experience matters

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When you’re part of a department called Insight and Planning it’s probably a good idea to know what you stand for, and where your value lies. Even more importantly, you need to know how your capability helps your organization to offer a competitive point of differentiation.

Over the last year, we’ve been internally debating what it means to be insightful, and the result is this presentation. We’ve shown it to clients, peers and our own teams in what I’ll refer to as a “healthy” dialog. Over the last month, we’ve had it out in the wild on Slideshare as well where it’s been getting some healthy linkage. One of the really interesting outcomes has been the discussion about how often we abuse or misunderstand the term “insight.” More often than not, we’re confusing insights with ideas, or elevating “findings” to the status of insights. The risk with loose definitions is that you can’t really be clear about the value you provide – you’re just creating noise. As a team, we’ve got a lot of thinking rolled up in this deck, but the the bottom line is this: we have a clear view on what we think insight is, how we generate insight and how we communicate its value. Subject to change of course, but then that’s why we’re talking about it.

So what’s the value of insight to your business?