The Insight Leader’s Playbook: ambition, broad thinking and creating time – transformation’s engine room

Previously I reviewed The Insight Leader’s Playbook by James Wycherley. But from an obvious angle. The book’s contents. What can Insight Professionals learn from it. How it links to James’ first – and equally fantastic book – Transforming Insight: The 42 secrets of successful corporate insight teams.

But The Insight Leader’s Playbook also has a set of lesser stated learnings for us. Ones which aren’t listed in the contents page. But ones which are important in being able to action the book’s advice.

Be ambitious

To transform a team, you need the presence of an ambitious, as in ambitious for Insight, dynamic, proactive insight leader. If you don't have that, then anything that we do remains a conversation, a description of something. Nothing actually changes dramatically.”

This quote from James is important. It serves as a bedrock for some of the playbook pillars like building insight’s profile and assessing insight’s performance. But it also reminds us that unless we have ambition, we can’t be transformative.

James promotes the need for ambition subtly. But he’s crystal clear throughout that ambition doesn’t mean aim for the stars and don’t be practical. And this is best reflected in James Clear’s quote which features in The Insight Leader’s Playbook:

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

Think broadly

Throughout The Insight Leader’s Playbook, James refers to other authors from who have inspired him. He pulls from a broad base. Rory Sutherland. Dan Priestly. Greg McKeown. Arnold Schwarzenneger. Anyone who has read Matthew Syed’s book Rebel Thinking will know this degree of cognitive diversity will reduce The Insight Leader’s Playbook’s intellectual blind spots.

Jame’s rationale for this is simple:

There’s not many books written about how to develop a corporate Insight Team. Whereas there are loads of books about marketing strategy, running a small business, personal effectiveness and communication. This means there’s lots of richer thinking there we can apply it back to our challenges as Insight Professionals.” 

But there’s also a subtle message too. We need to think beyond the microcosms of delivering current projects, next week’s presentations or writing the next brief. Instead, we should reserve time to think outside of our box. To look as far forward as we can. To think what fields can we learn from about influence and persuasion? Who is a great storyteller we can be inspired by? 

Manage your time. Don’t let it manage you

The Insight Leader’s Playbook doesn’t claim to be a book about productivity. Or act as a lifestyle manual. But throughout, James refers to the importance of needing to carve out time to work on – not in – Insight Teams.

He does this through a mix of referring to personal anecdotes. Referring to work by productivity experts like Stephen Covey. And also – most importantly – examples of how Insight Leaders from large global brands create the time to reflect and think ahead. Because, to quote James: 

There's certainly something about the importance of personal effectiveness and how that is always going to be a limit on any change that you want to manage.”

Why do these areas matter?

This three area’s importance aren’t a nod to their existence. They’re in fact the engine room of change. Insight Teams can have the world’s most perfect playbook. But what good is that if there’s no ambition to implement its principals? No breadth of thinking to be transformative? And no time to enact change? 

If you want to transform your Insight Team I’d encourage you to get a copy of The Insight Leader's Playbook here. And also to subscribe to the Insight Management Academy’s podcast.