Research & Insights – Part 2

Insight

It is time to confront the other part of the question. What is an insight? Something that helps us understand a problem or a subject; in certain instances, a better understanding. Something that can pierce through data and help us understand it. Something which helps organize the data around some theme, behavioural patterns, causation and so on. For example, the wave-particle dual character of light was an insight just as is what determines an option price. Or say the concept of field in Physics. Or Marx’s uncovering of the origin of surplus-value – this in itself is a fascinating example of the problematic relationship between research and insight. For the uninitiated, Marx spent more than two decades researching into what we understand as the capitalist economy. When he ‘developed’ surplus-value as a concept, he could explain so much of the economy he was studying than he earlier could. An insight helps us pierce even large volumes of data such that the data starts making sense. (But there are also examples of futile research – the history of science has many examples – research which produced no conclusive ‘insight’. This is especially true of mathematics where many a mathematician’s professional career has been ruined.)

Now that leads us to a problematic question – can the insight come from outside the research? From someone who has not been involved in the research? That hurts surely but has happened more often than not for us to disregard. This is quite often described as the advantage of a viewpoint without baggage, without the burden of inherited information (i.e., when inherited information becomes an obstacle to understanding). There is a certain freedom in anarchy, bound as it is by nothing other than its destiny to be critical. You should welcome it with open arms. In the pursuit of insights, willingness to go beyond an individual thinking is necessary.

There has been, in business organizations, a persistent trend, although it has taken new names. Research & Insight are domiciled in two separate groups of people. Those familiar with business history will recall the Strategic Planning department, which was considered the ‘place’ which thought, while others provided information. There is a brilliant book by Professor Henry Mintzberg titled ‘The fall and rise of strategic planning’ – (https://hbr.org/1994/01/the-fall-and-rise-of-strategic-planning). After emphaizing the need to develop new categories for real strategic change, he says: “Search all those strategic planning diagrams, all those interconnected boxes that supposedly give you strategies, and nowhere will you find a single one that explains the creative act of synthesizing experiences into a novel strategy. Take the example of the Polaroid camera. One day in 1943, Edwin Land’s three-year-old daughter asked why she could not immediately see the picture he had just taken of her. Within an hour, this scientist conceived the camera that would transform his company. In other words, Land’s vision was the synthesis of the insight evoked by his daughter’s question and his vast technical knowledge”. The child was not burdened by knowledge but driven by curiosity. This is reiterating what I have said earlier but let me add another observation which will force you to think anew on this – Einstein says that intuition is prior intellectual history, a caution against contrasting ‘reason’ with ‘intuition’.

If you were to examine research in healthcare, specifically cancer research, you will grasp the enormity of the challenge.

To come back to business organizations. It is true that in many of them, research is never more than supplying data with insight the responsibility of another team. In fact, there are companies that develop an Insights Engine. In 2016, HBR conducted a major study on this. There are companies which employ ‘insight professionals’. There is even a www.insightsassociation.org. It is a different point whether this kind of a division is advisable but is perhaps unavoidable the more so as providing research has become a business by itself.

This is the battle between the street and the tower, often acrimonious. The deep divide between operations and ‘senior strategic management’. If the operations teams suffer from a tunnel vision, others could be caught in a grand vision that has no grounding in reality. There is every possibility that research can turn into a headless chicken, too late to realize that it has been barking up the wrong tree. In engineering, an attempt was made decades ago to confront and overcome this problem, resulting in the operative practice concurrent engineering. We will pursue this now to see how this can help us further in this journey. Be warned, this is exploratory; it may not lead to a definite ending.

Takeaways

Insight helps makes sense of data

Some companies maintain a separate set of ‘insights team’

Tough to accept but insight could well come from outside research