When was the last time you had a great idea? What happened to it?
The best idea, however small, requires 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 be taken out of 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, in 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, glazed over by minds preoccupied with the insight’s more robust counterparts or insights of their own.
Daunting as this is, the insight is not alone. One mind may capture an insight, but history’s most pivotal insights seldom last long in their birthed state. Instead, they grow and develop with the sustenance of collaboration and experimentation. Without a way to see it, the insight remains a silent seed.
Insight Language is our tool for seeing, handling, and growing ideas. In their most basic terms, 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, their proportion and balance.
By mapping insights on these three planes, we see 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.
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.Â
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. Collaborators are experts in navigating innovation, and Insight Language provides the map.