Recognise that eye-roll? Every time you launch a new initiative.
You’ve seen the stats on poor engagement and limited effectiveness of learning solutions. Inside, you know why. Because you’re an employee too.
Do you really understand your audience, and how they work?
Having this information will help you understand where your people are right now. You’d uncover how people feel, what’s happening, what you’re not being told by your stakeholders. Messages that sounded perfect suddenly might not be so great, timings can suddenly look short-sighted. This level of detail will lead you to radically alter your design. Now you are crafting personalised, relevant solutions that give you a greater chance to massively improve outcomes.
Insight led design is a transformative approach to delivering impact.
Why is insight so important?
As well as their job, people have lots going on in their lives. Think of all the things that might be on their mind:
I’m getting married
My boss is being difficult
Who’s picking up that extra work since Ava left?
It’s so cold outside
Why didn't the team leave any donuts this morning?
People just want to get on with what they’re being paid to do. They have enough to deal with already. Yet, time and time again, we launch tone-deaf programmes.
Humans are complex. Groups of humans, like us at work add to the complexity. Workplaces are dynamic, emergent - ever changing. There is no single solution that will work every time. That’s why this is so hard.
Exercise:
Draw a circle
Draw an equilateral triangle so it fits inside the circle
Draw a triangle 1/3 of the size of the main triangle on each of its sides
Draw triangles 1/3 smaller on those sides
Repeat, and see how many times you can shrink the triangles.
Have you ever seen something like this before? It’s a wonderful quirk of nature highlighted by Chaos Theory, called fractals. If you keep zooming in, you will be able to add an infinite number of triangles. And it will never break the circle. Think about that for a minute: an infinite number of triangles within a single circle.
Now, imagine that circle is your business. The triangle only represents one employee’s potential for thoughts, beliefs, emotion and action. Imagine that multiplied by the number of people in your business.
That’s why these things are so hard to get right. The first step any learning or change is attention. Without engagement, you won’t get attention. People who aren’t looking at things aren’t learning new skills. This is why insight is so important, to give you the best chance to engage your audience.
With the right insight, you can uncover what matters, what’s important, right now for your audience. Then you can deliver what they really need in a way that will work for them. And they will listen.
Designing with insight in mind
The first stage of any project is to Define what you need to do:
What is the problem we need to solve?
Who is the audience?
What does good look like?
What are the success measures?
This detail is critical for success. But it’s not enough to design the right solution. A lot of people go from project definition to designing their solution. Without understand much at all about who they’re designing for. That’s not a recipe for success.
Insight is the missing ingredient. That’s why the next stage of project planning is often called Discovery
Demystifying Discovery
Think of Discovery as an extended investigation. Once you know what good looks like and success measures for the project, take time to explore the issue in more depth: research, and generate insight. You’ll need to make a judgement call on how much time to invest in this stage, but at the very least I recommend running a workshop with senior stakeholders from other parts of the business, desk research, and audience interviews/panels/discussions.
Some of things you might want to look at:
Audience research
Where do they work, tech, team structure etc…
Empathy mapping
Understanding Capability, Opportunity & Motivation for change (COM-B - more on this in the future)
Industry benchmarking
What else is happening across the business?
Has these been done before?
Do you have the skills in-house to achieve the outcomes?
Notice the heavy weighting on the audience there? That’s the real key to insight. If you can uncover what people are really thinking, and how they feel about work, it will allow you to connect closely with your audience. People who feel listened to behave in a far more positive way than those who feel they’re not heard.
Doing this work before diagnosing the problem will give you a whole new way to show value to your audience and your stakeholders.
Before you’re thinking about the solution, or content, spend time to get more insight for your projects.