How Insights Happen
For the donation insight, you might decide to stop here or scratch further, like a small puppy dog digging in stiff dirt. “If this is true, why is it true? What makes it happen? What’s the opposite? When does the opposite happen?” And you’ll see two dynamics at play:
1. The couple wants to do something good. They aren’t arguing about whether to donate. They’re arguing about how much to donate.
2. This is a battle. Someone must win. One partner might make an excessive donation to prove their power or morality or to spite the other partner. What can the other partner say anyway? “I wanted to do good, but not that good.”
Our donation insight might even lead to a more powerful reframing of the problem we need to solve: “Our donors aren’t arguing enough about how much to donate.” And then we’d dig for another insight that pries open this new problem statement.
How do we get them arguing more? What does winning a donation battle look and feel like for the winner and the loser? How do they later talk to each other about their behavior? And so on.
This editorial freedom–that you get to decide when you’re done, with which words you’re done, and where the words fit in your frameworks–is beautiful yet menacing. Even with stricter definitions of the word “insight”, writing insights isn’t the easiest of work.
There is always subjectivity in their writing–one person’s insight might not be someone else’s insight. Insights never sit alone like many strategists do–they need to work in a tight system of other ideas. They’re social objects, which is to say they exist within a group of people and the initial group of people they must survive is the group of people working on the project.
How Insights Happen
Problems, insights, and ideas can morph into each other and exchange places in your frameworks in front of your eyes. And, regardless of the inputs used to fetch them and any one person’s dogmatic way of fetching them, they can happen in any way that makes them happen.
You might watch an insight happen in real time. In the medical field, the mechanism of the “doorknob conversation” provides insight into how people approach sensitive health concerns. First, a person accrues several symptoms that make a visit to a doctor a worthy and substantial project. The person explains the symptoms to the doctor and they make small talk, appearing to wrap up. Then the person stands, walks to the door, and asks for a drug or referral for an issue that is taboo or awkward. For instance, “Can you prescribe me Viagra?” The person feels they have played along with etiquette—sat in the chair and discussed medical issues, built trust and empathy. That was the baiting. Then comes the switch into a more difficult topic the person wants to avoid discussing officially, but is the real reason for their visit. This conversation could also happen as the doctor gets up to leave and places a hand on the doorknob.
It makes you wonder whether any doctor’s offices have redesigned themselves to feature doorknobs more prominently and invited patients
to start their fifteen minutes of healthcare holding onto one.
How Insights Happen
Philosophers contemplate insights into existence. The modern world has a strange relationship with philosophy. It can handle it as aspirational quotes on a vision board or words from a rapper or celebrity, but it is suspicious of people who know formal philosophy and the history of thinking. “Oh, you think you’re better than me?
You aren’t. Besides, you think too much.” If Alan Watts, the late Zen author whose work has helped millions of people, came back to life as a strategist and said, “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth,”²² not only would one colleague respond, “But is that a data-driven insight? Can you prove that?,”
other colleagues wouldn’t pay it attention at all. They’d feel the insight is too foreign and makes for more thinking and, worse, self- reflection, though if they’d open their minds maybe they’d get an idea for a tasty toothpaste campaign.
Artists deploy insights. Not all artists. But many. A painting of a family that is a pleasant reporting of that family at one point in time is not hurrying an insight into the world. A painting of the United States’ first family in a White House flying to a warzone flooded by oil yearns to.
Statistics also nudge insights into the world. Although many strategists tire of colleagues holding up statistics and calling them insights, some sentences that use statistics are indeed stepsiblings of insights. For instance, perhaps we’ve learned that 66 percent of couples who argue about how much to donate will donate more. Or 24.5 percent of men only talk about erectile dysfunction while grabbing a doorknob in a doctor’s office. The statistics are invented but perhaps they front insights. Either way, they are stronger without the statistic, and also stronger when you explore why these statistics exist.
How Insights Happen
What’s happening inside this number? Has it always been like this? Why? Why not? What’s new about the number? What’s old about it? What’s really going on here? Can I connect it to something else I read or watched or to a song I know?
And, finally, strategists can feel insights into existence. Keeping a list of observations as you go about your life and then rewriting the observations as insights is a legitimate act of critical and creative thinking, even though some businesspeople are too buttoned-up to respect this. Of course, the thinking needs a supporting cast of evidence, but this need doesn’t delegitimize the thinking. Over time, you’ll develop your go-to techniques for describing observational insights. These techniques will become yoga poses available to you whenever you need them and whenever you are wearing a winter wetsuit in the oceans of the mind.