Part 1 of 3 in The True Nature of Business Insights Series
“We need more insights from our data!”
Executives everywhere
This desperate plea echoes from countless boardrooms growing louder as organizations sink deeper into an ocean of data. Meanwhile, analytics teams work harder and faster to create more dashboards, more reports, and more analyses — each promising to deliver more coveted “actionable insights” to transform the business.
Yet despite all the sophisticated analytics tools and endless streams of data, business leaders still struggle to see genuine insights that drive meaningful change.
Why does this disconnect exist? And more importantly, how can we bridge this gap?
The Reality Check: Confusing Answers with Insights
Step into any business review meeting today, and you’ll likely witness many “insights” being shared from every team:
- “Key insight: Website traffic is up 15% month-over-month”
- “Critical insight: Southeast region shows declining conversion rates”
- “Latest App insight: Users now spend 3 extra minutes in our app”
- “Customer insight update: Response times improved 20% this quarter”
Notice something? None of these are insights — they’re all answers to basic business questions. Yet we’ve brainwashed ourselves to label every data point, metric change, and observation as an “insight.”
As someone who has spent years in the trenches of both business and data analytics, I’ve witnessed firsthand how this misuse of “insights” has evolved from a minor irritation to a major barrier in business decision-making.
The Insight Paradox
In today’s data-rich business world, we’ve fallen into a troubling pattern I call The Insight Paradox: When everything is labeled an insight, nothing truly is an insight. This phenomenon mirrors the well-known Importance Paradox – if everything is important, nothing is important.
Consider this: How many times in the past month have you:
- Heard someone present a specific metric as an “insight”?
- Seen a dashboard labeled “Marketing Insights” that merely shows data trends?
- Received a report titled “Business Insights” that simply describes performance?
The dilution of the term “insight” isn’t just a semantic issue, it has real consequences for businesses.
The Hidden Costs of Insight Misuse
1. Decision Paralysis
When everything is labeled an “insight,” leaders struggle to identify transformative understanding from basic observations. This paralysis leads to delayed decisions or, worse, no decisions.
Example: A marketing team presents 20 “key insights” in their monthly review, leaving executives unclear which findings require their focus and attention. Are they all really important?
2. Resource Drain
Analysts become solely focused on generating reports and dashboards full of “insights” they believe drive change. The reality? These reports often gather digital dust and leaders don’t see any insights.
Example: Data analysts spend 80% of their time creating weekly “insight reports” that executives admit they barely read or understand.
3. Strategic Drift
Organizations fail to identify truly transformative opportunities or blockers amid the noise of pseudo-insights. This often leads to missed opportunities and strategic stagnation.
Example: A company misses an emerging competitor because their “competitive insights dashboard” focuses only on tracking known competitors’.
4. Innovation Barriers
Real breakthrough insights never get discovered as we focus only on the constant stream of routine observations clogging inboxes. Truly innovative ideas never surface or gain traction.
Example: A product team’s genuine insight into changing user behavior gets lost in the weekly flood of meaningless usage statistics labeled as “insights.”
The Foundation of the Problem
At its core, this crisis stems from three key misconceptions:
- All Data Is Insightful:
- Belief: All data contains insights.
- Reality: Most data can provide expected answers to the questions we ask. We don’t always derive insights from data alone.
- Tools Create Insights
- Belief: A software tool can create an insight.
- Reality: Tools help manage and shape the data for humans to understand its meaning. Insights develop from human thinking applied with data using software tools aligned with business objectives.
- Insights Are Easy to Find
- Belief: Insights are easy to find in the data.
- Reality: True insights require deep thinking and careful cultivation. Insights are hidden within our understanding and require data and critical thinking to help unlock it.
Breaking Free from the Crisis
In my next post, I will help share how move forward and dive deep into the anatomy of a true insight and explore how they can transform businesses. I’ll share some real-world examples and break down the components that make genuine insights so powerful.