Insight management basics

When we say insight we mean knowledge that the recipient finds useful.

Research psychologist Gary Klein discusses the what insight is, its role in performance and the fact that organization struggle to capture, manage and digest it from 1:47 to 8:07 in this video:

In everyday talk, insight and knowledge are used interchangably. However, insight differs from knowledge in several meaningful ways, making insight in many respects more valuable than knowledge.

When we describe something or someone as insightful, we mean that they successfully articulate perspectives on the world that resonate with us and that we intuitively understand to be true.

Consider these differences when attempting to improve your understanding of the differences between knowledge and insight:

Insight emerges as the result of combining input (aquired through learning or experience) with reflective thinking.

Insight management is the process of proactively and deliberately organizing insight.

A simple way of thinking about insight management is that it means writing useful stuff down and making it easily available to others who might find it useful.

A concrete and familiar example of this is writing down and sharing cooking recipies. The primary motivation of a cooking recipe is to produce a high quality and predictable outcome, even if you're not an expert chef.

Similiarly, in the context of business, the aim of the "recipies" we build is to produce great and predictable role holders, processes implementations and behaviours.

Read more

When it comes to insight, most people default to handling it intuitively (as opposed to deliberately), and to share it verbally whenever it occurs to them.

By managing insight we can more easily understand/align, share and improve the insight.

Understand/align

Let's say you have a hard time understanding something, or getting someone else to understand or get on the same page as you.

By writing it down you are challenged to ensure your own, proper understanding of the idea or concept, and can more easily have a discussion with someone else about where they agree or disagree.

Sharing

So long as insight is located only within your own head, it can only be accessed by others when you are explicitly available to them, and by yourself as long as you remember it. By writing things down the insight can be made more easily accessible to anyone whom would benefit from it later, yourself included.

Improving

When insight is kept in the heads of individuals, the insight is fluid and, as a result, more difficult to improve upon.  By taking it down we have a fixed and shared understanding of the insight, which means we can more easily elaborate and improve upon the insight as our understanding improves over time.

Read more about the specific advantages of practicing insight management within an organization.

Insight effects are the effects we can get from the insight we posess.

The more/better effects we can get from our insight, the more we can justify our insight management investment.

Insight effects can be broken down into 5 categories.

1. Awareness
2. Clarity
3. Self development
4. Behavioural change
5. Improvement

Awareness

• Learning: Build new knowledge.
• Inspiration: Renewed commitment and desire for action.
• Reflection: Thinking about and evaluation against ideal situation.
• Opportunity awareness: An undestanding of what is possible.

Clarity

• Situational clarity: A deeper understanding of the situation of onself or others.
• Quality clarity: A deeper understnding of what greatness/well-functioning/health looks like.
• Problem clarity: An ability to see, articulate, understand and identify the root causes of a problem.
• Role clarity: A deeper understanding of the roles of oneself and others.

Self development

• Self-knowledge: Increased knowledge and understanding of oneself.
• Selv-treatment: A change in how I treat myself.
• Mastery: An increase sense of mastery with my situation or roles.
• Life awareness: Increased awareness of life and what is important in my practice of it.

Behavioural change

• Priorities: A change in what I prioritize in the short or long term.
• Habit change: Removal of bad habits or the establishment of healthy ones.
• Cultural change: Changes in intuitive and accepted group behaviour.
• Operationalization: Systematized behaviour in order to ensure predictable practice and quality.

Improvement

• Alignment: Agreement on what can be expected, how things should be done and what to prioritize.
• Problem solving: Solving of a concrete problem.
• Friction reduction: Reduced friction in one's own life, or in the dialog, co-existence and collaboration with others.
• Structural improvement: Development of new or improvement of existing structures to create more clear expectations.

The insight management process consists of these five steps:

1. Identifying insight relevant for managing
2. Taking down relevant insight for further refinement
3. Organizing the insight for better discoverability and a deeper understanding
4. Exposing the insight to relevant stakeholders
5. Improving upon the insight

There are three primary levels of practicing insight management. These levels represent how effective an individual is in contributing to the retention, sharing and reuse of insight within a team, and can be improved upon through improved awareness and practice.

The levels are:

• Level 1: I intuitively look up and reuse recipies built by others
• Level 2: I identify and flag useful insight worth sharing
• Level 3: I correct and make adjustment to recipes when appropriate
• Level 4: I proactively convert my insight into recipes that can be reused by myself and others

The expected insight management level of any given person will depend on their role and level of experience. The more experienced a person is, the greater the benefit will be for the team if that person reaches a high level of insight management.

In order to effecively practice insight management, you need a system which answers the following questions:

1. Destination: Where should the insight be stored?
2. Classification: How should the insight be organized?
3. Template: Which types of insight are we working with, and how should each type be formatted?
4. Ownership: Who is responsible for maintaining, using and making sure each piece of insight is used?
5. Meta-data: How does individual pieces insight relate to eachother, and how has the insight been used?

https://wecomplish.no/article/insight-management#obstacles

Insight types as a concept

Uploading insight into the organization refers to the process of taking information gathered from a knowledge transfer process (i.e. a course or a conference), breaking it down and placing the various pieces of insight into locations where it will be available and operationalized at the right time in the right context for the right people.

Some people feel uncomfortable when prompted to document how work it done.

Some common concerns are:

• How can I ensure that it's not a waste of time?
  • Won't it be quicker to just do it?
  • Will it actually be read by anyone?
• Writing stuff down makes expectations more permanent/rigid
  • I want people to have a sense of freedom
  • I don't want us becoming robots acting out programming instructions

If these concerns resonate with you, consider discussing them within your team or with an insight consultant in order to collect multiple perspective and identify what makes sense to document and not in the context of your team.

When we refer to someone as having an insight management mindset, we mean that that person understands the value of and intuitively practices the insight management process.