2021 – a year to think better?
Don’t worry, this isn’t another blog post about setting goals, expectations, mindsets, or resolutions for 2021. It’s just a muse on how we think. Or, put it another way, we’re thinking about thinking.
Why, you might ask.
On last week’s episode of The Reset Show, we were lucky enough to have a conversation with Mr So What, Now What, aka Sam Knowles. Sam is founder and MD of Insight Agents, and author of two great books, Narrative by Numbers: How to Tell Powerful & Purposeful Stories, and How To Be Insightful: Unlocking the Superpower that Drives Innovation.
Insight Agents are storytellers. Data storytellers. Sam describes the business’s purpose as helping organisations sound like people and talk human. A one-time agency planner, Sam has focused his facility for turning relevant data into narratives that resonate and campaigns that deliver, into a consultancy helping others do the same.
Sam is a friend and collaborator, and we’ve had many interesting and rich conversations over some great coffee. These cover many things, including empathy, insight and design thinking. So I wanted to bring Sam to The Reset Show for two reasons. To see what we could learn about data and insight from his experience in comms and apply it to the world of people, culture and experience. And, secondly, as we stare blinking into the void that is 2021, explore what we can all do to be more insightful and impactful in our lives and our work.
It was a bit of a task for a 50-minute chat on a Wednesday lunchtime. But Sam took us on a fascinating journey. We touched on everything from Aristotle, to the Chip brothers, Kahneman, minotaurs, Brezhnev and much more besides. It’s the longest post-show reading list we’ve ever had.
So, as I said, we were thinking (or talking) about thinking. Sam defines insight as a “profound and deep understanding of a person, a thing, a situation or an issue that we can use to help us advance”. And that’s the important bit, the doing something with it. Hence Sam’s moniker when an agency strategy director “Mr So What, now What?” According to Sam, insight is also the foundation stone of innovation. And, innovation is certainly what we need a lot of right now as we look at rebuilding culture and experience to cope with rapid change, remote and hybrid working – against the debilitating backdrop of a pandemic.
On the show we touched on Sam’s STEP Prism of Insight, a model of insight generation and ideas development that anyone can use. STEP Prism is designed to help anyone needing to solve problems and develop insights, to do so with more certainty, more of the time, first time. Sam describes it as ‘scaffolding for thinking’.
We can all be more insightful if we put our minds to it. But sitting at a desk, glued to Zoom calls nine hours a day isn’t the way to do it.
Bigness matters (as does happiness). So, in the words of a famous children’s TV show (1973-1995!): “Why don’t you just switch off your…[laptop]…and go and do something less boring instead.” If you don’t do that, and you try and work your way through a problem, you’re treating the problem like an analytical problem, not an insight problem, and you’re preventing your brain doing that combinatorial thing of mixing old things together to make something new. Taking time out can mean different things – working on another piece of work, doing your timesheet, listening to a podcast, taking some exercise. Even doing mundane tasks – those with a beginning, middle and end – will use your procedural memory and allow you to get closer to those combinations going on subconsciously. Washing up, mowing the lawn and ironing are Sam’s favourites.
What else can we do? According to Sam, we need to be endemically curious – not just about the thing we’re working on, but everything. Fill your boots with new stuff from across the spectrum. “You never know when your brain is going to do that subconscious thing and put those ideas together.”
Why not start by checking out The Reset Show podcast?
