Becoming Insight-Prone
What does the term “insight” mean to you? It’s a suitcase word with so many different meanings that it’s become little more than white noise in daily discourse. “Strategy” is another such term. I exhort to my teams that strategy is about developing, designing, abstracting and arranging elements in an ecosystem to yield competitive advantage. If the actions don’t yield competitive advantage, there is nothing strategic about them. A clear and common understanding of such frequently used and consequential terms is as important as speaking and comprehending a common language in an enterprise.
I define insight as the unpacking, discovery and abstraction of the most relevant, most leverageable nexus of two or more elements. As a result, insights are about powerful connections. Insights are critical knowledge that unlock untapped opportunity and ultimately lead to competitive advantage. Enterprise-level insightfulness can often generate higher returns in pricing.
In my days as president of global marketing, strategy and innovation at Burger King, my team had a great insight into our menu architecture and pricing. They developed the hypothesis (an insight to be tested) that if we introduced a Triple Whopper to our Whopper line, we might not sell very many of them, but when offered single, double and triple options, customers would more regularly choose the Double Whopper, according to the Centrist Pricing Theory. Sure enough, Double Whopper sales jumped almost overnight! A single high-yield insight connected the dots of our menu architecture to consumer behavior related to pricing.
Becoming insight-prone is not just for ad agencies and marketing teams. Every aspect of your business has opportunity trapped or unseen that a perspicacious and insightful mindset can unlock or identify. Place a premium on curiosity. Organizations and individuals with a rage to know and learn are those that regularly produce great insights spanning their entire business. Build a cultural message that rewards managerial courage to question why anything and everything is or must be the way it is. Teach people to become insight-prone by orienting them in systems thinking.
Becoming insight-prone is everyone’s responsibility. A recent study featured in Jeff Howe and Joi Ito’s Whiplash showed that adding so-called “smarter” people to a team has diminishing returns on their problem-solving skills; whereas adding more diverse thinkers (with potentially lower IQs) has an almost unlimited effect on improving a given team’s problem-solving skills.
Got insight?
