This is a snapshot of some of our thinking around the changing Landscape of insights, insight capability and the challenges and opportunities it presents.

You'd have to have been asleep for the past few years to miss the revolution in insight capability. It's fast becoming a key differentiator in business let alone marketing. We are at a point where we are discovering just how much there is to discover. From new sources of data and information to new research and analytical approaches the world of insight is changing. But, over and above the avalanche of data and information, new research and analysis technologies great insights still have precious qualities - they are unique, compelling, incisive, profound and human 'moments of truth' that can change they way we think, influence entire organisations and re-shape industries. They are incredibly valuable, but too often undervalued, invisible or simply ignored. That's changing.

We've seen profound shifts from relatively simple market research and data base marketing analysis to an agile, interactive insight discipline encompassing collaboration, ideation and advanced research techniques, (wearable research, gamification research, co-creation, customer ideation...) and sophisticated analytics (semiotics, mobile ethnography, predictive analytics, attribution modelling, micro-targeting, re-targeting...). But what are the drivers, challenges and opportunities facing organisations that truly want to be insight led?

1. Informing decisions

There is now and perhaps always will be a need to challenge decisions, intuition and orthodoxy, to test assumptions and bias, to challenge leadership as well as inform it. As insight capability develops and analytics become trusted, this will become easier. But, for many organisations leadership and cultural change will be a challenge. Essentially we have to become smarter about how we interpret randomness and situations, how we make decisions and take corrective action. We need to careful not to encode assumptions and bias or to obviate learning and knowledge that challenges what we're doing.

2. New ways of working

Part of the journey to an insight led organisation lies in different ways of working, different relationships, broader coalition across disciplines, departments and organisations. We each need to do 'more with less' but collectively 'more with more'. We need to be less transactional, more collaborative, less individualistic and more interactive, more flexible and more inclusive. We know that individuals and solo organisations are far less effective at developing valuable insight than those that collaborate and ideate through an eco-system.

We also know that building new insight capability requires attitudinal and behavioural change. More and more organisations are engaging in 'serious play', challenging themselves to do things differently and explore more. Creating an environment of play, freedom to explore sounds easy, in practice it can be challenging, but when it works the results are astounding.

3. Intelligent networks

It's highly likely that we are on the cusp of new information revolution that will offer new insight through things like the Internet of Things (IoT), personal sensors, home hubs. What's more, the transformation of networks from communications protocol to decision making engine has been going on for years. Machine learning, predictive analytics, programmatic marketing, dynamic price point optimisation are just the start. Where next, perhaps sentient networks, sensory alerts, who knows? All we can say right now is that the inexorable trend toward shared 'situational knowledge' will continue for some time to come.

4. Broad coalition

Like marketing, insight is no longer the exclusive domain of a small group of talented experts. Instead insight relies on effective integration of a broad range of disciplines. This might mean co-location, close proximity of people. But it certainly means coalition amongst leadership and practitioners that have a range of skills and competencies (strategists, tacticians, analysts, technologists, behavioural scientists, marketers..). We've been working to develop a new group of 'collaboration and ideation' archetypes and work-styles that suggest tomorrows organisational models will be quite different from the ones we have today.

5. Customers

More and more organisations are re-focusing resources around customer relationships, experiences and journeys. Customers are becoming more directly involved in ideation, product and experience development. But, while the business advantage of deeper customer insight may be obvious, some customers simply don't want or in fact need 'closer' relationships with organisations. Regulators are beginning to recognise this too, stepping into the debate with behavioural economics, information usage, contact management and so on.

It might be better to think of effective insight as a way to tell if deeper relationships are viable or in fact, preferable, even necessary at all. Inevitably opportunities to develop insight about customers will continue to develop, but great insight will temper these opportunities with sensitivity, fully considering the situational needs of customers. For business and the customer new balances need to be struck. Balances, where 'intelligence' helps to concurrently position brands, commercial returns and at the same time build longer term customer value, that is real benefits the customer receives. This requires a new kind of dialogue.

So what...

Most organisations recognise these challenges to some extent. However, it's what they can actually do that counts. Too many organisations are perhaps underestimating the transformation to 'insight led' and are missing opportunities to invest in resource and capability that will quickly become 'playing stakes', future assets in a race toward more effective customer connections and 'customer first' strategies. Interesting times....