-   Courses later this year

Welcome to the 13th edition of 5-Minute Insights, the e-mail newsletter from Steve Wills and Sally Webb at Customer Insight Solutions (CI Solutions). We hope that in the few short minutes that it takes to scan the key messages, you will find snippets that are both informative and stimulating. If you want to find out more, we have provided links to longer articles for some of the insights.

INSIGHT IN PRACTICE

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

If you want to increase your influence in your organisation, it really helps to have friends in high places. You may have a great boss with a lot of influence, who is happy to champion the insight cause and open doors for you. But what if you don’t?

You will need to identify and develop supporters who can help you and your team to have the impact and influence you both need and deserve. But how? 

• You need to assess their relative value against criteria such as their seniority and influence, and their appreciation of insight
• You then need a strategy that will enable you to build, develop or nurture your relationship with them
• You also need to consider how you could demonstrate your value to them at a business level 

On a more personal level, you could explore their preferred way of working and communicating. If you can help and impress them, you will be well on the way to developing a potentially powerful advocate for your team and for the insight cause. In the next issue of 5MI, we’ll be looking at the opposite side of the coin - damage limitation (never mind your friends – keep closer to your enemies!)  

For more detailed information and ideas, please click here.

INSIGHT INTO INSIGHTS 

As an Insight team, you should be sharing your latest insights regularly, so that you know what’s happening with different internal clients or in different business areas. Many teams get together to discuss project updates, but don’t make time to share what they’re learning. This could involve: 

• Regular team meetings (some teams alternate between progress updates and insight sharing events).
• You could ask all team members to come to the meeting with a prepared summary to share.
• Alternatively, they could each share one or two insights from recent work.

When sharing, it’s important to remember that there are two forms of insight:

Insights (plural) –These need to be passed on to the right people as quickly as possible to ensure that any potential opportunities aren’t lost. They include: flashes of inspiration; a penetrating discovery; ‘Aha!’ moments; typically insights from analysis, research or observation.

Insight (singular) – This is all about having a deep, embedded set of knowledge that helps structure and decision-making. A key role of Insight teams is to join up the ‘dots’ so that people can see the bigger picture – and then to get it embedded in the organisation.

When you get together you should be sharing insights (plural) – so that you can then build insight (singular) - that bigger picture. Click here to find out more.

SOUNDBITE SID

This is the latest in a set of 'pen portraits' of different types of internal clients, and the issues you may need to address when working with them.

Soundbite Sid

Sid is a brand manager who is more interested in the creative side of things than in gaining a detailed understanding of projects. He likes to be seen as someone who has great ideas. To give this impression to others, he’s likely to visit your team and ask: “I’m meeting the Director – what new insights have you got?”

Unfortunately, Sid doesn’t really understand insight at all. If you let him have any useful information, he’s likely to take the credit for it himself – and he’ll also mis-use it. But if you don’t help him, he’s likely to tell others that you’re unhelpful. 

So how can you handle him? The key depends upon whether he’ll learn and change his ways if you take the time to educate him. The alternatives are:

• Education, education, education – If he’s open to learning, explain to him that there are no ‘instant insights’, and that you need advance notice of any issues.
• Forewarned and forearmed – If he won’t listen to rational argument and advice, give him insights that have already been seen by the Director.
• A hard lesson – He’ll soon learn – probably by being embarrassed at a meeting – that he needs to take responsibility for anything he wants to introduce as his idea.

For more detail about how to handle Sid, click here.