The World Cup Football 2010 has started. England fans and the British media are extremely unhappy with performance of their team. Two draws into the tournament and fans are booing the players off the pitch, newspapers are suggesting the coach must go, WaGs (Wives and Girlfriends) are being flown out to ‘boost the boy’s morale’. As the final group game approaches next week, a Sky News presenter offered a ray of hope, “England tend to perform better with their backs against the wall”. I noted the same media driven feeding frenzy happening at the recent congressional hearing for BP CEO Tony Hayward.
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The debate over insight is becoming heated, particularly at Research-Live, although I think most of the differences are semantic. Nick Johnson first proclaimed that “insight is dead”, and I agree that the word is overused. However, his (very accurate) description of research outcomes with two hour and 80 page powerpoint decks, is about data and not insight, and his plea to look beyond the immediate data is absolutely on the mark. In his response to this, Anthony Tasgal defends “insight” as the currency of consumer understanding, and argues that insight is a process and not an object, and most importantly that insight always includes a creative element, and is always actionable (and actioned). He is right to argue that insight is about replacing the 80 page deck with an action oriented debrief process.
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An obscure laboratory experiment in 1958, set the scene for a new awakening in consciousness for mankind. Harry Harlow showed that infant monkeys preferred to nestle up to a soft cloth surrogate mother model, rather than a wire mesh lactating mode. Certainly man cannot live by milk alone, he concluded.
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Dan Ariely’s work in behavioural economics is famous (and profound) in terms of breaking down the minutiae of human behaviour, through elegant experiments which measure what people really do in specific contexts, as opposed to what we all believe we do (which is often very different). Many of his findings are stark and counter-intuitive: for instance, that bigger bonuses actually reduce performance rather than improve it!
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One of the key skills in developing insights and solving all kinds of problems is to ask the right questions. In Zensights, we identified six key themes for simplifying complex data, the first four of which revolve around asking the right questions: what is the real problem?, what is the context?, what frameworks can I use to understand the problem?, and how can I structure the information to simplify the problem?. At heart, problem solving and insight discovery are creative processes, where divergent thinking will give the best chance to find elegant and profound new truths. Although it may seem contradictory, divergent thinking can be structured through planning different ways to look at problems, or by asking a wider range of questions.
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