Devoted to how insight is developed, shared and acted on
Share this article :
Other articles you may be interested in:
A Sense of Style
Looking at Belbin roles within teams
Take A New Look At Insight: Think like a..... Chef
Analogy between building insight and making a meal
Stop Trying To Delight Your Customers
An excellent article suggesting an alternative measure for use with customer experience
Organisational culture
** - Recommended - Describes a model of 4 classic company cultures
Mind How You Go!
The Role of Emotional Intelligence - or why your EI is as important at your IQ when it comes to your career
Are you Satisfied at Being Delighted?
Why minimising customer effort is good for business; and how to calculate your Customer Effort Score
Being Seen to be Better
Heath Brothers article on 'watching the game film'
Research Brief Outline
A checklist that you can incorporate into your research briefing template
Take A New Look At Insight: Think like a..... Surgeon
This 'take a new look series' investigates how Insight teams can learn valuable lessons from people in other professions. This month, we learn from the example of a surgeon…
Insight teams have to pull together information from lots of sources to build pictures that are as complete, clear and correct as possible. These can then guide business decisions that are often worth large amounts of money. However, complex projects often involve a team of people with different skills, expertise and ideas. It’s essential that one person takes absolute ownership of the results and ensures that the work and experience of the different contributors knits together correctly.
This situation mirrors that of the surgical team. Even in routine surgery, there will be a team of people – the anaesthetist, the theatre nurse, and often a supporting surgeon. On more complicated procedures, the team may increase, with each person having a role to play. However, the surgeon is still in control and takes full responsibility. They will delegate different aspects of the operation but will carry out the core surgical processes.
This is because someone needs to have an absolutely clear vision of what they are going to do and when, in order for the operation to be a success. If a supporting surgeon was to cut something before the lead surgeon was ready, or if a blood vessel was cut before a clamp was in place to stem the blood flow, disaster could ensue.
Conceptual integrity
This principle is called ‘conceptual integrity’. It means that one person has a vision of what is needed and undertakes all the key parts of the work, even though others may contribute when requested.
This idea has been extended to other areas. In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a seminal book called ‘The Mythical Man-Month’, on how to create major software systems. He had been responsible for developing the hardware and the operating system for the massive IBM 360 computer system, and the book described the lessons he had learnt. One of the most important was the idea of ‘conceptual integrity’.
Brooks recognised that an operating system involves huge amounts of programming and therefore a sizeable team. But if he had simply divided up the work between the team and then assumed that all of the pieces, once assembled, would work, this would have guaranteed disaster. The problem was that each programmer would only be responsible for their part and would not always see how that might affect the contribution of other team members. The net result would be software that fought with itself.
His solution was that all of the core elements of the operating system had to be written by one person (the equivalent of the surgeon). Other team members were only responsible for specific sub-routines or isolated pieces of software. The lead programmer was then responsible for piecing everything together. But as that person had central control, they could see and correct any potential conflict between different parts of the system. This principle has been central to the development of large software systems ever since.
The insight application
So what does this mean for insight? It shows that one person must take responsibility for standing back from a problem and seeing the bigger picture. Information and opinions may come from many sources, but all too often each contributor will have a different, (and limited) perspective and could therefore bias the picture. The information from different sources may often conflict, requiring one person to stand back and determine the real picture.
Too often within the insight world, the problem comes down to one of two issues:
- Only one person looks at a problem and therefore fails to bring in the wider expertise and knowledge of the team – which might mean there is conceptual integrity but incomplete information.
OR
- A team of people will contribute to a problem, but each will present their information separately, resulting in a confused picture.
Therefore, for any problem, an insight team should always involve others who will bring knowledge and expertise to the situation. However, one person must take the lead in piecing it all together (with minimum conflict) to create a clear picture that actually addresses the issue at hand. That person must always think about the questions others might ask when presented with the picture. Whatever happens, they must not sit on the fence – they must ensure that they have a clear view.
Copyright © 2012 Customer Insight Solutions. All Rights Reserved