You Can’t Outsource Intelligence
My podcast The Conversation Factory has been an amazing space and time to absorb new ideas and turn them into deeper insights. I’ve learned that in order to have great ideas, space and time to cultivate reflection is absolutely critical. Three insights from three episodes are connected for me in a flow for three steps:
- Building an Intelligence Engine inside your self, team or organization to pull ideas from inside and outside the organization and turn them into action.
- Unpacking and processing your data with intentionality
- Measuring that engine’s production via Volume, Variety and Velocity.
In actuality, not to be too meta, the recording, editing and writing about the podcast is my intelligence engine! By recording them, and being accountable to get them into the world, I’m building an intelligence engine that is building momentum.
How can you build structures of accountability to harness and transform insights?
Building an Intelligence Engine
Talking to Sara Holoubek in Episode 006, one phrase that really stuck with me was the idea of the intelligence engine.
There are a lot of ways to think about companies through metaphor. This article goes through eight common images of organizations, and who could forget this cartoon that went viral a few years back?
How do you cut across silos to make sure that one part of the organization knows what another part knows? How does information get from the edges to the center? Where does action originate from? I don’t think there’s one optimum design. Even in Holocracy you need a specific role to coordinate between sections of the organization. (episode to come on that!)
What will power your Intelligence Engine?
Unpacking Data by Hand
When I first started the podcast, I thought I would get each episode transcribed, then read the transcript to find interesting quotes and nuggets, and then edit it. That turned out to be both expensive and a waste of time. It’s a slower, extra step. And I was looking at the data as a design researcher who wanted to get the gems and then to move on. Back in my design research and strategy days, I never had time to watch the videos or listen to the audio…we would just debrief post interview with our notes, and go to the audio to find those moments we already had noticed. Taking a bath in all that data was a luxury my small team couldn’t really afford.
In Episode 002, I interviewed Abby Covert, author of How to Make Sense of Any Mess, and a rockstar Information Architect. Abby highlighted a really different and valuable perspective on turning Data into Insights…Actually taking the time to listen to the interview and to unpack it all yourself. I have been doing this with all my podcast episodes since! It adds time, sure. But if the interview was worth doing, it’s worth listening to again. I take that time to put together deeper show notes and find out what the interview was actually about.
“The first time you have the conversation, you are in the mode of progressing the conversation…but re-listening to the conversation, is when you actually hear the real meat of what’s going on…but you’re not able to see the real story until it’s over. I need that separate time to listen to it again.”
I’ve criticized organizations for taking these same shortcuts: Doing multiple research interviews for a week, but only synthesizing the data for a day or two. I’m trying to be more disciplined about this now…and unpacking the data by hand — with my own hands — has proven to be when the real story unfolds, just like Abby says.
If you build an intelligence engine, it has to be powered by insight. And insight comes from carving out real time to reflect. Data isn’t transformed into insight by anything else than a human mind, taking time.
Where is the opportunity for you to carve out that deeper reflection time *after* a critical conversation, to unpack what the real insights are?
Celebrating Volume, Variety and Velocity of Ideas..distinctly.
I love an alliterative framework. Who doesn't love the 5 E’s of Experience Design (entice, enter, engage, exit, extend)?
In my conversation in Episode 003 with Leland Maschmeyer we talked about a lot of things, but he succinctly described a pleasantly alliterative framework to describe the overall shape of innovation in a company. His 3V’s framework asks a company to decide:
- How many new ideas are we capturing from the chaos and clearly identifying as opportunities?
- How diverse should these ideas be? In what categories do we want a diversity of ideas and opportunities?
- How quickly can we turn these opportunities into proof of usefullness or uselessness? How much success and failure can we tolerate?
“We’re in an environment where evolution is a business priority. Having an in-built capacity for change is a strategic necessity. You have to design that in. You have to start behaving more like an organism…you have to be okay with waste…it’s the price you pay to endure.”
That’s about 100 minutes into a really amazing and wide-ranging conversation. I hope you take the time to give it all a listen!
For me, my ongoing question is what is powering my intelligence engine in my own work, how will I make dedicated time to process the chaotic data and process into signals and trends, naming opportunities and finding ways to test and try them out. For teams and organizations the question is the same, just the scale is different.
