Activate Your Insights
My esteemed colleague
Randy McDonald
has already spoken about the difference between generating insights and coming up with discoveries. He makes the shrewd point that genuine discoveries, given their reliance on human insight, just aren't scalable. Instead, you need to generate insights through some kind of automated process that involves no human intervention or analysis on a regular basis. It's the only approach that's truly sustainable and scalable. Anything else is equivalent to lighting that money on fire, or buying a WNBA franchise.
But one important detail is figuring out how to
activate
these generated insights. Inactive, unactivated insights are like dormant volcanoes. Powerful, but so what? They might as well just be middle-aged mountains with eruptile dysfunction. You need that fiery, indigestion-stricken, magmatic belly to give the mountain any gas, otherwise the other mountains won't respect it and its dominant effluence.
The key to this process is activation. How do you activate insights? By making it easy for stakeholders to action them. Actioning an insight is how you know it's activated. If you can't action it, it's not activated. Actionability and activatedness are intertwined in that regard.
Bottom line:
activate your insights
or they'll be dead on arrival. You might even want to invest in an automatic insight generation activation protocol, but that might be further along in the analytical transformation than you'll be in the near term. Focus on insight activation to let your team members transform your organization by actioning them with maximum speed to value.