Insight Language in Action

When was the last time you had a great idea? What happened to it?

The best ideas, however small, require care and attention to become reality. Even with ample planning and persistence, an idea can only go so far on its own. At some point, the idea you spent so much time shaping must leave the garage. Ideas require testing, revision, and collaboration to see the light of day, but before any of this there is a beginning: an insight.

Insights are the building blocks of innovation. The potentials of an insight are always present, but only some come to life. A glimpse into the adjacent possible immediately endows the thinker with a seed of change but, for the moments following, this seed is planted firmly in the center of the ultimate arena, subject to the scrutiny and limitations of systems larger than itself: fully formed ideas and environments who know their rules and expect new entrants to act accordingly. The utility of a fresh insight is hidden in plain sight.

Daunting as this is, the insight is not alone. One thinker may first capture the insight, but history’s most pivotal ideas never last their birthed state. Instead, they grow and develop with the sustenance of collaboration and experimentation. Without a way to parent its future, an insight remains a silent seed.

To grow an idea, we use Insight Language: our tool for seeing, handling, and developing ideas. With insight language, insights are composed of three elements: a Definition, Attributes, and Position. Definitions are our most foundational plane for charting insight. They dictate an insight’s space: its limitations and potential. Attributes fill this space, populating the definition with the qualities and utilities that compose an insight’s form. An insight’s position is the relationship between attributes, its form: the proportion and balance of attributes.

On these three planes, insights reveal their persistent nature across disciplines. As collaborators adopt and engage with an insight, they stress and bolster its constituent parts: specifying its definition, pruning the attributes, and honing its positioning. Insights with faulty structure are weeded out, left to decompose and fertilize the evolutions of future generations.

Today, collaborators rarely know which part of an insight they are operating on. Some may only be concerned with an insight’s position, while others strive to leave no attribute unaccounted for. Positioning with an incomplete attribute set will burn out even the best of teams.

In bringing an idea to life, collaborations without due orientation are doomed to fail. With insight language, collaborators have a common code: an allegiance to something greater than any one piece. This ideal, the element that all collaborators must honor, is the insight. Insight Language maps an idea. Collaborators are experts in navigating innovation, and Insight Language provides the map.

Definition:

A good definition gives voice to the considerations of all experts in the conversation. This is the time to lay your foundation: what are the parameters, in the clearest terms possible? In the definition stage, you have time to confirm the fundamental information for developing an insight. This also is the opportunity to hear concerns and warnings about how the insight could mutate if not taken care of properly.

Attributes:

Attribution is the stage for asking “What do you mean by this?” The way we choose to distill and simplify our ideas forces conversations about perception and value. Do the same words mean the same thing to different people? Pulling attributes from a definition will ensure they do.

Positioning:

Now that we know we are talking about the same things, how do those things relate to one another? Sure we can agree that grilling season means hotdogs and hamburgers, but do we want to focus on both equally? Using this exercise, you can move “hamburgers” and “hot dogs” together based on your answer. By having this conversation and agreeing on a position, the experts in the room have the chance to confirm their considerations are part of the insight, allowing them to capitalize on that real estate while guiding other experts to act accordingly.

The implications of this structure expand across disciplines, giving unified direction that is actionable for all parties. Feedback on the elements of a developing idea is given relative to the aspect of the insight, emphasizing attributes and articulating positions.