How to become insights-driven in 2023?

Markets are becoming increasingly complex, the competition fiercer. New products, technologies and business models disrupts traditional ways of doing things. War in Europe, inflation, rising costs of living, and the aftermath of the pandemic. 2023 is highly unpredictable. My guess is that insights-driven companies will be better able to navigate this uncertainty.

At the end of 2022, we arranged a roundtable workshop with Norwegian business leaders, discussing how to become more insights-driven in 2023. I want to share some of the insights from this session, as they are applicable to any business that sees the commercial value of fact-based decision making.

A premise for the discussion was the following model:

Trustworthy data is a pre-requisite for becoming insights-driven. But data alone won’t get you there. A business needs analysis capabilities (human and algorithmic) to go from data to insights. Valuable insights are useless, however, if they are not properly implemented into the decision-making processes of the company. To go from insights to action, a business needs to have the right process capabilities in place. Insights-driven companies does not only act on insights in a mechanical if-x-then-y fashion. They have a culture of learning, where the insights of today helps inform the broader worldview of tomorrow, for the whole company. You need the right cultural capabilities to take that final step.

How do you move through the different steps towards becoming an insights-driven business? Five key topics surfaced in the roundtable discussion.

1)????It all starts with leadership.?Insights and statistics are too often “weaponized” to further political agendas in the management team. To foster a culture of learning, management needs to set an example by being open and curious, using insights to learn and develop new perspectives rather than trying to validate their own hypotheses.

2)????Thinking in models.?The sum total of insights can be a highly fragmented and diffuse. Heuristics and cognitive models – such as segmentations, customer journey maps, scenarios etc. – can help the organization make sense of it all. This is especially important to include less numerate members of the team in the discussion.

3)????Sharing is learning.?Good insights will often go to rest within an organizational silo or with specific team members. To become insights-driven, learning needs to be shared across organizational borders, and over time, so that people can learn from what others have already figured out.

4)????Good enough is good enough.?Analytics teams have often a strong scientific leaning, seeking perfection and precision. Today’s business environment moves fast, and it’s often better with imperfect insights delivered prior to when decisions need to be made, than perfect insights delivered hopelessly too late. Being insights-driven requires a certain level of pragmatism.

5)????Insights should be planned for.?Insights cannot be an afterthought, though, something that runs in parallel with decisions being made. An organization need to keep an open mind and suspend judgement until the insights are made available. Insights should come first, and be used to inform decisions, not validate decisions already made.

In this perspective, an insights-driven organization has the analysis skills to convert data into insights, the process skills to convert insights into actions, and the cultural skills to convert disparate insights into organizational learning.

To what extent is your organization insights-driven?