Research departments everywhere have been renaming themselves ‘insight’, but the simple act of renaming isn’t enough. We need something more than cosmetic – a radical shift in market research, to root it in creativity and disruption. In this era of information overload, we need to look again at insight, and drag it kicking and screaming into the domain of creativity. 

De-ghettoising insight

Part of the problem lies with business’ desire to keep calm and carry on while reducing marginalising insight. Behind this is the obsession with short-termism: the drive to make the numbers, to be reliant on metrics and KPIs – something I call ‘arithmocracy’. In this suffocatingly defensive system, anything that is seen as too creative (pink, fluffy, daring) is outsourced to people with beards in Shoreditch.

Let’s not be frightened of insight; let’s not shy away from creating the ‘aha’ and ‘eureka’ of insight within the body of every corporate. Unless we integrate a sense of curiosity, creativity and imagination in our employees and colleagues, as well as across the education system, we will do little but pay lip service to the insight we claim to crave. Integrate insight – don’t fear it.

Generating insightment 

There are several key principles and practices we can learn and apply to our business cultures. to make them porous and liable to ‘insightment’.

• Theorists of insight conclude that true breakthroughs come from serendipitous collisions and combinations, created largely in the unconscious thinking System 1, and often happen in what are termed ‘bed, bath, bus’ situations, when the conscious System 2
  is offline.
• It’s not the winning, it’s the taking apart. What many scientists and creative people observe is that insight is not about a linear accumulate-and-await approach, but rather about ‘stand back and jump out’. 
• Don’t fear the power of conventions and assumptions. Never settle for the obvious but take everything – all assumptions and heuristics – apart. Adopt the motto of the US Palaeontological Society, frango ut patefaciam – I break in order to reveal.
• Be non-linear and indirect in searching for novelty and setting objectives. Obliquity, as economist John Kay suggests, is often the best approach to achieve what you seek, rather than bullishly going direct.
• Insight often comes about through naivety. Outsiders – such as Michael Ventris, who decoded the Linear B script, the syllabic writing of the Mycenaean Greeks – succeed by asking innocent questions that experts are too cognitively invested in to ask.
• Humour, wit and playfulness are far more fertile than our po-faced, reductionist arithmocracy will tolerate, but we need to find ways of taming these qualities and breeding them in corporate cultures. Wit, we should not need reminding, means humour and sharpened intelligence – both keys to seeing things differently.
  

Integrating insight

Let’s marinade business-as-usual in ‘insight’. Let’s ensure we decompartmentalise and create a process for making curiosity integral to our jobs, rather than a mere… well, curiosity.

Some ideas of which I have direct experience include:

• Discourage groupthink by deliberately recruiting against the norm. The instinct to recruit ‘in one’s image’ is ingrained, but can lead to the perpetuation of conventions and lazy assumptions about the market, the brand and the consumer. Ad agencies have become especially adept at recruiting in this way.
• Legitimise, condone and even reward curiosity. As someone who lectures at university – and as a parent – I often lament how so much of the marketing/comms industry tends to attract curious, open-minded young people, but the pressure of deadening deadlines, performance and a maximising culture often bleeds the curiosity out of these still innocently questioning minds.
• Institute ‘meandering time’. Companies such as Google are famed for not just sanctioning this approach, but positively encouraging it, by allowing staff time to work away from their main projects. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first highlighted the idea in their 2004 initial public offering (IPO) letter: though it seems to have waxed and waned – it was originally designated as 20%. Even at Google, however, this time is dedicated to ‘side projects’ rather than allowing people to truly wander without boundaries. In one case, we set up Diversity Days – allowing staff a day each quarter to do, or try, anything they choose; all they have to do is discuss what they learn and how they (or the company) might see things differently as a result. 
• Bring in ‘ad hoc outsiders’. I have a couple of clients where part of my retainer relationship is to take an outsider’s view of their research, to identify previously unseen connections – as good a definition of insight as you can ask for – and propose new research, marketing and comms ideas off the back of it.

If we think differently about insight and curiosity, and scratch the creative itch wholeheartedly, we are more likely to be seduced by its charms and find the inspiration we so desperately desire. 

 Anthony Tasgal’s book The Inspiratorium is published by LID Publishing