How to Better Define Strategic Business Insights

Can we all agree that insights are good? Perhaps it goes without saying, but insightful thinking offers clarity and helps us gain confidence in our decision-making. We’re a little biased, we know, because it’s literally right there in the name of our company. But executives, innovators, and leaders of all kinds all need to cultivate the art of generating strategic insights.

What is the value of strategic insights?

The point of insights is to get past what we don’t know.

When we’re trying to bring new solutions to market, to get an edge, to disrupt, to venture into the unknown, we don’t have the luxury of asking customers what they want.

Innovation can’t wait for reactive data.

We have to be able to anticipate, and create meaningful experiences that are future-ready.

And the decisions that inform those developments need to be based on insights and foresights.

Where do we begin?

Start with a question. It could be any question. “Why is the sky blue” is a classic, but it has a fact-based answer. “How can we grow the business without spending a lot more cash in the immediate term” is a common dilemma.

Pose that question to a Large Language Model chatbot like ChatGPT, and one thing you can count on for sure is that you will get an answer. It might not be a very good answer, but it will be an answer formulated from statistically likely words. And for some purposes that is extremely useful and a great time saver. I’ve used LLM tools every day for years to help me save steps and gain efficiencies.

What machine learning models don’t do, though, is a pretty vast list when it comes to knowledge work and executive insights: they don’t understand context, trends, the marketplace, your culture, the experiments you’ve tried and abandoned, or countless other factors that would make the feedback more valuable. And hence, more meaningful.

Machines do a lot of things well, but one of the things AI can’t do is make things meaningful to humans. For that we need actual humans. Because when we’re making decisions that impact human experience, what we’re looking for are human insights.

So how do we arrive at better, more meaningful strategic insights?

We start with a framing question, one that allows us to ponder and examine the moment for significance. On that allows us to be honest from an intellectual frame.

“To me, the hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask.”

— John Brockman, This Explains Everything

Our Strategic Insights Model

Very often when we think about knowledge — or the acquisition of knowledge — we think about asking questions and determining answers. But the thing about answers is that they’re inherently contextual, circumstantial, of the moment, timely, and driven by externalities that are likely to change.

So from that question we don’t proceed directly to an answer. We allow ourselves to dwell in the liminal space between questions and answers, which is where strategic business insights can form.

Once it asks that question we can look for partial answers. And it is once we have a few partial answers, preferably partial answers that seem to contradict one another, that we can begin in that tension to find some kind of timeless truth, some kind of guiding insight.

It is often in these contradictions and tensions that we find the most powerful insights because they challenge our preconceptions and force us to think more deeply. When we’re just looking for answers, we tend to find the first thing that seems to fit and then move on. But when we’re looking for strategic insights, we allow ourselves to explore the complexity and find the diamonds in the rough.

So what are some of the ways that we can bring this process of looking for insights to our work?

1. We can start by being more aware of the questions we’re asking.
2. We can take the time to explore the answers we get, even if they don’t seem immediately useful.
3. We can allow ourselves to dwell in the tension between questions and answers, and let that be a space for creativity and insights.
4. We can look for contradictions and explore them, rather than running from them.
5. We can be open to what the world is trying to tell us, even if it’s not what we were expecting.

This process of looking for strategic buisness insights is something that we can all benefit from, whether we’re working on a personal project or a professional one. It’s a way of recalibrating our thinking and approaching problems from a fresh perspective.

Once we have landed on an insight or perhaps more than one, we can use an understanding of context, externalities, and trends to shape insights and useful and timely approaches and answers to the original question, or a reframed question. And we can even begin to find potential foresight.

How can we apply strategic insights to foresight?

Insight is a function of time, tension, and context. It’s a way of looking at the world that allows us to find the diamonds in the rough. It’s a tool that we can all benefit from using, whether we’re working on a personal project or a professional one.

Foresight is the ability to see into the future and predict potential problems or opportunities, or anticipate change. It’s a way of thinking that allows us to be proactive rather than reactive. It’s about understanding what might happen, and then making decisions based on that understanding.

There are many ways to develop foresight, but one of the most important is to always be on the lookout for strategic insights. By constantly being on the lookout for those Aha! moments, we can start to see patterns and trends that others might miss. We can begin to understand how the world is changing and what might happen next.

Insight and foresight are two sides of the same coin. Insight helps us understand the present so that we can anticipate the future. Foresight helps us see the potential consequences of our actions and make decisions accordingly.

Both insight and foresight are essential for effective problem-solving. By using both, we can not only find solutions to the problems we’re facing today, but also anticipate and prevent problems that might otherwise arise in the future.

When we’re looking for answers, we tend to find the first thing that seems to fit and then move on. But when we’re looking for insights, we allow ourselves to explore the complexity and find the diamonds in the rough.

It is often in these contradictions and tensions that we find the most powerful strategic insights because they challenge our preconceptions and force us to think more deeply.

Read more: What are good questions?

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