Customer Insights : Rocket Fuel for Your Innovation.

Rocket fuel symbolising how insight can power your innovation

When business performance is deteriorating, what can you do?

Often we can feel under pressure to 'try harder’. In effect, to do more of what we're already doing : Analyse the problem with conventional analytics, perhaps increase advertising spend on a product, make more sales calls, improve service levels in the call centre, and perhaps hold some meetings to rationally diagnose the problems?

And if we still see no improvement, then often there can be the pull to do even more of the same.

But you’ve probably heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting to get a different result?

However, if we don’t follow established management practise and analytical thinking, what's the alternative?

What Einstein Said...

A quote that is attributed to Einstein says : "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

So how can we change our ‘level of thinking’?

One way is through an insight-led approach.

What is Insight?

Insight is a different type of thinking - which occurs naturally in the human brain. However, organisational culture is usually biased heavily towards encouraging critical thinking and analytical thinking. Therefore, we typically do not get a lot of practise using insightful thinking in organisations.

Insights can transform businesses and organisations and shift them rapidly towards peak performance.

Insight involves overcoming particular assumptions and suddenly realising there is another way of going about things or solving a problem.

Just for fun, here's a couple of problems that require ‘insightful thinking’ to solve. (Answers at the bottom of the page.)

Example one

While on safari in the wild jungles of Africa, Professor Roberts woke one morning and felt something in the back pocket of his shorts. It had a head and a tail but no legs. When Roberts got up he could feel it move inside his pocket. Roberts however showed little concern and went about his morning rituals. Why was he so relaxed about the thing in his pocket?

Example two

Solve: |r|e|a|d|i|n|g|

Download Anatellô’s white paper on Using Insight to Drive High Performance .

Why Do We Need Insight?

Insight is critical to breaking paradigms – be those paradigms be about how markets are defined, what customers want, what would be an effective business model, your positioning versus competitors and more.

That’s why insight is so powerful. Get powerful insights and you can generate brand new revenue and profit streams through understanding the hidden needs of your customers and developing more meaningful products. You can leap ahead of your competition and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. We call insights the rocket fuel of innovation.

Without insights to power you innovation and change, you will only be able to offer your customers small incremental benefits. You will only know how to make small changes to team and organisational culture.

Unfortunately, some people use the word ‘insight’ to describe things that are not actually insights. They may just be referring to:-

Any old piece of data
Common knowledge
The result of conventional analytics
A justification for a currently held view

However, when we at Anatellô talk about insight, let’s call it transformational insight , we are talking about a very different way of thinking and of solving problems. Transformational insight can revololutionize your innovation capability and your innovation results.

How Can Transformational Insight Help Businesses and Organisations?

Insightful thinking can help you to :-

Resolve deep seated team conflicts and develop high-performing teams.
Exponentially increase profit though choosing a better business model.
Turnaround a track record of failed new product launches.
Eclipse the competition through having a more appealing portfolio of products

Insight brings to light new, hidden information and also enables us to re-organise information and combine it in new ways. It is this combining and re-organising information that helps us to get fresh thinking on problems.

Gain Confidence With a Proven Insight Process.

if you're not used to insightful thinking, using a proven insight process will give you and your teams confidence.

The process can either be led by an experienced facilitator or you can get trained up in insightful thinking.

A good insight process will be based on how the brain naturally gets to insight. Anatellô’s RIDGE process for insight helps you to:-

Look at your data and information with ‘fresh eyes’ so that you can see features in it that were not previously obvious
Discover non-obvious relationships between new information and information acquired in the past
Put together elements of a problem in a way that produces a way forward that had previously not been obvious.

Other processes that can help you get to insight are Anatellô’s Insights in Space and Insights through Metaphor processes.