What is the key insight?

It is essential now more than ever before, to respond creatively and fast. But wait, take a step back — it’s not enough to just be reactive, you need to have the right understanding to have the right aim before firing. The path to ‘know clearly’ starts from insights, the right insights with a great deal of churning or synthesis lead to the key insight. The key insight is the deepest, most fundamental human truth that gives you the superpower to reframe any problem as an opportunity.

Take a crash course now!

Imagine and respond to this scenario — a mother and a toddler are in a public space, perhaps a mall. The mother has driven here and has a long list of tasks. The three year old should ideally not have come along, but she didn’t have a choice. Just as mom begins her shopping expedition, the little fellow decides that he’s had enough and starts finding reasons to leave. He gets more and more agitated when he doesn’t get his way. Eventually, he throws himself on the ground and refuses to get up.

In this situation, you are a helpful stranger who is challenged to change this situation that has clearly gone downhill into a preferred one. You have 5 minutes and 10 pieces of color paper. You have to think on your feet, use your imagination and the paper creatively.

When you play this game, Points are being given for acting (to the ones playing mother and child), for creative problem solving and prototyping (to you) and everyone gets to feel the urgency and the delicate nature of the situation.

This exercise is a riot and you must try it to discover the importance of thinking laterally, of thinking on your feet, and you will realise that you need practice - in observation, understanding and continuous reflection.

It takes a lifetime of preparation to feel, think and respond creatively - in life and work situations where there is no formula, no fixed plan and very few resources at hand.

At a recent Advanced Design Thinking Workshop with Banker - Academicians, led by Spread, teams and individuals experienced the mother child scenario as a warm up exercise to understand the importance of insights and creative problem solving, of Design Thinking as process that is not linear but is about a feel, think, do mindset.

While the exercise has nothing to do with money, the scenario discussed earlier was created to emphasise the importance of (human) understanding. It’s only natural to think that Bankers are in the money business. Right? But are they not more importantly in the people business - dealing with their needs, challenges, hopes and more so aspirations. And don’t you think that there isn’t another topic around which there are higher sensitivities than money. Strangely, it’s a bit like love - that changes relationships, lives, everything!

Technology will free up Next Generation Bankers from routine tasks and they will have the opportunity to focus on being the human interface, the mind, heart and soul of the banking customer journey! Young bankers will be more and more in the people business, even as they have lesser and lesser physical contact with their clients. Clearly there is an opportunity for Bankers to be insightful design thinkers, leveraging their understanding and creativity in every interaction and in all situations.

Which brings us back to insights. That moment when the fog lifts and you see things clearly in your mind’s, as if for the first time - is a moment of insight; of understanding situations, people, life as well as your own self; in an ongoing search for truth.

The journey towards developing insights is one of lifelong practice. It is the essential ingredient of the designerly approach - the hunger for answers, the curiosity to look under the surface, the desire to go deeper and find the real problems that need to be solved. Sharing some learned and/or assimilitated approaches to developing better insights. Hope they are useful.

The hover mode

Keep the drone view, figure out the broad coordinates and hover! Practice observation with open eyes and an open mind — whether you are trying to understand events and happenings or people. Widen and deepen your view. What you can see from an objective and holistic perspective, you can totally miss from an upclose narrow view. When you begin to see connections, you see emerging patterns. This enables you to differentiate between things as they seem, to things as they are.

Fresh Eyes

Imagine you are wearing a futuristic headset, that allows you to see everything with baby eyes. Without any preconceived notions or biases. Make an effort to recognise your own biases and consciously destroy them. Be authentic. If your subconscious mind has already reached a conclusion, you will gain nothing new. A point of view is different from an insight. Observe without agendas with fresh eyes, to gain fresh insights.

This is easier said than done. Why not, as you see your own biases surface, put them down on a sheet of paper and rip it, bin it!

Real Conversations

If you have the opportunity for good old fashioned face to face conversation to gain understanding, listen truly genuinely! Come closer and don’t pass judgement - even if you don’t articulate it, the other can see it, the guards go up and the truth is hidden. Don’t take notes - instead, contribute meaning to the discussion. Respond in your own words, help give an objective view and insights.

An observation or fact is objective whereas an insight is abductive. What is happening here vs the core reason behind why this could perhaps be happening.

Mirroring

You may have heard about walking a mile in another’s shoes as a design research technique. While you may do so quite literally, I am talking here about becoming one with their story, let’s imagine a mirror. Where you see and experience another’s journey, their story, its ups and especially downs. A story that absorbs you so fully that you become the lead character and feel the pain, the desires and the aspirations.

Lets just call this mirroring — when you are not rationally reflecting (pun intended) but feeling and thus experiencing the deepest empathy.

A meditative mindset

If we train our mind over days, months, years to focus attention inwards, interestingly we become even more outwardly aware. We discover more about what is truly happening to us, around us and within us. Learning to smell, taste, listen, experience things fully.

Vipassana, for one is a direct and gradual cultivation of mindfulness or awareness, a form of mental training.

‘We learn to listen to our own thoughts without being caught up in them. We wake up to what life really is. Life has a much deeper texture than that if we bother to look, and if we look in the right way.’

I am super curious about Vipassana and will head out soon as I finish this post to find a program.

Reconstruct thoughts

The above approaches will help you kickstart the insighting process. Besides which, there are several tools and techniques. The simplest of which is sticky notes and clustering.

Tape large white sheets of paper on a wall and stand in front of them with a diverse enough group. These sheets become the canvas to freely express thoughts and ideas from a flexible and not a fixed view (the standing makes much of the difference). Once independent sparks are on colourful sticky notes, they can be clustered. Affinity mapping or clustering allows for pattern recognition and the articulation of insights. (I tried an online tool - 10,000ft insights. Quite useful but I went back to sticky notes.)

Sticky notes are a great tool to take apart thoughts, to reconstruct them in new ways. For a fresh thought ‘construct’. There is always a deeper truth or one key insight. Finding that insight is like finding gold when digging a mine. It takes rigour and while one can learn about it in a workshop, it takes lifelong practice, constant churning to experience the aha moment of arriving at the key insight.

Always ask — what is the key insight?

Coming back to our workshop where the discussion about insights started, and led to this post — there is as yet a 51% unbanked population that needs to be included. Its worth thinking about and preparing to educate the Next Generation Banker differently, to enable and empower her or him to respond effectively within a dynamic, competitive and disruptive banking scenario. All the time, engaging with and retaining happy customers while acquiring new ones.

Teams created a persona of the millennial — which we decided to also use as a proto persona for the Next Gen Banker. After which, we went into insights, clustering or affinity mapping and with much reflection, we derived the key insight.

Do see the example we developed.

It is usual to think of Millennials as a set of folks who are perhaps disengaged, distracted, directionless. When they are students of banking, the key task then seems daunting — to feed a young student enormous amounts of the most current information about a changing and tightly regulated world…money business remember! But there could be more, there is always space for improvement and its fabulous that we are consciously thinking ahead, for these young folks who’s careers are just beginning.

In the insighting process, it was realised that we need to drop our biases about banking and the next gen banker profile, train her/him to deal with disruption, shed the baggage that comes with banking being a legacy business, find alternate ways for ‘information readiness’ (think ‘mindtickle’ for instance), develop empathy, prepare for a role in the people business. Another simple and fundamental fact is that this young person who is choosing to enter the banking sphere, is not necessarily someone who is crazed about changing the world radically. He or she perhaps wants stability, wants to make it big steadily, and in the present moment, personally just wants a better life.

Can we then train Next Gen Bankers through banking to make a better life for themselves. Can we make them realize that as bankers, they are enabling others too to make better choices and design a life that is a little better everyday. If we can create the systems to do so, perhaps their job might seem less overwhelming and more empowering and meaningful.

Before you develop solutions, remember to search within, for the key insight. And remember that it is a shift from the conscious and the rational to the subconscious and super conscious — to the interconnected universe. Deep, right? No wonder it doesn’t come easy!

This is the first in a series of reflections and observations from our first workshop around design methods and banking.