86 — Thinking in Paradoxes: Disruptive Insights with Chris Kocek

Karen: 00:00:00

Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Greenbook Podcast. I am so glad that you are taking the time to join us today. It’s a pleasure to have you here with us in spirit knowing that you’re listening at your leisure. I’m Karen Lynch hosting today and excited to be talking to Chris Kocek, who is the author of a book that I devoured this week called Any Insights Yet? It’s about connecting the dots, creating new categories, and transforming your business. So I’m happy to welcome Chris. I’m going to let him introduce for just a moment. But I will also tell you that he is the founder and CEO of Gallant Branding, which is, you know, a brand strategy agency, really, that’s, you know, having a data-driven strategic planning process behind some of the work that they do. So, Chris, I’m going to let you tell everybody a little bit more about yourself, but welcome to the show.

Chris: 00:01:03

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Karen: 00:01:06

Tell me just a little bit about your agency and what it is you’re doing there.

Chris: 00:01:11

Yeah. So Gallant Branding—started it about 10 years ago, and our focus is on building brands for a better world. I got my start at BBDO New York all the back in 2007, and then I ended up over at GSD&M here in Austin, which is where I am today. And, when my daughter was nine months old, I thought, “Well, why not give something new a try?” So I, you know, jumped onto the lily pad that is Gallant and started working on—there was a quick-service restaurant here in Austin called Snap Kitchen. They were our very first client, and that’s how it all began.

Karen: 00:01:50

That’s really great. You know, I love—we love Austin, so we’re, you know, shouting out to everybody who knows that we’ve had our IIEX North America event in Austin, which we will be having, of course, again in the spring, and we can share that link with all of our listeners. But Austin is a really great city, and I imagine that it’s just loaded with inspiration and creative fodder for an agency like yours.

Chris: 00:02:11

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the convergence of all of the colleges within 5 to 10 mile radius, the good weather, except for the summers when we’ve had, you know, so many 100 plus degree days. Maybe that inspires creativity. But also the convergence of cultures. I mean, the capital is here, so there’s a little swirl of politics. There is swirl of creativity—of course, ‘Keep Austin Weird.’ You’ve got a lot of artists, a lot of different people, different kinds of thinking, and it’s really always inspiring.

Karen: 00:02:42

Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. So talk to me just a little bit before we get into the book, which I’m really quite excited about, and I’ll tell you all why I’m really excited to talk about this book. But I want to just go on a little journey with you. Help me understand what it was in the work that you were doing that brought you to the point where you wanted to write this book, where you wanted to, you know, put your thoughts about getting insights and what even is an insight into words. What brought you on that journey?

Chris: 00:03:09

Yeah. That’s a great question. So it started after I wrote the first—this first book, The Practical Pocket Guide to Account Planning, and I was giving talks at different universities. And at UT Austin and a couple of other universities, the students would come up and say, “Hey... I wish that chapter on insights had been a little bit longer.” And so I said, “Okay. I’ll work on a second edition. I’ll make that section a little bit longer. Maybe I’ll throw in a couple of other new chapters.” But the insight section just kind of grew and grew and grew until it eventually became its own book.

Karen: 00:03:42

Yeah. And I don’t know how many people in this industry has grappled with the question ‘what is in an insight’. So, I mean, I’ve addressed it in some of the presentations that I’ve given in previous companies that I’ve worked for, and I’ve seen it in presentations also. We still grapple with what an insight even is, and I loved seeing the many definitions that you even brought to text here. What has been your experience with people defining insights in a variety of ways?

Chris: 00:04:10

Yeah, I mean, you know, that’s sort of the opening of the book is that people use it so much. It’s so overused that it’s almost lost its meaning, right? I mean, it would be like, you know, if everything I did, you said, “That’s amazing,” right? At some point, the word ‘amazing’ would kind of start to lose some of its luster. It wouldn’t mean as much anymore. And so, yeah, I kept hearing that word over and over when I do research, you know, for our clients. I often will find reports that say, you know, “20 insights,” and things like that. And so, you know, I go look them up, and I’m like, “Oh, those aren’t insights,” you know. Like, those are interesting facts. Those are interesting data points, but they’re not the same things as insights and, you know—and I don’t want to split hairs on like, “Oh, well, if you didn’t use the right word, we can’t have a conversation.” Of course, we can have that conversation. But, again, it dilutes the word if we’re using it improperly, if we’re not being more precise with our language. And I think, you know, as a researcher you probably know this first hand. Words matter. Words are very important.

Karen: 00:05:14

Seriously. And, you know, the thing is I—and I’ve talked about this a ton before, and I think you and I were talking about it just before we started recording. So I have this, you know, career as a qualitative researcher before taking this position, and I’ve also taught, you know, writing qualitative research reports, and I helped form a qualitative department at one of the previous insights providers that I worked at. And the reality is, is people need to be taught that a finding is not an insight. And, in your book, you mentioned, you know, observations are not insights. Data is not an insight. It is all just the findings of the work, the results of the study. The insights are something completely different if you think about it. It's the connecting of the dots. You used a great metaphor, which I’m jumping ahead to, you know, kind of the metaphor of the Big Dipper and the constellations. So can you kind of explain that metaphor to our audience about the work of connecting the dots to actually get to an insight?

Chris: 00:06:10

Yeah. I mean, that took me a while to get to because I was trying to figure out myself how do I define an insight. What is it? And, also, in talking with so many people, I would ask other people like, “What’s your definition of an insight?” And there was a lot of swirling language. There was some overlaps, but there was a lot of—I don’t know if it was confusion, but just different ideas. And so I kept thinking to myself, “What is something that is right in front of you, right, that you can see, but you can’t necessarily see all of it unless you look closely?” And I spent a fair amount of time in my younger years in Canyonlands National Park, where there are a lot of stars. You know, it’s a dark-sky community out there. And I thought, “You know, an insight is a lot like a constellation.” You have to connect the dots between the stars. And, again, you might not know which stars connect to each other. But, with our ancestors or our relatives or someone comes up and tells us, “Oh, those three stars, those five or seven stars, that comprises the Big Dipper,” or, “That comprises, you know, Cassiopeia,” or whichever, you know, constellations. And I thought, “Yeah. That’s really, like, a good metaphor for it because it’s not just one thing.” A data point is one star in the constellation. A personal observation is one star in the constellation. And you have to then connect the dots in your mind or on paper in a way that can then hopefully inspire other people.

Karen: 00:07:46

And sometimes it’s elusive, right? Like, sometimes you can see it, and it’s all right in front of you, and then you’re like, “Oh, wait. Is that it?” And you—your focus comes in and out because your brain is grappling with it. You know, I can’t tell you how often I’ve experienced sort of what I know is an insight, and it’s really fleeting. Like, literally, it’s so clear in my brain, and then, three seconds later, and I’m like, “Wait. I just had it, and now it’s gone again.” Like, there’s these moments where you have to really focus on it and be deliberate and mindful about the time it takes to get to it. Because it doesn’t always happen in a flash. Sometimes, it actually is, you know, really thinking, really taking a step back and looking at how it all comes together.

Chris: 00:08:25

Oh, yeah. It goes in and out. And that’s also where the star or constellation analogy works so well because have you ever tried to look directly at a star and you can’t see it? But then you turn your vision just a little bit couple degrees to the right, and the star shines brighter. So, like, looking away allows you to see it more clearly as paradoxical as that is.

Karen: 00:08:46

And I’m all about metaphor, right? So now I think—like, and sometimes it’s just a little cloudy, right? And you know it’s there, but you—you know, you have to just wait for time to pass for just a little bit longer or for something that’s in the way to get out of the way. Anyway, I love it. You also go on in this book, which we can get into, some of the things that actually help define a true insight for you. But I do want to share with you one of the—again, I used to work for a full-service company called InsightsNow, and the chief research officer there—he was my manager at the organization—had a working definition of an insight, which was ‘an unexpected human truth that you can act upon.’ And it was very—it was a sound bite, right. It was really easy to memorize and grab onto. And I loved when I saw your characteristics of a true insight enveloping those and also even bringing a little bit more into it, right? So you have the—you know, it inspires action, so it’s something actionable, right. It’s not just something that lives out there. It’s something that you can actually do something with or implement some change or strategic directive against, but also that it’s not obvious, right, somewhat unexpected, and it does tap into a human truth. So let’s talk about some of the other things that you think bring an insight actually to fruition that are a little bit broader than the working definition that I had learned a few years ago.

Chris: 00:10:06

Yeah. I mean, so some of the other characteristics that make an insight and insight?

Karen: 00:10:10

Yeah. Please.

Chris: 00:10:11

Yeah. I mean, again, going back to data and observations, those have to be part of it. Unfortunately, you probably can’t just go on gut instinct alone. You can try. That gets into the whole issue of, like, how do you sell an insight to other people. And if you show up and just say, “Hey... I’ve got a gut instinct. This is the insight,” you may lose some people along the way because, you know, people don’t usually want to bet tens of millions of dollars for their next campaign on your gut instinct. So I think it does need to include some—you know, some few data points or observations or trends, you know, having a convergence of trends, or sometimes a divergence of trends, like what’s going on there. There can be a tension, right? And speaking of diverging trends, the whole cultural tension component, right? So it doesn’t always have to have a cultural tension, but there’s a lot of—I like to say there’s a lot of potential in the tension. So, when you find polarities—and there’s no shortage of polarities in our society [laugh] right now.

Karen: 00:11:12

Absolutely [laugh] .

Chris: 00:11:13

When you find polarities, look in the center of the polarities. It’s kind of, you know, the shades of gray, not Fifty Shades of Grey, just shades of gray between the two opposite sides. And somewhere in there, there’s going to be something probably more nuanced and more powerful that you can tap into.

Karen: 00:11:33

That section of the book, to our listeners, Chris digs deep into some of these conflicting cultural tension points where these two things coexist, right? And it’s all about the situation that you find yourself in or the context around it. So, you know, which one is true: ‘if you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself,’ or ‘if you want something done, you should outsource it’? You know, those are [laugh] —those are two realities that could coexist together and, in different situations, one might be true versus the other. But they are said as if they are, you know, indisputable truths. And I think that that’s where the tension is because there is some really great mystique in that. And, if you come across one of those—listeners, if you come across one of those things where two truths can actually both be true at separate times but maybe not at the same time, there might be a nugget of insight in there that you can play with.

Chris: 00:12:27

Absolutely.

Karen: 00:12:29

Let’s talk about the trend work for a minute, also, because there was another section of the book that I loved and really mulled over for quite a bit. When you look at—a lot of people in our industry focus on trends and they do trend work. What I loved about it was it’s not just one trend that sometimes leads to the truly insightful thought. You can actually list several trends happening at the same time, and then an insight might arise from that. Could you talk a little bit more about that conceptually and how you can glean an insight from trends which are not necessarily first-hand research that leads to data and data points?

Chris: 00:13:08

Yeah. I mean, hopefully this example will be helpful. But, you know, in the book I talk about the Lay’s ‘Do Us A Flavor’ campaign, right. Talk about different trends and different things happening at the same time, some converging but most actually diverging from each other. And so, you know, you’ve got—on the one hand, I think one of the things driving the trends toward exotic flavors, you’ve got, you know, immigration. Different people from all different cultures, you know, expanding the American taste pallet. And Lay’s is a global brand anyway, right, so it’s not just, you know, here in America. But, you know, different people saying, “Hey... I would be interested in a chicken tikka masala or a tikka masala-flavored potato chip,” or, “I would be interested in a wasabi-flavored potato chip.” Now, again, you know, years back, let’s say, that would’ve been crazy to suggest going to market with something like that. But there’s that trend going on. There’s the trend in terms of customizable quick-turn packaging. So a lot of times technology, certain technologies, can really speed up an advantage within a particular company. And so, with Lay’s, you know, their ability to do small batch sizes for different chips and things like that I think, you know, was helpful for them in that effort. And then, one of the things that we found in our own research that I would guess Lay’s probably knew about too was that, when you buy an exotic flavor of chip, you almost always buy a backup bag. You buy your safety. Now, I don’t know if they knew that ahead of time or if that was just a happy accident. But in our own research with a chip or snack brand, we found that to be true. In focus group after focus group, people talked about—you know, it’s a risky proposition buying a new flavored potato chip or whatever kind of chip, and you want to make sure that you don’t go home or that you’re not empty handed when you go to the pantry if you end up not liking that chip. So what it ended up, you know—either incidentally or accidentally, it created probably double the sales.

Karen: 00:15:18

And, I mean, that kind of information to mull over or those pieces of a puzzle that researchers are putting together, that happens through these conversations. I know that—and again, I fully disclosed that I was a qualitative researcher. And, you know, you mention in the book being on the side of what’s often perceived and dismissed as, you know, the expensive qualitative research, you know, the conversations that you have with people that bring you to some of these human truths and some of these realities that, if mulled over, can actually lead to something. Tell me a little bit about, in your experience, how companies balance that, that desire to bring in some qualitative intel, if you will, to some of the data they’re collecting?

Chris: 00:16:01

Well, I think you have to convince them. I mean, you first start the persuasion campaign with the clients in the first place because, you know, one of the things is big data is important. You need to have it. And, again, as a researcher, you can start there. You can start with what’s already known, right? What have they gleaned? But then I think it’s really important to ask ‘what hasn’t been asked,’ right? And so our discipline in research is to ask the questions that nobody’s asking. Because a lot of times questions can be—I hate to say it, but a lot of them can be navel-gazing questions. ‘What did you think about us?’ You know [laugh] , ‘Would you—

Karen: 00:16:40

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: 00:16:42

—would recommend us to’—and those are helpful, but that’s not really going to get you to higher ground. You have to understand them, the people that you’re talking to. I remember working on John Deere when I was at GSD&M, and one of the questions we really wanted to get the answer to was ‘how do people feel about their lawns’. You could talk all day about John Deere tractors and all the things that, you know, make them worth the price. But what if we got to a deeper human truth or conflict within somebody about tending to their lawns, right, those feelings?

Karen: 00:17:18

Yeah. Yeah. You mention in the book also—and, again, you know, I feel like ‘spoiler alert’. I don’t mean to be telling everybody all about the whole—the book. But, like I said, it’s a very digestible book. You know, one of the sort of strategies is to revisit the situation or reexamine your assumptions or reframe the question. And so what you’re saying now about, you know, data that exists, like, yeah, sometimes it’s about, you know, are you asking the right questions, or, you know, is there another question that you didn’t ask, or what haven’t you thought to ask before. But sometimes it’s just is there a way of looking at this that we didn’t look at before? Or, you know, this might be research done. It’s almost like repurposing research that’s done to see if there’s any—you know, any stars that you can start to connect in a different way. So I loved the creative thinking that went into this book, also, to kind of stimulate the process of getting to an insight.

Chris: 00:18:11

Yeah. I mean, you know, breakthrough thinking, this idea of revisiting your assumptions or revisiting certain ideas—I give an example somewhere in the book about, you know, Dollar Shave Club versus Gillette and how, you know, for years and years—don’t get me wrong. I love Gillette. But, like, for years and years, it just kind of seemed like the next thing was always just ‘one more blade, one more blade.’ And then Dollar Shave Club came along. And, again, there was a technology component here, which was, you know, easy to order online and set up a subscription-type service. I mean, now, subscriptions are like, “Oh, that’s old hat,” right? But, at the time, that was a pretty big thing, and their biggest challenge was actually convincing people to throw away their blade every week. They had to break through the barrier of human behavior that had calcified over the years of hoarding blades. And their whole messaging was, “Look... don’t save your blades. Just use it once a week.” Or not—sorry, “Throw it out every week. You can use it as many times as you like, but then you’re going to have to move on to the next blade.” And so that was their biggest challenge. But their insight was connecting the dots between ‘maybe innovation doesn’t look like more blades. Maybe innovation comes from somewhere else in the buying and using process.’ And then, also, I mean, gosh, they really got the price down. And with the name ‘Dollar Shave Club’ they reduced the barrier to entry significantly.

Karen: 00:19:37

Yeah. Yeah. And so what do you think? This is, you know, out of the scope of what we originally said we were going to talk about, but I think about, you know, why people struggle to define insight. And then I think about why people struggle to come up with insights. And then I think, “What’s also in the way of people thinking innovatively and differently and trying on these different frameworks?” You know, what do you think are some of the obstacles that corporations need to overcome to get to this level of breakthrough?

Chris: 00:20:03

Oh, man, I mean, pressure, daily pressure. “We got to go now,” you know. Like, “We’re not getting enough sales now. Inventory is piling up in the warehouse right now. Like, let’s get something, you know, out there, and let’s just see if we can move some units that way,” right. So insights—the insight building process can take a little bit of time, and time is not usually on a strategist’s or researcher’s side. So I think that’s probably the biggest thing. And so, a lot of times, people will grab for the lowest hanging fruit. They’ll grab for the obvious, and then, they’ll just try and twist and turn that obvious thing until they land on a good creative idea that can work. And, for long enough, people have gotten away with that, right, that, “Hey... this is a good twist on something that we know to be true,” but it’s not particularly deep. And I’m talking about—like, in the book, I talk about, you know, connect the dots and, like, create new categories and transform your business. And I think that, you know, where you get truly transformative category-disrupting insights is around—you know, well, you see it now in examples like Netflix. The entire business model—video stores don’t exist anymore, right? And Netflix, you know, had this insight that Blockbuster was not interested in. They were given—I mean, they heard about it. They knew about it. And they just didn’t jump on it as quickly. I was thinking about this earlier today too about Amazon versus Barnes & Noble. At a certain point, they were neck and neck. It was viewed as ‘Oh, they both sell books.’ And Amazon had an insight into the marketplace, into consumer behavior, into many different things, and said, “This is a lot bigger than books.”

Karen: 00:21:54

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that’s what differentiates an insights professional to somebody who can actually become a brand strategist, right, is somebody—there are people that do research and can report on findings. And then there are researchers who can do the research, report on findings, and deliver insights, you know. And then there are the people within a brand, for example, or an end client who can take all of that in, deliver insights, but then also drive that action by connecting it from other data sources. And you end up talking a little bit about how to sell those insights, how to tell the story of the insights, which I thought—I did not realize, again, when I first picked up this book that you were going to not only tease out the definition of insights but then also switch to ‘by the way, let’s bring in storytelling’. So talk to me a little bit about that and what your experience has been with—where sometimes the process falls short, and that’s in telling people about the insights.

Chris: 00:22:50

Yeah. I mean, you have to sell the story. You don’t just tell the story. You have to sell the story, right? And so my recommendation for anybody looking to, you know, become a better storyteller is study Pixar shorts and—or almost any Pixar movie, but the Pixar shorts in particular because they tell such compelling stories in three to five minutes. And then another, you know, category of storytelling to look closely at are murder mysteries. If you’ve seen the Knives Out movies or Memento or, you know, these different things, what do they do to hook you, hold you, and then tease you along, and then reveal something at the end that’s like, “Oh, man. I didn’t see it coming, but I kind of did.” Like, that’s the—you know that feeling when you watch a movie. And I give the example of The Sixth Sense. You know, so hopefully this won’t be a spoiler for anybody listening because it’s kind of part of the pop culture. But, you know, all the clue—I won’t spoil it. There were all the clues in front of you the entire time, and you just didn’t see it because you had certain assumptions, certain blinders on. And that’s what I love about the work that we do is that you have to approach every day with kind of the child’s mind. You have to unlearn what you learned the day before and not go into things with assumptions.

Karen: 00:24:20

Yeah. And I loved that section where you were talking about that because, yeah, sometimes when you get to the end of a film and you’re like, “Oh, that all makes sense now,” you want to go back and rewatch the movie or look at it again with the information that you gained by the very end of it. And, actually, you know, spoiler alert for the book. Your description of The Matrix—I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched The Matrix, but never really start to finish because I always come in and out of it. You know, my husband watches it a lot and—well, that series. Anyway, I read this book, and I’m like, “Oh...” That’s a really good explanation of actually what’s going on in The Matrix and why the knowledge gained at the end is actually really interesting to then go back and rewatch. Now it all makes sense why my husband rewatches it, right? Anyway, the same is true for insight work. Like, sometimes what you get at the end of this process of putting together an insight you actually want to then go look at other research, right, and say, “Oh, actually, let’s go look for evidence of this in other work that we’ve done.” So excellent, excellent work on that concept. I don’t know if you want to expand upon what I’m saying.

Chris: 00:25:25

Yeah. I mean, you’re absolutely right. Like, research begets more research, or it makes you want to double-check something else. And, you know, I think some of the clues along the way when you’re looking at research is, obviously, you can start with where are things over indexing or under indexing, right? A lot of times there can be—just like in movies, they call them sleeper hits. You know, there’s this movie that, you know, doesn’t have a big budget, didn’t have a huge amount of marketing, but it exploded. It was a sleeper hit. It was waiting, you know, for its time. And, sometimes, I think you can have a situation where the data is—you know, if you looked at it at a glance, you’d say, “No, there’s no real opportunity there.” But, if you look at that data with some other converging trends, then you’d be like, “Oh, my gosh. There’s an untapped opportunity here. This is huge.” I mean, it’s a little bit like—I don’t want to, you know, get too much—it sounds like I’m getting into the woo-woo here, but it’s, like, there’s a meditative aspect to it. You know, I’m not a huge surfer, but I know a lot of surfers coming from California. And it’s like the idea of, like, riding a wave. You got to look for that wave and time it so that you are able to ride that wave. So that means getting out in front of the wave and understanding how it’s going to arc, how it’s going to curve, and then you got to start paddling. So, again, that’s where, like, the converging trends can come into play, and you take advantage of it. And then your brand gets a nice, big lead.

Karen: 00:26:54

Yeah. I love this. And, you know, I know some of the most satisfying work I did as a researcher happened when, you know, my client or somebody that I was partnering with on the research, you know, kind of allowed us to pull in from other sources. Like, “This is really what we learned in these focus groups. But, if we look at this social media data and if we look at this secondary data that we got from another source, you know, and we really worked in tandem with all of these data points to put it together, we could deliver really some great work together.” So I think that’s a part of it for an insights professional is thinking about differently. “Let’s talk about what if,” right? Thinking about, you know, what if you could pull in other information into the work that you’re doing. Yes, maybe you were hired to do one small project. But what if you could pull in from other sources to help tell a bigger story? The power of the ‘what if,’ right? [laugh]

Chris: 00:27:45

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I love—that’s one of my favorite techniques is just asking ‘what if’. And part of that’s—it’s an imaginative exercise. But, again, all of the techniques in the book are about shaking up your brain and, again, getting past your own assumptions or the things, the truths, that we all learn to take for granted. And so asking ‘what if’ is also a great way to just start making some thought starters. So, even if you don’t land on an insight, the process of just asking ‘what if’ questions is going to take you to some interesting places. Because ‘what if’ is really—again, like many of the other techniques, it’s actually challenging the status quo. That’s what asking ‘why’ is all about. Why do people do it this way? You know, it’s trying to understand their motivation. But there’s another question that usually comes associated with the ‘why,’ which is ‘what if we did it another way,’ you know. What are the opportunities that we’re overlooking just because—in fact, I would say almost as a litmus test. If somebody says, “This is the way it’s been done for a long time,” that right there is an opportunity to say, “Then I guess maybe it’s time to change.”

Karen: 00:28:56

Yeah. Yeah. What if we did it differently? Absolutely. Absolutely. So, speaking of, you know, doing things differently, I imagine, you know, there are researchers listening to us thinking, “This all sounds great and, you know, very, like, idealistic, but how do I change what I’ve been doing?” So, you know, the question out there is what if researchers did it differently than they’re currently doing? How do they go about this process of getting to an insight? What’s the kind of actionable recommendation for people?

Chris: 00:29:25

Well, you got to take constant notes, you know. You’re always taking notes. You got to take notes, take pictures, and you’ve got to also not assume that just because something like an outlier that it is an outlier. You can connect those dots and bring them in a little bit closer, you know, to your other dots. One of the things I think about a lot lately is ‘get comfortable with being uncomfortable.’

Karen: 00:29:51

Tell me more about that. I like that, yeah.

Chris: 00:29:53

I mean, I know it sounds counterintuitive, but, like, if you are trying to get to a new place, right, the tried and true or the well-worn statements that exist out there are going to not really yield much. But, if you can sit kind of quietly with the discomfort of diverging thoughts, diverging opinions, two different data points that don’t seem like they go together, then you’re going to be able to hold these thoughts in your mind. And, again, out of that tension, out of those differences, you may land on something that’s going to be more powerful. I can’t emphasize enough how important the articulation of the insight is. That’s so important.

Karen: 00:30:37

Yeah. Yeah. Talk a little bit more about that because that’s one of the things that happened early on in the book is, you know, you share some examples of very well-written insights. And they are short. They’re succinct. And, yet, they pack a punch, right? So expand upon that thought for us.

Chris: 00:30:55

Yeah. I mean, I love comedy. I love the comedic twists. I have many examples in the book about comedic insights. And I think that, you know, it’s a fun exercise to do. I mean, we could do it right here for example. Okay. So I’m going to give you the beginning of a statement, and you’re going to finish the statement for me. Okay? So what doesn’t kill you... How does that statement usually end?

Karen: 00:31:20

It makes you stronger. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Chris: 00:31:24

That’s right. That’s the well-worn wisdom.

Karen: 00:31:27

Right.

Chris: 00:31:27

But what if we put a comedic twist on that and said, “What doesn’t kill you mutates and tries again?”

Karen: 00:31:35

Hmm. Right. Right.

Chris: 00:31:36

They’re both [crosstalk] —

Karen: 00:31:36

Terrifying. [laugh]

Chris: 00:31:38

Yes. Yes. Or another one, “What doesn’t kill you, you know, weakens you so that something else can come along and kill you instead.”

Karen: 00:31:48

[laugh]

Chris: 00:31:48

I mean, that’s kind of the law of the jungle, right? Like, if we don’t get taken down by this this tiger, you’re wounded, and then something else can come along an easily take you down. So, I mean, I know [laugh] that’s kind of brutal example. But...

Karen: 00:32:02

[laugh]

Chris: 00:32:02

But it’s [laugh] about taking, again, the well-worn truths or expressions that we have and saying ‘how can we rewrite the ending?’ And that’s good for both copywriting, but it’s also good for insights. You know, again, one of my favorite techniques that goes back into this—it’s actually doing a lot of things at once—but interrogating language I love. I love looking more closely at language, and I love how—are you familiar with Hannah Gadsby and Nanette, her stand-up comedy show?

Karen: 00:32:33

No, but there’s much to talk about here. So first tell us about the technique. Or first tell us about the comedy show, and also tell us about this technique.

Chris: 00:32:42

Yeah. So the technique of interrogating language is, again, challenging preconceived notions. And this goes back to an earlier question you asked, which is why is it harder for corporations to sort of embrace the insight-building process? Well, because you’re challenging authority. You’ve got the speed and the pressure problem, but you’ve also got this thing of saying, “Hey... I think I got to challenge you on that there. [laugh] I’m not sure that what you think is true is actually the truth here.” And that can be uncomfortable for a lot of people, right? So being able to delicately and diplomatically work your way through those sort of discomfort zones—but interrogating language I love. There’s a scene in Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up comedy special called Nanette where she talks about the color blue. And, again, counterintuitive idea here. She says, “Blue, if anything, is a feminine color because it’s full of contradictions.” She says, “Blue is a cold color, right? We often think of blue as being cold. It’s on the cold end of the spectrum. But what’s the color for the hottest part of the flame? It’s blue.” She says, “If you’re feeling blue, you feel sad. But if you’re feeling optimistic, you would say, ‘Blue skies ahead.’” So, in the language itself, there are these contradictions. Now, as a comedian, she’s just pointing them out, and we’re all having a good laugh. How you tie that into your brand’s advantage, well, that’s part of the art of the strategist is to kind of, you know, take that momentum and put that energy toward your brand. But that’s a good example of interrogating language, finding the contradictions, being uncomfortable with the contradictions, all of it in one place.

Karen: 00:34:28

Yeah. I love the idea—going back to something you said a few minutes ago, which was, you know, not discounting the outliers in the work, right. So I know that, as researchers, we sometimes do that, right. We’re taught, “No, no, no. Let’s—you know, if there’s an outlining opinion, set that one aside because you’re looking for consensus,” or you’re looking for what most people are feeling or experiencing, and you’re not looking at the outliers. But I love the idea that there could be nuggets of insights happening in that space where there is an outlier that you just have to maybe note it and then take a look at it and figure out what’s actually at the heart of that. So it’s an interesting way to look at something that might be rethinking how we’ve done things in the past.

Chris: 00:35:13

Yeah. I mean, that’s where I think the promise of AI is actually really interesting. Because, ultimately, all we’re really trying to do here is find the patterns, right, in the data and also the anti-patterns in the data so that we can, you know, get to a new place. The insight kind of emerges out of the tension between the patterns and the anti-patterns. And, if we can do that, then I think, you know, a lot of times fresh ideas present themselves quite quickly.

Karen: 00:35:43

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. It’s great. I could probably talk about this sort of thing all day because it’s the creative thinking that I always found my way with anyway—so it speaks my language on that front—and also just mulling over the idea of how to deliver insights to people who need them to do the work that they’re doing. So I love what we’re talking about here. If you had to say, Chris, kind of, you know, taking a step back and thinking about your book, what would be the message, the main message, of this book for the reader in your opinion and in your words?

Chris: 00:36:14

Yeah. That’s a great question. I think what I’ve lately come to—and, actually, this was almost a title for the book—was ‘no insights necessary.’

Karen: 00:36:23

Hmm. Interesting.

Chris: 00:36:24

But that felt like a title that didn’t have quite as much energy into it—

Karen: 00:36:28

[laugh]

Chris: 00:36:28

—as I wanted. But, you know, the process of building an insight is—it’s an exercise. You are challenging yourself. You’re challenging those around you. Because you’re trying to get to something new. You’re trying to reframe the problem in a new way. That’s going to come from asking a different kind of question. That’s going to come from—you know, again, going back to AI and how AI may be able to identify something that we, you and I, would see as an outlier. But because of the kind of number crunching and the way that AI will combine things, it can say, “Nope. That’s not actually an outlier. That is core to this conversation.” And so I think that, you know, even if you don’t land on an insight, even if you don’t build an insight, you are going to have so many more ideas and creative ways to apply those ideas than if you had never done the exercise in the first place. It’s like the expression ‘if you aim for the stars, you’ll land on the moon.’

Karen: 00:37:29

Yeah. Speaking of stars, right? [laugh] Going back to our—the constellation that we are creating when we go for an insight. I love the concept of or the idea of calling it an exercise. This is something that you do after you’ve done the research and you’ve gotten the data or you’ve, you know, made your observations, then there’s this other part of it. So I think a lot of times we’re looking for insights to happen throughout, right? We’re looking for the ‘ah-ha,’ the spark to happen throughout the research process. But I love the idea of thinking about it as ‘this is an exercise that actually you have to build into the process once you have all your data points and you’re putting them all together.’ So separating our thinking a little bit in this way I think could go a long way for a lot of people. You also mentioned in here, by the way, like, some people—you know, you don’t get a lot of these. [laugh] Like, you know, it’s not like insights are a dime a dozen. Some people go their whole careers and maybe they just get a handful of them that are really solid insights. So it’s a misnomer to think that you get them all the time. So—

Chris: 00:38:31

Yes.

Karen: 00:38:31

—anything else you kind of want to share along that point?

Chris: 00:38:34

I think that you nailed it. I mean, you know, go into it with a goal but to sort of temper your expectations and maybe temper everybody else’s expectations, which, again is a hard thing to do at the beginning of a project. Like, “Hey... I know you’ve hired for me for my consulting excellence, but let’s not expect any insights coming out of this”—

Karen: 00:38:53

[laugh]

Chris: 00:38:53

—“for sure, for sure.” Because, again, it’s a process. It’s an iterative, collaborative, creative process. That’s why I used the word ‘you build an insight,’ right? That’s active. That’s collaborative. Finding an insight, again, you find a data point. You experience a particular observation. But, when you find something—again, I think it can be the tail of the tiger. I think it can be the breadcrumb trail that leads you to the treasure chest area, you know. And so I think that those things are important, but they’re all parts of building the insight. And then, I guess one other thing that I think, you know, is helpful is that different people can look at the same data and build completely different insights. And I think that’s a really nice thing to think about. So it’s not like your insight is wrong; my insight is right. [audio break] It does come down to how well can you sell the insight that you’ve got versus somebody else’s insight. How far can it travel? How many ideas can spring out of it? So, you know, there still ends up being kind of a competitive edge to whose insight has more juice to it, I guess. But I think that what’s nice about it is it can be very collaborative. And you can connect the dots in your way, and it can be beautiful. And I can connect the dots in my way, and we can both come up with some great campaigns, great ideas.

Karen: 00:40:25

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Thank you so much. And I—you know, again going back to the storytelling part of it, I loved that you called out that you really do have to bring people along in the story of how you got to the insight too. You might be able to lead with it if you’re presenting it, for instance, but you have to make sure people journey with you to understand where it came from. Because, if you don’t, then it might not land the same way with somebody else, and you’ve—you know, you’re vested in it. [laugh] You know, you’re like, “No, no, no. Trust me. This one’s true,” or, “This is really it,” or, “This is the one to land on.” But you really have to envelop it in storytelling to make sure that you get the buy-in that you want for it so that other people feel what you feel, you know, inside as well. So, anyway, again, I could probably go off on this a little bit longer, Chirs. But, for the sake of time, I do want to ask you is there anything we didn’t talk about in our time together that you wish we had?

Chris: 00:41:21

Oh, gosh, like you said, there’s so much. There’s so much out there. No, I mean, I think we covered, you know, so much of it. Happy insight hunting. [laugh]

Karen: 00:41:32

Happy insight hunting, I know. And, again, I can pause on that for a moment too. Like, you know, we’re hunting for insights. We’re building insights. It’s an active process. This isn’t just something that happens. This is something that you have to deliberately set out to accomplish and achieve, you know, hunt, build, collaborate, do the work. So thank you for bringing this book into the world. We’ll definitely be linking to it in the [show notes] . Anything else about where people can reach you, Chris, or find this book?

Chris: 00:42:00

Yeah. LinkedIn is a great place to reach me. As a companion to the book, I started creating—I don’t know how many weeks or months ago, I started creating, “The Light Bulb Newsletter.” So, you know, this idea that—now, again, insights take time to build, but you do have flashes of insight, or you do have flashes of inspiration. And so that’s where “The Light Bulb” companion newsletter kind of comes into play here. And every week it’s a very simple format. There’s one piece of creative that inspired me. There’s the questions that it sparked in me. And then there’s a quote that’s made me a smarter strategist. So those three things—you can enjoy it every Thursday, two to three minutes to read, and hopefully it’ll inspire additional thinking.

Karen: 00:42:43

Where do our listeners go to sign up for that? I personally signed up for it, I think, via your website today. So why don’t you share a little bit about that so they know how to find this newsletter.

Chris: 00:42:53

Yeah. That’s at chriskocek.com. Last name is spelled K-O-C-E-K dot com. And, yeah, it’s just under, “The Light Bulb Newsletter” insight.

Karen: 00:43:02

Very cool. Very cool. And, like I said, we can share a link to this book. Speaking of Amazon, most likely, right? [laugh]

Chris: 00:43:09

Yes. Amazon.

Karen: 00:43:10

Speaking of. Speaking of. [laugh]

Chris: 00:43:12

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, wherever you prefer to get your books.

Karen: 00:43:15

Yeah. That’s great. Thank you so much for joining us and for having this conversation with me, Chris. I appreciate your time and look forward to our paths crossing again.

Chris: 00:43:24

Thank you, Karen, so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Karen: 00:43:27

Excellent. Excellent. Well, also, many, many thanks to our producer, Natalie Pusch. Thank you for all you do, Natalie. For our editor, Big Bad Audio, who will clean up some of our, you know, bumps and bruises along the way of these recordings and always does a stelar job, thank you so much, Big Bad Audio. And, of course, our listeners, thank you for tuning in and for giving us your time so that we can deliver some insights to you, hopefully, through our episodes. Have a great day, everyone.