Get Obsessed With the Insight, Not the Solution

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My friend Mike Mad­dock has spent thir­ty years study­ing how good ideas die inside orga­ni­za­tions. He ran Mad­dock Dou­glas, an inno­va­tion agency that worked with a quar­ter of the For­tune 100, and wrote the books on it: Free the Idea Mon­key, Plan D, Brand New. Now he runs Flour­ish Advi­so­ry Boards, sit­ting in the room with dozens of CEOs a year as they try to get unstuck.

I asked him what those thir­ty years taught him. His answer came down to one dis­tinc­tion, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

“Ideas are easy,” he told me. ​“Insights are hard.”

An idea is a solu­tion. An insight is a cus­tomer need. Ideas start with us: our com­pa­ny, our capa­bil­i­ties, our per­spec­tive, and they push out­ward. Insights start with the cus­tomer: stand­ing in their shoes, look­ing at their world, and work­ing back­ward from what they actu­al­ly need. There’s no such thing as an insight that isn’t a cus­tomer insight. If it does­n’t start with the cus­tomer, it’s an idea wear­ing an insight’s clothes.

“Let’s launch a whiten­ing tooth­paste” is an idea.

“I want white teeth, because it makes me look younger, but brush­ing alone does­n’t make my teeth look white enough” is an insight.

That insight is the real one that launched Crest’s whiten­ing line. No prod­uct in it. No tech­nol­o­gy. Just a cus­tomer, a want, and a frus­tra­tion. Mike’s for­mu­la: I [want some­thing], because [why it mat­ters to me], but [what’s stop­ping me]. That frus­tra­tion was worth $4 bil­lion. Den­tists missed it for years because they were focused on gin­givi­tis, not white­ness. The insight came first. The ideas followed.

The ​“but” is where the oppor­tu­ni­ty lives. It’s the gap nobody else is filling.

This dis­ci­pline is impor­tant right now, because AI has made it dan­ger­ous­ly easy to skip. A CEO does­n’t need months of cus­tomer con­ver­sa­tions to stand up and say ​“we’re all in on AI.” They just need a tool and a head­line. Mike has a name for what hap­pens next: FOMAI, the fear of miss­ing out on AI. It’s the same old mis­take, chas­ing a solu­tion before you under­stand the prob­lem, except loud­er, faster, and company-wide.

FOMAI isn’t a new prob­lem. It’s the old­est one, ampli­fied. Every com­pa­ny chas­ing an AI ini­tia­tive with­out a cus­tomer insight behind it is doing what com­pa­nies have always done when they fall for a solu­tion first: build­ing some­thing impres­sive that nobody actu­al­ly needed.

The fix does­n’t change just because the tool did. Stay obsessed with the insight (the real, cur­rent, evolv­ing need your cus­tomer has) and let the solu­tions com­pete to serve it. Some­times the best solu­tion will be AI. Some­times it won’t. That’s a ques­tion you can only answer once you know what you’re actu­al­ly solv­ing for. Cus­tomer needs shift, too; the insight that was right a year ago may not be the one that’s right today. Chase the mov­ing tar­get, not the shiny tool.

Chal­lenge

Before your next AI ini­tia­tive, or any ini­tia­tive, write one insight state­ment. Write it as your cus­tomer, not as your com­pa­ny, and build it from real con­ver­sa­tions, not a whiteboard.

I [want some­thing], because [why it mat­ters to me], but [what’s stop­ping me].

Hold it up against Crest: ​“I want white teeth, because it makes me look younger, but brush­ing alone does­n’t make my teeth look white enough.”

Then run two checks:

1. Could a real cus­tomer have said it? If it sounds like your strat­e­gy deck, start again.
2. Is there a solu­tion hid­ing in it? If a prod­uct, a project, or ​“AI” shows up, you’ve writ­ten an idea. Take it out.

If you can’t fill in the ​“but,” you don’t have an insight yet. You have an idea look­ing for a prob­lem, and right now, that idea is prob­a­bly AI.

Watch the full inter­view with Mike below.

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About Mike Maddock

Mike Mad­dock spent his career study­ing how good ideas die inside orga­ni­za­tions. He co-found­ed Mad­dock Dou­glas, an inno­va­tion agency that worked with a quar­ter of the For­tune 100, and wrote four books on the sub­ject, includ­ing Free the Idea Mon­key, Plan D, Brand New, and Flirt­ing with the Unin­ter­est­ed. He now runs Flour­ish Advi­so­ry Boards, where he curates peer forums so CEOs get pres­sure test­ed by six delib­er­ate­ly dif­fer­ent points of view instead of one. He also hosts the pod­cast Your Seat at the Table.