Ways to Gain Better Insights
Chris Kocek
Seeking traction and advantage for one’s career is usually something top of mind for many people. One expert has a recommendation to help: Insight.
“An insightful person looks at a situation or a cultural tension or a particular behavior and asks, ‘Is that what’s really going on here?’” says Chris Kocek, founder and CEO of Gallant, a strategy and design studio and the author of “Any Insights Yet? Connect the Dots. Create New Categories. Transform Your Business.”
“Insightfulness requires that we not just just take data or observations at face value, but that we look more closely at the context or the specific conditions that are at play,” he says, adding that, “It is a mix of curiosity, investigation and articulation.”
This skill can be overlooked by hiring managers, colleagues, superiors, prospects and clients.
“It can be hard to pinpoint whether someone is insightful in an interview or in a casual conversation because there are a lot of dynamics at play,” Kocek says. “In a way, an insightful person is trained to second-guess conventional wisdom or other people’s conclusions, so it can be a delicate situation, asking questions that challenge another person’s perspective.”
He elaborates how this can silence a person who has meaningful, helpful information to contribute.
“A lot of times, people don’t like to have their beliefs or perceptions challenged,” Kocek says, “so someone who is insightful might be a little quiet in a meeting, writing down observations, but not necessarily sharing them until they feel more confident about their hypotheses or tentative conclusions.”
Urgency, he contends, can lead to decision makers unknowingly maybe, or maybe not, preventing valuable or critical information from coming forth.
“Businesses often need to move quickly because of quarterly profit reports, but insights take time to build, so a lot of times, it can be faster to just take a well-worn observation that’s already out there and run with it instead of taking the time to interrogate that observation to get to something deeper or something different than what’s been done before,” Kocek says.
It’s important to realize how important this skill and value can be to our performance and professional life.
“Insightfulness can be incredibly advantageous to your career because it can help you stand out from the crowd,” Kocek asserts. “Insightfulness is the springboard for big, category-disrupting ideas and award-winning ad campaigns. If you can provide an insight or a fresh perspective that’s truly different, leading to breakthrough innovations or great campaign ideas, then people will always have a seat for you at the table.”
This will change how people perceive and judge you.
“They’ll see you as someone with a unique perspective, but who is also able to cut to the chase and provide actionable ideas,” Kocek says.
Leaders can assist their people and teams get to insights faster, without a loss in quality.
“I think it starts with letting members of your team go out into the world so that they can observe human behavior first-hand and ask people questions,” Kocek says.
“It’s amazing,” he’s found, “how rarely businesses actually talk to their customers. Or when they do talk to customers, the questions are all about the business - ‘Did you like our product?’ or ‘Would you recommend our product to a friend?’”
He explains why this puzzles him as a preferred, practiced strategy.
“If you really want to get to higher ground or a place of innovation, you have to get to know your customers in context and you have to understand why they do what they do. You have to figure out their unspoken fears, their pain points or their needs and then speak to those issues with a new product, service or messaging campaign,” Kocek says.
It is beneficial, his experience has taught him, to know what to look for, differentiate and understand.
“It also helps to have a data analytics program so that you can find patterns or tensions between qualitative and quantitative data,” Kocek says, adding, “And no matter what results or answers you get at first, if you want to get to something deeper, you have to keep asking why.”
In the pursuit of insightfulness there are questions that should no longer be commonly asked or at least focused on during brainstorming sessions.
“Here’s a question that people ask in a lot of business brainstorming meetings because of the pressure of those quarterly profit reports that I mentioned earlier, ‘How can we increase traffic and generate more sales?’” Kocek says.
It’s not as smart as it usually seems to organizations.
“That question tends to be an insight killer because it’s starting from the wrong place and it’s pointing people in the wrong direction,” Kocek flatly states.
“If you ask people how to generate more sales, the ideas you get back will tend to be gimmicks and tactics that may lead to short term gains, but those tactics will quickly be copied by competitors and you’ll be back to square one,” he explains.
The normal practice: “We all know some of the quick, revenue generating tactics out there - flash sales, contests, giveaways, bounce-back cash, because they’ve been used hundreds of times,” Kocek says, admitting “And they can be effective in the short term. But if you want true differentiation and an idea that’s going to give your brand a long-term competitive advantage, then you need to start asking the following questions:
“Why aren’t people buying our products as much as they used to or as much as we expected?
“What does their decision making process look like in this category? What are the different phases of that process and what can we say or do at each phase to get their attention or show them how much better our solution is?
“How are people currently solving the problem that our product solves today? What are the workarounds or elements that are still missing from that solution?
“How do they feel about their current solution? What do they still feel like is missing?
“Is our solution just incrementally better or is it fundamentally different and exponentially better?”
He talks about why certain people and organizations might not find those queries attractive and worthwhile.
“These questions don’t have immediate, off-the-shelf answers,” Kocek says. The good news is that, “The answers are out there, but they reside with your customers or with a deeper examination of the category, the competition and consumer behavior, which means you’ll have to talk to your customers or observe their current behaviors and keep asking that question that leads to breakthrough ideas.”
The question he advises?
“Why are they doing it that way?”
###
Publisher’s Notes:
*Communication Intelligence is a free, traditional publication
*If you’d like to advertise in this section or this particular feature, contact the publisher (Michael) at CIM.writer.publisher@gmail.com
*Advertising in Communication Intelligence is available through (paid) links for your service or products, ads in articles, section sponsorships, expanded business listings, the book store and job and collaboration listings.
*Communication Intelligence also now offers professional writing services: email the publisher — see the upper right-hand corner of this website — with questions or to get started.
