Insights & Issues

Time to move on

Friends,

I hope that all is well with you and yours.

This is, with the risk of breaking some sort of author’s fourth wall, the fifth time I am rewriting this newsletter. For some reason, I just cannot seem to find the right words to accurately describe the topic on which we are about to focus.

Perhaps it is because insights have become such a ubiquitous feature in the strategic dialogue. Agency planners and management consultants look for them ferociously; no strategy is complete without one. Clients, meanwhile, increasingly replace market researchers with insight managers. Everyone agrees that insights are as essential for business success as food and water is for human survival.

And yet, as far as I can see, most of it amounts to three fifths of fuck all.

It may come across as controversial or provocative, but my intention is neither to cause controversy nor provoke. The evidence merely appears, to me at least, overwhelming; despite the dramatic popularity of insights, few actually make the rounds. That is not to say that they do not exist – clearly, they do – but given the enormity of attention devoted, it is staggering how very little comes of it.

Cause and concern

There are a few reasons, I suspect, as to why.

The first has to do with what the term means. It may appear that there is a lack of consensus, but upon closer inspection, one realizes that most definitions are variations on an easily identifiable theme. In literal terms, an insight is a noun, described by the Cambridge Dictionary as “a clear or deep, and sometimes sudden understanding of a complicated problem or situation”. Most interpretations used in strategic practice, whether pretentious (“an unspoken human truth”, “a revelation”, “a disturbance in discourse”) or pragmatic, share the root; believed-to-be discoveries of causal relationships and new ways of, so to speak, connecting the dots.

There is nothing wrong with this per se – provided that it is indeed applied to complicated contexts, not complex ones. Unfortunately, it too rarely is.

As long-time subscribers will know, the inescapable issue with trying to unearth causal relationships in complex adaptive systems such as organizations or markets is that they are inherently dispositional; not demarcated by linear causality but, conversely, a lack thereof. In other words, try as you might, there will be none to find. Inevitably, one is thus far less likely to have an epiphany than an apophany.

Apophenia can be defined as our human tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. It was coined in the late 1950s by German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad during his study of schizophrenia, who noted that subjects would interpret events around them as proof that they were being watched, followed, or talked about. Of course, they were not. This inclination, however, turned out not to be unique to those who suffer from mental health issues, but a human remnant of a time long past. Ancestors who immediately fled upon hearing the sound of rustling leaves, for example, might have been embarrassed, but rarely killed.

I digress.

The point is that, due to the complex reality in which we act, insights in the modern proverbial wild easily become no more than micro observations assumed to hold on a macro level, usually without any actual evidence to support the assumption. In a way, it is inductive reasoning taken to the extreme; one creates general rules from specific instances, not merely based on what is possible, but what is claimed to be actual. In the end, it rarely is.

Welcomed platitudes

The second reason why insights fail to live up their billing is that they turn out to be little else than market research in trendy clothing (a rose by any other name, and so on). Instead of new ways of seeing things, they become watered down descriptions of the problems we were asked to solve, no more revelations than realizations. As such, they are so general that anyone who does the work, be it employee or competitor, invariably will discover them.

Of course, that is rarely taken as a negative. Despite the endless claims to the contrary, most organizations do not actually want genuine insights.

Although there are many kinds of insights (a topic for next week), common among many of them is that they are incompatible with our current beliefs; they disrupt and disorganize. It is for this reason that they are, per the Cambridge definition, sudden and often take us by surprise. By contrast, organizations in general – and managers in particular – seek stability and predictability. Most insights gained are thus stifled; they die not because there is no flame, but because there is no oxygen. Only platitudes, safe in their reaffirmance of the status quo, remain.

To make matters worse still for those of us who work in business strategy, the aversion to change tends to become stronger the higher up the hierarchy one gets. With seniority comes experience, certainly, but also age. The closer one is to retirement, the more likely one is to maintain the established modus operandi if for no other reason than convenience. Consultants are often blamed for saying what the client wants to hear. It bears keeping in mind that many business leaders also have selective hearing.

A different path forward

Given the many issues with both insight generation and the insights themselves, should we abandon the search for them entirely?

The answer, I feel, is a resounding no.

Insights are essential to move organizations forward; they can improve the way that we operate in the now while shifting us to a new paradigm tomorrow. But it is undeniable that there are fundamental flaws in the ways most go about creating them. The notion that one can extrapolate a micro observation is not merely flawed in practice, but too a priori.

Thus, we need to look at insights differently, not as discovered causal relationships but newly unearthed emergent patterns. It may appear a matter of semantics or overemphasis on technical accuracy, but it is anything but. In seven days’ time, we will discover why.

Until then, have the loveliest of weekends.

Onwards and upwards,
JP

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