- Monitor non-verbals.
- Listen to learn.
- Monitor your talk:listen ratio.
- Don’t interrupt.
Perplexities
Marketers often have blinders on when it comes to their products. The product will sell itself, they say. Only to later lament over their customers who just didn’t understand the data.
Perplexities are simple enough to define: the state of having conflict data points or perspectives.
Investigating and validating a data point should include three core components: who reported the data, by how many, and with what instruction?
Framing, or the framing effect, simply refers to our preference for positive wording over negative wording and has been shown to have a significant impact on how we answer questions. Framing is important in perplexities because the way we ask a question and the way we frame it can result in different answers.
Tensions are when two important groups or stakeholders view something differently, and it impedes progress or creates an impasse.
Ask questions the other person will enjoy answering.
Many of us are uncomfortable with silence. We feel the need to fill the space with words. Ask questions in five words or fewer. Statements, or backstory to questions offer little value and run the risk of bias or directing people toward a certain answer. This is also called a leading questions.
Warren Berger has the three-question trinity: Why? What if? And how?
Hindsight is analyzing our past. Insight is our present state. Foresight is what we envision the future state to be based on our insight.
Connecting the dots – building insight capability and competency
We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like. Dave Ramsey[2]
Synthesis – strengthening your insight foundation
One pillar alone can start the germination of an insight, but the strength is in the combined understanding of multiple pillars.
Summarizing is a skill we are encouraged to perfect throughout our education. Synthesis is the next step and what we call the work of arriving at an insight. With synthesis, you are making connections between those key points in your summary to create new findings and an insight or further refining of an insight.
A theme is simply a connection that exists between data sources or a conclusion from a data source. Themes can become an insight on their own, help teams answer business problems, and/or aid in solution creation.
A common framework used in insight discovery is the “data-to-insight pyramid”. There are many versions of, but essentially, data is the base, then there is a layer above that is sometimes called knowledge, interpretation, findings, conclusions and at the top is insight or wisdom.
You go from data to theme with four pillars and from theme to insight with hypothesis.
BE principles or behavioral economic principles have been compiled by economists to help make sense of and predict irrational behavior. Some of them are: default (people tend to choose the easiest option), loss aversion, social proof.
Some key steps before you take your hypothesis into implementation:
- Validate outstanding assumptions and concerns. What would you need to see to prove this is true or not?
- Incorporate insights into brand development. Make sure you got positioning right.
- Pull through your insights in your communication.
- Continue to evolve the insight.
Becoming an insight-based organization
The essential ingredients for building and sustaining any organizational capability are:
- Process
- Tools
- People
- Culture
One source of truth is important.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Insight discovery is a team sport, but it needs a facilitator. New question can be more valuable than new insights.
[1] In the book on page 14
[2] In the book on page 141
