Devoted to how insight is developed, shared and acted on
Buddy Can You Spare The Time
One of the most important elements of an insight role is being able to summarise a huge amount of data and analysis clearly and succinctly. Winston Churchill is supposed to have written to a friend “I’m sorry for writing you such a long letter, but I haven’t time to write you a short one”.
Precis has become something of a lost art, and summarising a large piece of work can be notoriously difficult, especially if it is carried out by the person responsible for it. It’s the classic case of “Can’t see the wood for the trees”.
The most effective solution is to get someone else (a ‘buddy’) to do it with you. This approach enables you to benefit from:
- Greater clarity – For some reason, if someone sits down with you and just asks you to describe the key points of a project, you will probably find that you can summarise it better verbally that you ever can in writing.
- A new perspective – Even if your explanation rambles a bit, the person listening provides a great sounding board. They should then be able to summarise what you’ve said in their own words. Most of the time, they’ll probably get the main message right – but even if they don’t, you can then correct them. And if you haven’t made everything clear, they will ask you questions that will help them to understand the key issues so that they can help you to summarise them.
- A faster response – It might seem at first that calling in someone else to help you will just take more time. The opposite is actually true – it can be a fantastic time saver. Writing a summary on your own can take hours, or even days. Using a ‘buddy’ can often cut the time taken down to just half an hour or so.
A friend in deed
‘Buddying up’ also has huge value in other areas. For example, before you even start a project, you may want to parade some of your main ideas past one or two valued colleagues to see if they can see their relative worth. They may even be able to suggest a few refinements that could help you to gain other useful information.
Again, if you want to put a financial value to the conclusions from a project, it’s always better to ask a colleague to stand back and apply some common sense to it. They might be able to give a more objective view of what something might or might not be worth – and might think of costs or benefits that you haven’t taken into account.
But perhaps the best use of a buddy is for simple sense checking. You may have spent ages on a project and drawn seemingly fantastic conclusions and recommendations. However, you may equally have ended up becoming too involved to make recommendations that are actually credible. A buddy can take a ‘Dragon’s Den’ approach, by testing what you’ve said and making sure that it isn’t foolish.
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