How Insights Work
Insights tend to demand change from people, but they can also reinforce people. Where one strategist might contemplate how to get a group of people to rethink the idea of locking defenseless immigrant children in cages, another strategist might contemplate how to make this behavior seem necessary and attractive, and stoke a different group into defending it.
Strategist One identifies the problem as “Cages show strength.” A leader with a flair for the authoritarian and a supporting base who adore shows of strength benefits from cages. Strategist One decides to try to shift the idea of strength and argues for the insight that “Caging something makes a strongman look strong, but it takes more strength to open the cage.”
Strategist One argues for the strategy “Show that strongmen open cages,” and promotion of the idea that it takes more strength to open cages than to use them to keep at bay what we fear.
Strategist Two also knows that cages show strength. This is why Strategist Two encourages the appearance of the cages in certain media channels. Phase one of this strategy is to go on the attack, showing that people who don’t like cages are weak, and that because they are weak, 1. They’ll make other weak decisions, 2.
Their opinions are for crybabies, and 3. Through a combination of weakness and crybabiness, they are irrelevant. Over time, as opinions against the cages mount, Strategist Two faces a problem:
how can we continue to show strength about this issue without making any concessions to people we have condemned as weak and irrelevant, because if we make any concessions to these people, then we are weaker than they? Strategist Two will then borrow the strategy from Strategist One, but in parentheses will add, “without making us look weak.”
How Insights Work
So they’ll say, “Show that strongmen open cages (without making us look weak).” This means that the opening of the cages will need to be a major show of strength, a theatrical epic of superpowered empathy with fireworks, costumes, and F-15 jets patriotically screaming through the sky, beyond anything Strategist One might have envisioned. Alternately, Strategist Two could attack the word
“cage”—maybe trying “playpen”—and hope that different words will make the issue less of an issue without changing any behavior.
“These children are not in cages–they’re in playpens.”
There are many benefits to insights. Insights change business relationships. Agencies can win pitches and keep clients because of a sentence that changes the trajectory of a marketer’s career.
Insights can win awards, decorate strategy portfolios, and earn jobs and promotions. Insights can bond people across businesses.
Informal chitchat about topics that have nothing to do with the overt business at hand—chitchat that includes spontaneous, zesty insights—can bring agency folk and clients closer to each other.
Small talk about how a client can manage an absent or helter- skelter boss can bond the client to a better career and then to an agency. Insights can lead to new ways of doing business and new product ranges. These things can happen without insights, too, but insights can help.
Insights give people common ground, but many insights initially stay private. A person whose mind shifts about the role of marriage or how they perceive their mental health challenges might keep these shifts private. At some point, however, insights usually appear in public. They burst into conversations, movies, novels, songs, and essays. Insights can make money, so this creates an industry of people scavenging to make the private public.
How Insights Work
In public, collections of people can observe an insight and nod as they absorb it and consider how to apply it. Then they discuss it.
Some go on to join a new online community, subscribe to a new podcast or newsletter, or attend an event, and they do so because the insight has given them a problem to solve and common ground upon which to solve it with other people. The common ground makes people feel less alone in their attempt to solve the problem.
Insights help businesses relate to people. Humans love seeing themselves everywhere. In mirrors, in their children, in their parents, in the design of cars and buildings, in more famous humans, and in old tales. “Ah, that’s just like me. I’m not so unusual after all. See, maybe I’m normal and you are too. Let’s be friends.” Insights ask humans to see themselves in a brand, even if what they’re seeing isn’t how someone else would see them. For example, a parent buys an off-road car because the car understands the mountains, but the car, once bought, never drives in the mountains. Or a middle-aged American drinks a beer because it’s a Mexican beer and young people drink it on beaches in the summer, but the middle-aged American doesn’t go to beaches or to Mexico. Insights know what it is to long for mountains, or Mexico.
Insights get humans to share. Again, sharing is a form of gossip. “I found out this thing. Isn’t it amazing? Pass it on. It might help you survive.” To repeat a paraphrase of Jonah Berger’s research on why people share content, people share content that reveals something awe-inspiring about them or about the world around them. Listen to any conversation in a cafe. One person will express a summary of how they feel about themselves or an idea. They will then tell an anecdote as justification.
How Insights Work
If the conversation seems to peak in a problem, the other person will offer a solution and that solution will often come with an insight and then a recommendation about what to do, a strategy. Listen for conversations about bad dating experiences–“You’re too good for him” will often appear with some kind of wisdom about why. On the internet, sharing someone else’s insight gives the sharer attention and status.
Watch how people post quotes from marketing academics talking at business conferences on social media. Many sharers aim to build this as capital that they can cash in at a later date, whether for money, love, or some kind of rare resource. This doesn’t mean generosity is a cynical act. These dynamics have helped humans survive for thousands of years.
Finally, insights cause awe. Humans feel awe in the presence of nature, art, performance, religion, and charismatic leaders.
According to psychology researchers Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “awe is a sense of vastness that makes you adjust your perceptions of yourself, the world, or even the universe.”²⁰ They suggest that “prototypical awe involves a challenge to or negation of mental structures when they fail to make sense of an experience of something vast.” These experiences can feel confusing and scary, they can feel illuminating or like a rebirth. They can also feel like peeing in a winter ocean.
In Australian surfing, there exists a phenomenon known as a wetty warmer. A wetty warmer is this: It’s midwinter. A surfer wearing a full-body wetsuit ventures into cold water, scans the horizon, and paddles. They make peace with the rough tides that surge and rip and with the waves that heave then pummel. They dive under monsters breaking onto them and dash up giants yet to crash.
How Insights Work
They hope their breath can outlast the ocean and that its depths hold no surprises with sharp teeth, cutting coral, or stubborn rocks.
They make their way to where the sets of waves they are hunting tend to appear. Then they wait and, while they’re waiting, they might pee a little inside the suit. The pee warms their thighs and lower belly area, but because the surfer is in the ocean the pee can also swim away and the surfer feels relieved, warm, and clean all at the same time. Insights are wetty warmers for the brain.
Whether the insight is a Lurker and is naming a hunch or a Surpriser who shoves a door in front of people out of nowhere, it will elicit a feeling of awe down the leg.
Can effective work happen without insights? Yes. But finding insights is one of your most important goals. After you find them, the proper handling of insights includes knowing when to use them and when not to. Like Bruce Lee deciding when to use a punch or a kick.