Winning With Data: Say No To Insights, Yes To Out-of-sights!

If there is one thing the universe agrees on, it is that you should just provide data… You should provide INSIGHTS!!!

In the 807,150 (!) words I’ve written on this blog thus far, at least 400,000 have been dedicated to helping you find insights.

In posts about advanced segmentation, in posts about how to build strategic dashboards that don’t suck, in encouraging you to reimagine how you pick metrics to obsess about using the magnificent Impact Matrix, and on and on and on.

Go for insights!

The Problem.

In time, I’ve come to hate the word insights.

In our world – marketing research and analytics – that word has come to represent data puking.

It has come to represent telling people, with dozens of reports or eighty slides, that water is wet.

I’ve observed, during my work across the world, when we deliver insights, we mostly deliver to our audiences things in-sight – things they can already see!

As in, the blue line is 20% above the red line. I CAN SEE THAT! Or, life-time value of California purchasers is 3x when compared to those who reside in Georgia. Oh, please, I can also see that on the table with my eyes.

This, unsurprisingly, ends up being a massive waste of your incredible talent, and an insult to the intelligence of our audience (the people who pay your salary).

The Fix.

The last time I changed jobs, I wanted to change the aspiration of what our talented team and I should shoot for.

Instead of insights, I coined a new phrase for a new start: Out Of Sights!

Our aim would be to provide out-of-sights – things people can’t see.

As in, the blue line is 20% above the red line because our biggest competitor launched a new product and priced it 10% below our best product. You are explaining the performance. BOOM!

It is such a small play on words. But, my goal was to provide each peer this pause-worthy moment when they bring the results of their work: OMG, is this really an out-of-sight?

The influence on our culture, on our actions, on our audacity was profoundly dramatic. Turns out, cultural transformations can start with a word. 🙂

Every time we were done with our analysis, we now had a higher standard to shoot for. We challenged each other by saying, are you sure that is an out-of-sight?

Four Attributes of Out-of-Sights.

While we got the spirit right away, scaling understanding requires a common language we could share.

Our team was up to the challenge, and off to the whiteboard we went to systematically approach the problem of creating a simple framework to identify what’s an out-of-site.

This is when I feel super blessed to work with such smart people. At the end of a couple of whiteboard sessions, we came up with our criterion that every out-of-sight had to meet…

1. Novel: New and surprising.

Novel is a tough, high, standard. It eliminated 90% of the data puking and made work so much fun for the Analyst.

2. Actionable: Expressed with a clear implication for the audience.

Actionable is the single most crucial element if you deal with data. It requires knowledge well beyond the data – requiring an understanding of the business, a robust set of cross-functional relationships, and an ability to persuasively influence.

3. Credible: Data source – tool, people, entity – is respected by the audience.

I have the following ask of the analytics team:

Credibility is very helpful. Be the biggest enemy of your analytical work.

4. Relative: Expressed in context.

The relative attribute helps speed up understanding. It ensures your out of sights really sink in.

Every finding from your rigorous data analysis has to meet the above-mentioned four attributes – N-A-C-R –, before it can be called an out-of-sight.

When you set yourself on the quest for out-of-sights, you set a standard for yourself, for your team, for your data, that will result in everything you discover being meaningful and material.

Your Out-of-Sights Jumpstart Guide.

You will find your own way to discovering out-of-sights for your company. Still, I want to help a little bit. I would like to give you a list of questions that will increase chances that you will bump into more out-of-sights.

Questions provide context, questions lead to relationships, questions expand your horizon, questions enhance your business savvy, and in doing all that, and more, questions provide that magical missing ingredient: Purpose.

And, knowing purpose increases the chances you’ll discover out-of-sights that qualify as such with all four attributes: Novel, Actionable, Credible, and Relative.

Here’s a helpful list:

Not an exhaustive list by any means, just a representation of the kinds of questions I strongly believe your talent and emphatically answer.

You answer these questions not with insights (things people can already see), but with out-of-sights (things people can’t see).

Bottom-line.

When you check if the results of your analysis pass against all four N-A-C-R attributes, chances are 90% of what you do today needs to die. Because telling people water is wet, week after week, results in only sadness.

Don’t deliver sadness, deliver meaning and impact. Make your job fun!

What percentage of your team’s insights this week met all four of the out-of-sights criterion?

Happy out-of-sighting!

Special Bonus: If you are looking for a picture to insert into your leadership presentations, you can use this one I use in my keynotes…