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Perspicacity noun /pur-spi-kas-i-tee/
š® the quality of having a ready insight into things; shrewdness.
Bonjour, fun fact: je suis bilingue.
In other news, Iām in the midst of running my new Market Intelligence Relay on goodr (theyāre not a client and donāt know Iām doing this) for 4 weeks. You can follow along on LinkedIn or peek at the output on the Kudare site.
My calendar is open and bookable if youāve got work you want to do together this fall.
ā Kurt
Nothing really breaks if you skip the interpretation, it just falls flat.
An annoyingly discouraging amount of what we do as researchers or strategists never really says what we think.
Not that what weāre producing is wrong. I mean, itās accurate, probably long, and Iām sure sounds super profesh. The only issue is that thereās no take in there that someone might disagree with. And I get it. Weāre afraid to introduce biases or over-editorialize something thatās supposed to be completely objective. But is there really value anymore in work that doesnāt come with some degree of subjectivity from an expert?
IMO, there are a few steps that get us from perceiving reality to affecting reality, and that makes what Iām talking about here sound a lot more metaphysical than it is. Iām just talking about getting something done. In our industry, you need to be able to observe the current reality, interpret the implications of that current reality, and then act on it.
Observe, interpret, act.
OBSERVING is cheap, and itās getting cheaper. Weāve got dashboards, brand trackers, and now our good buddy Chat, who can read half the internet before Iāve sat down at my desk with a mediocre coffee.
ACTING got cheap too. Programmatic bidding, automated recipes for lifecycle marketing, massive AI-generated ad setsā¦
And then thereās the middle part (not the one that JTT made famous and gen alpha seems to be bringing back), INTERPRETING. This part never got cheap though, because the market hasnāt figured out how to widgetize it. It doesnāt come with a seat license, thereās no dashboard plugin. You can definitely still buy it, but itās not part of the ones and zeros in your monthly SaaS subscription.
HODL UP, just to be clear here, a summary doesnāt count as interpreting. A summary is just an observation compressed. Same stuff, maybe a little clearer and succinct, but often still missing the š¼šø š½š±š® š®šÆšÆ š¦ššš£.
Interpreting is also the only of these three parts where you can be personally, specifically WRONG. Honestly, terrifying.
ź© Follow the right methodology to collect information? Well done, friend!
ź© Make something real and put it out in the world? Look at you accomplishing things!
ź© But ponder for days about what something might mean and what we should do about it, and then share that perspective out loud? Straight to jail. Jk.
Youāre NOT going to get in trouble. Tell the class what you think.
I forgot to make space for interpretation this summer.
You know how weāre all trying to get AI to do stuff for us? Well I am too. But itās taken me a while to get my head around task decomposition, and the purposeful selection of how tasks in a workflow get assigned, especially human vs machine assignments.
Anyhow, Iāve been building a research machine this summer (Market Intelligence Relay). This thing reads more in a morning than I could all week, but then when you ask it to say what any of it means, you get back 14 of the same boring and obvious āinsightā delivered confidently in a rule of three or telling you to delve into something or whatever. All 14 werenāt necessarily wrong per se, but they were barely more than nothing.
Iād automated the observing (yay!), then automated a summary of the observing instead of making sure any real interpreting got done. And in the task decomposition, that one should definitely have been mine (oops).
But, donāt worry, I only spent WEEKS tweaking and redesigning the machine over and over to try to get it to do it without me before realizing this. Iām fine. Itās fine. Itās nice to feel needed.
Nothing really broke broke when I (unwillingly) skipped the interpretation, it honestly just fell flat.
But going straight from observing to acting can feel sneakily glorious btw. Itās quick, it looks super decisive. Nobodyās stopping you to ask what you think any of it means, because youāve got data and youāve got a plan š¤
[pretend thereās an epic handshake meme here]
Ya, handing over observations without the interpretation feels quicker, but realistically does NOT save anybody time. Now whoeverās building the dang thing has to decide what it all means, probably on a strict deadline, while already in create mode, and having spent a fraction of the time you did with the data (ie observations).
What do we get? The work that comes out the other end is rushed, or shortsighted, or worse has NO perspectiveā¦ no soul.
And what happens with work that got no soul? Well, most people probably wonāt bother to call it bad. Itāll be competent and on-brief and completely forgettable. Because the reality is that bad work gets flagged and fixed, but meh work just ships and gets forgotten.
Sooooo think deep thoughts! Wonder, hypothesize, ponder, question.. then form a brave enough opinion that itāll make at least one someone mad.. then say that sh*t with your whole chest!
k but how?
A few tactics you can steal. Sometimes they help, sometimes they donāt.
before anything leaves your desk, find the sentence or paragraph where you took a stance. Then say it to yourself, out loud like a weirdo. If you canāt find it, you know what to do.
change the Key Findings section title to something like What I Think This Means. Youāll think a lot harder about the relevance and impact of whatās in there when youāre clearly taking personal responsibility for it.
try writing the so what BEFORE building the deck. Force yourself to build the story of the report/brief/whatever around the things that matter most, instead of doing the easy (though tedious) thing of just giving a laundry list of every observation youāve gathered.
send your nuanced perspective to whoever has to act on it before the big formal readout. It can be a few bullets in a slack, it can be a 15-min calendar invite, it can be an informal chat while grabbing a spindrift from the office fridge (why is there only ever lemon left? justice for blood orange tangerine!). Just get their reaction ahead of time, and go into the bigger meeting basing the focus around that pre-established alignment (or disagreement, because that can be just as fruitful).
ok one more, less about making sure that youāre bringing the interpretation and more about making sure that your interpretation is heard and acted on: ask whoever is supposed to make the decision or take the action āwhat are you going to do differently if this is right?ā
Gāluck. go tell people what you think. YOUR OPINION MATTERS
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ā Kurt