2.0
Insights
An insight isn’t an observation. It isn’t an interesting fact. It isn’t something you can spot casually, from a distance.
An insight is earned. It’s revealed by inhabiting a problem through immersion, questioning, and refusing to settle for what’s obvious.
If research shows you the doors in a problem space, an insight is the key that lets you unlock the right door.
First, an insight requires close interaction. You can’t uncover it by standing on the sidelines. Real insights emerge only when you've lived with a problem long enough to notice the tensions, patterns, and blind spots others miss.
Second, an insight reveals a hidden truth or tension. It names what's been operating underneath: the unspoken motivations, the overlooked frictions, the accepted realities that have gone unquestioned for too long.
Third, an insight points to a new possibility. It doesn’t hand you a solution on a silver platter — it reorients how you think about solving the problem. An insight inspires action, not because it dictates the answer, but because it unlocks new ways of moving forward.
When you find something that meets all three traits, you’ll feel it: a subtle but powerful shift in how the problem looks, feels, and behaves.
Insights are simply the pressure points of change — the hidden levers that move the system. And your job as a problem solver is to find them.
That difficulty is not a flaw, it’s a feature. If insights were easy to find, they wouldn’t be valuable. They wouldn’t allow you to enact durable change.
The problem-solver’s job is to go farther, dig deeper, and name what others can’t yet see—then use those insights to build the bridge to new futures. In the next sections, we'll break down how to reveal powerful insights from the noise and how to articulate them in ways that drive action.