If you have heard me talk about insight before, you have heard this already. I want it at scale, I want it to have depth, and I want it fast. Most of all I want it to be present rather than outdated, because insight collected a fortnight later is not history. It is memory. History is what happened. Memory is what people can still recall about it, reshaped by everything since, and that is a thinner thing to plan from.
The problem is that you usually get two of the three.
Send a survey afterwards and you get scale. What comes back is thin, because a rating out of five is not a thought, and it is late, because by then people are reconstructing what they felt rather than reporting it.
Sit down and interview people properly and you get depth. Do that fifteen times and you have spent a fortnight, and the moment you were asking about has gone cold.
Ask for a show of hands and you get speed. Useful in the room. Gone by the afternoon.
That trade-off is not an academic problem. Most organisations I work with are making decisions about what their people need using information that was thin when it was gathered and out of date by the time anyone read it.
Last month we got to test the alternative properly.
What we actually did
A one-day conference, with 50 people in the room. Coaches, physios, sport scientists, people working in academies, schools, professional clubs and on their own. Some two years into the job, some more than ten.
At the close of every session, before anyone moved, the room was given a couple of minutes to put down what it was actually thinking. Not what people thought of the session. What was still unresolved, what had shifted, what they would do next.
We ran it through Wayvora, the tool we have been building for exactly this problem. By the end of the day we had 105 reflections and a picture of the room that updated as the thinking in the room moved.
It is not the first time we have run it. It is the first time we have run it somewhere I can write about in this much detail.
The scores told me nothing
Every confidence rating collected across the entire day sat in a narrow band between 2.4 and 3.5 out of 4.
Nobody was in crisis. Nobody was sorted. Had that been all I collected I would have learned precisely nothing, which is roughly what a scored feedback form delivers every time you run one.
What people typed was another matter.
The same problem, three times, from three directions
Three sessions, three presenters, three genuinely different technical subjects. In the first, a quarter of everything written came back to the same point. In the second, a quarter again. In the third it was the single largest theme in the room.
The point was this. How do you get from a number on a screen to a decision you can actually defend?
Nobody in that room was short of information. They were short of an agreed rule for what to do when the information arrives. Which measure leads. What level triggers action. And importantly, what actually changes on Monday morning when the number moves.
If you do not work in sport, the translation is not difficult. Your people are not short of dashboards either.
What makes it worth something is that nobody asked the question. It was not on the agenda, it was not in anyone's slides, and it was certainly not on a feedback form, because nobody would have thought to put it there. The room raised it about itself, repeatedly, across three separate sessions, unprompted.
More choice made people slower
The second finding has already changed how I will design a session.
Discussion consistently produced several defensible answers to the same problem. That did not make anyone more decisive. It made them hesitate. The barrier was never a shortage of options. It was the absence of a rule for choosing between the options already on the table.
Alongside it, my favourite thing to come out of the day. A number of people moved away from the novel approach and back toward the simple one, because the simple one actually did the job that needed doing. The room concluded for itself that inventiveness should follow the requirement rather than replace it.
Nobody said that from the front. The room got there on its own, and we could watch it happen.
A high score does not mean somebody is ready
This is the one I am still reflecting on.
Some of the people who rated the day at the very top of the scale had not settled on a single thing they were going to change. Meanwhile some who scored it lower walked out with the sharpest commitments in the whole dataset. One had a specific before and after test they were running inside a fortnight. Another had written down the rule for when they would stop a session early rather than push on.
A high rating usually means "that was relevant and interesting". It does not mean "I know what I am doing differently on Monday".
On a spreadsheet those two people look identical. In practice, one of them is going to do something and the other is not.
The part I underestimated
We built time into the running order to give the room back to itself. At the close of each session the collective picture went up on the screen and people were given a moment to sit with it. Not my slides. Their own thinking, gathered together, in front of the people who had written it minutes earlier.
That was a deliberate choice rather than a happy accident, and it turned out to be the best one we made. What I had not anticipated was how much it changed the conversations that followed, because everyone could suddenly see they were not the only one stuck on the same thing.
A room full of capable people each quietly assuming they are the only one who has not figured this out is a common state, and an expensive one. Showing the room to itself dissolved it in about ninety seconds.
That is the difference between insight that is present and insight that is outdated. One of them can still change the day it came from.
What I would do differently
Give the closing reflection the same standing as everything else in the day. I placed ours right at the end, where it was competing with trains home, so I only captured a fraction of what was in the room. The thinking from those who did settle into it was the richest of the day, which tells me the problem was where I put it rather than any lack of appetite. Next time it sits in the running order as a session in its own right.
Beyond that, less than I expected. It cost the room a couple of minutes a session, and everyone in it left with their own thinking written back to them.
What this is actually for
It would be easy to read all of this as being about learning. Did the day land, did people take something away, did any of it stick past the weekend.
That is the smaller half of it.
The larger half is that for one day I could see what fifty capable professionals were genuinely uncertain about, in their own words, while they were still uncertain about it. Not whether they enjoyed themselves. Their actual thinking. Where it sat at nine in the morning, where it had moved to by four, and what they still could not resolve between them.
Point that at a workforce rather than a conference audience and you are no longer running feedback. You are looking at where capability genuinely sits across your organisation, on the day, described in the language your people use rather than the language of a competency framework. You are seeing the questions nobody has put their hand up to ask.
That is a different question to whether the session went well. It is also, in my experience, the question organisations most need answered and have almost no way of asking.
Scale, depth, speed. You normally pick two.
This is the first time I have not had to.