The Difficulty with Insights
Finally, insights are not intellectualism. Strategists might trip over their brains and stumble punch-drunk to insights by playing with scholarly terms, but to only do this out loud at other people with long abstract words and to then leave a meeting room with no follow-up will destroy the esteem of strategy within that team. Try to take the long intellectual routes and roundabouts in private and use simple, clear language for the actual insight.
As with the word “idea,” the word “insight” can follow silent adjectives. There is nothing wrong with different types of insights.
The friction happens when people use the word without revealing their silent adjective or the way they are intending the term.
One key adjective is “cultural.” With the rise of social media and the increased importance of social movements, many strategists will deal in cultural insights. Cultural insights tend to appear in more public ways and address behaviors that are more obviously collective than other kinds of insights. How people use phrases such as “like a girl,” “be a man,” which memes people share, what kinds of events people attend, and the stories and music and art they digest are the grounds for finding cultural insights. Such insights can be easier to formulate because these cultural actions happen in public, but you still need to scurry into them and ferret out their deepest significance.
Other strategists will prefer insights that happen at the individual level. These insights are more about people’s inner lives and they are private. They are things that people catch themselves saying or doing, but do not usually share with others—and they might not dwell on them because they create soul friction. There is nothing wrong with “company” insights, “brand” insights, and “category”
insights. But using multiple types of insights on a project risks distracting people from which insight will lead the work into the world.
The Difficulty with Insights
“That’s not an insight” is a phrase that requires additional words: “I see insights differently. Here is how I see them. How do you see them? Can we agree on a way we can see them?” It can be beneficial, in fact, to use the word “insight” as little as possible. The benefit of using it as little as possible and in as specific a way as possible is that when you do use it, people will focus on it, and it will stand a better chance of appearing in the final product.
People make insights difficult for themselves. There are many reasons for this. The first reason is that, as with the word “idea,”
many people who use the word “insight” do not know what an insight is. This is reporting, not shaming. Other professions take themselves more seriously and arrive at certain definitions of words to use as a group. Advertising generally does not do this, to its detriment. But the better definitions we have, the better insights, better ideas, better strategies, and better lives we can create.
The second reason insights can be difficult is that insights, like ideas, may be seen as threats. Insights about particular groups of people and what makes them tick suggest there are different ways to live in the world, and many people do not want to have to think about this or do not want others to think about this. Even if it’s ostensibly their job to do so. A life of denial and non thinking is less turbulent.
A third way that insights are seen as difficult is that numbers have become egotistical teenagers and they want all the attention, and insights can be based on numbers, but are not numbers. Yet numbers want the final say. And so data often try to lead instead of inform and support. Data are meaningless until you form patterns with them and then they become information.
The Difficulty with Insights
The fourth way that insights can feel difficult is that they take time.
Writing techniques may seem to make them happen in an instant, but in reality, life needs to weather you, break you, tear apart an easy and obvious existence to reveal different ways of thinking and living in order for insights to emerge. This is how empathy muscles develop. One reason that strategists aren’t always sure if they have an insight in hand is that it also takes time to get to the edge of their domain of expertise—to know which insights already exist.
This slow march is one possible yet debated reason why the average age of Nobel Prize winners has increased over the past one hundred years.¹⁷
Data provide the building blocks, and we thank them for their service, but they aren’t the Taj Mahal. Many companies nonetheless force strategists to tack the vaunted term “data-driven”
onto every so-called insight:
What did you find out?
Oh, lots of insights. All these slides in front of you—all two hundred of them—I have labeled with the word “insight.” That’s how many insights I have found.
Data-driven?
Yup. I wrote that there too.
But here’s the thing:
All insights are data-driven.
All insights are data-driven.
All insights are data-driven.
All insights are data-driven.
All insights are data-driven.
The Difficulty with Insights
Academics talk of insights that are historically new and psychologically new. “Historically new” means new in the history of the world. “Psychologically new” means new to the individual. Two strategists could watch stand-up comedy and laugh at different jokes because one of them has heard all the jokes before and that affects their guffaw level, or they can both laugh at the same joke because the joke is new to both of them, or new to the entire world.
The fifth challenge with insights arises because businesspeople like things to feel concrete. This is why they are businesspeople, not art people. Many want an insight to have bulletproof properties.
It’s a strange desire, because shooting at words would miss every time. Nonetheless, the myth of concreteness causes much angst.
The truth is that many insights can only prove themselves in the wild. This is why stand-up comedians try jokes in small venues and record their sets so they can hear which lines cause painful laughter and how often the laughter happens, since comedians’ life goals are laugh goals. It is a form of multivariate testing, but it is not pretesting. The jokes happen in a context and in public. The context includes a national culture, a city’s culture, what is happening in society at the time, the audience’s familiarity with the comedian, the time of day or night that the jokes happen, the other comedians performing, the effects of alcohol consumption, the comedian’s or audience’s comfort with the language and slang being used, the level of shared understanding of history and pop culture, and many other things. To pretest any of this without its live context is to pretest air, and air isn’t bulletproof.
The Difficulty with Insights
This leads to the sixth problem with insights. There is an art to insights. This is not to put insights out of reach of eager hands. It’s to put them in reach. But many people deny that the art exists.
Insights require data and facts, but they don’t stop at data and facts. There is a leap of intuition, whether the public showing of the intuition is poetic or academic. Yet placing too much weight on this art idea leads to another, seventh, problem: some strategists insist that writing insights is a mystical feat and some kind of spiritual superpower. Many strategists operate from a deep well of intuition, but strategists are more powerful when they bring their teams into the insights rather than leave them waiting at an altar for one.
The eighth thing that makes insights difficult is shitty attitudes. A strategist acting holy is shitty. A strategist policing other people’s insights is shitty. People undermining each other’s insights is shitty. Other departments saying they don’t need insights from a strategist is shitty.
And here’s the ninth problem: the strategy community self- flagellating about caring about insights—vacillating between caring about insights and feeling guilty about their caring—makes insights difficult. “Oh, you’re being too clever,” your colleague says. What does this even mean? What it means is that you’ve gently criticized a statement they made because it is not an insight and it isn’t clear. Then that person, embarrassed, refutes the idea that they had any intention of describing an insight or being clear: “You obsess way too much about insights. What’s wrong with you? Who would take the job so seriously? This doesn’t happen in other professions. In our profession, if people see you taking your job seriously, they won’t take you seriously.” Nonsense.
The Difficulty with Insights
The people strategists spend time with by proxy when they’re too good to think about their craft are obsessives. If work isn’t working out today, they pick up a novel, research paper, album, ticket to a music festival, wine, beer, meal, or coffee, or they visit an art gallery. Strategists surround themselves with artifacts of the obsessive while shaming others out of obsessing about strategy.
And this isn’t just in London.
The tenth way in which people make insights difficult is with their words. It’s too easy to whip out “insight” to try to sound important and to then use long, nonsensical, quasi-academic language to make something that is not an insight sound important enough to seem like an insight. “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? What about now?” To which the answer is, “By ‘there’, do you mean,
‘lost’? Yes, you’re there.”
Before I learned the art, a
punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick.
After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick.
Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.
—Bruce Lee¹⁸