Steps 2 & 3 — Forming Insights and Focusing the Challenge
Blog 4/10
After 25 in-depth interviews we’d gathered an abundance of notes and photographs. Sprintbase was flooded with observations that surprised us, notes about what our people really cared about and any adjustments they’d made along their career journey.
It was time to roll up our sleeves, get stuck in and make sense of them.
We reviewed all observations individually to develop a well-rounded view of everyone’s research. And took this forward into a group discussion, clustering our observations into themes. It was enlightening, and in a sense reassuring, to unearth many similarities. Themes like, employees would happily move to another business area, they just didn’t know how to go about it.
How do we get from observation to insight? And what constitutes a good insight?
Our Design Thinking coach, El, encouraged us to pick our most interesting observations and use these to generate our insights.
This was made simpler by starting our insights with the sentence,
“People care about/value/hate it when…”
Our insights needed to be fresh, interesting and true (nailed on to the observations we’ve made). Working with our earlier example, this observation evolved into,
“People care about having visibility of the opportunities available in other areas of the business.”
We rapidly formed our insights; they were rich and plentiful. Next, we had to select which of these would make it through to the next stage. We had 10 votes each and an hour in which to use them. Taking to Sprintbase we voted on the insights that spoke most to us. The votes were counted and verified, and we were left scratching our heads at the results. From the top five insights, two were so alike you’d think they were twins and two fell out of the scope of this project. A quick call with El, reassured us that this is typical with the volume of insight we’d generated, and voting was reopened.
With the benefit of hindsight, we distributed our votes in a more considered manner. Making sure we voted on insights that not only resonated with ourselves, but if they made it through to the next stage we’d be able to do something with them.
Success. Our new freshly selected insights were ready, and we liked what we saw.
Our next stage was to reframe our top insights into “How might we…?” (HMW) questions to bring forward into our brainstorming phase. This stage was rapid, helped largely by some useful do’s and don’ts when it comes to building a great HMW question.
Great HMWs always have the user at the centre of the question and feel like an invitation to brainstorm multiple possibilities. E.g.
“How might we make opportunities more visible and accessible for all employees?”
Not-so-great HMWs might have a solution partly baked into their structure, seek to benefit the organisation rather than the user and/or limit brainstorming. E.g.
“How might we use a website to increase the number of internal moves between business areas?”
After generating two HMWs for each of the five insights, we voted once more. This allowed us to close in on the challenges we’ll take over into next phase.
Brainstorming.
