Insights versus Findings?

When I was 12 years old, I had visited my uncle’s farm near Hyderabad. His farm was a beautiful, lush haven symbiotically flourishing with farm animals. I used to enjoy spending my time there, and every morning, along with my aunt, I’d pick up the eggs laid by the hens. A few days after returning from the farm, I developed tiny red dots all over my skin. The doctor diagnosed it to be chickenpox. I started associating the chickenpox with the “chickens” at the farm, believing that they were the cause of my misery.

One day, after I got better, I went back to the farm during my summer vacation, and my aunt asked if I wanted me to come with her to the chicken coop to collect the eggs. Frightened by the memory of the chickenpox, I vehemently said, “NOOOOO!” Puzzled by my behavior, she asked me why. I told her that I hate chickens because “they” had given me the chickenpox. Initially, no amount of explanation or coercion could make me see the light that the chickens were not the cause of my chickenpox. A few years later, as I grew up, I finally realized that the chickens were not the reason for my chickenpox.

This incident has served as a reminder to keep an open mind when I perceive something to be true.

Taking a little extra time to deeply understand and synthesize information is any day better than running faster towards the final line of conclusion.

And, this learning is all the more relevant in my professional space.

There are numerous instances when immediately after interactions with research participants like in an in-depth interview or a site visit with my clients, I see a bright smile on the client’s faces and a nod that declares that one of the points that they heard in the discussion is THE insight and in next 5–10 min you have the solutions being discussed. When I hear such generous garnishing of the word “insights,” I’m painfully tempted to ask, “why do you think that’s an insight?” The word “insight” has, unfortunately, become an oft-abused term for what merely could be an observation or a finding at the most. In the research world, it’s imperative for us to consciously not fall in the trap of mistaking a result as an insight. Insightful statements pave the way to ideas that provide an answer to the clients’ and users’ predicament.

As a simple ground rule, anything that comes too easy to us, is staring at us in the eye and may have emerged from a single interaction will not be an ‘insight’ — rather it’s a start to the journey of knowing the answers.

An insight would be a truth that is often unearthed by continuously asking the “why” question to get to the heart of the problem. When I was leading a research exercise for a healthcare project to understand why the patients did not adhere to their medicine intake schedule, several times the ‘experts’ from the medical world made statements like “the patients have several physical and visual reminders, yet they do not take the medicines on time”, “it’s a tedious job to refill medicines, and often they run out of stock and discontinue their medication.” These statements were only observations showing “what” the patients’ behaviors were like. None of these statements addressed “why” the patients were not adhering to the medicine schedule.

We took the direction of uncovering the emotion behind the patients’ mindset and our investment paid off. Our findings led to profound insights creating epiphanous ‘aha’ moments for the client and us. The creative team took this insight as a starting point to think of a solution that emerged from deep insights.

Arriving at an insight is a painstaking process because, often, what most people think of as a solution is a mere fact that does not lead to anything substantial to make a ‘difference’ to one’s life. We have to dig deeper to know the answers to the “why” because it’s the “why” that would help us arrive at what to make of your findings and how to solve the problem.