Leading Libraries Series: Leading for Innovation
Inquiry and reflection
Pulling it all together: Synthesising your learning
When we have completed the Inquire stage of our innovation cycle, we can often feel totally overwhelmed with the data we have gathered! The aim of the Reflect stage is to help us synthesise what we have learned and to summarise the insights
we have gained and the opportunities we have identified. Synthesis is a process of bringing together all the data you have collected through your research and making sense of it. The output is a set of insights that you think are the most
inspiring, and a set of principles for how you would like your solution to be.
Whichever method you use, you are aiming to gather :
- stories – to understand personal experiences
- gaps – things that people want or need that might be relevant to your inquiry
- opportunities – possibilities which relate to your Breakthrough Question.
Again, there are a range of different methods we can use to synthesise our findings in the Reflect stage, but let's start with that tricky word 'Insight'.
What is an insight anyway?
‘Insight’ is a key concept drawn from Design Thinking approaches and is a key to the way designers think about knowledge and understanding. An insight is a little nugget of knowledge that suggests a new perspective.
The most powerful insights are usually:
Remarkable
They might be a surprising new piece of knowledge or new understanding. Often insights are most powerful when they challenge commonly held assumptions about how things work.
Repeatable
You might have found your insight from a small number of cases, but something about it tells you that it might be true for many people or many situations.
Revealing
Insights tell us something about why the world is as it is. In particular, the most revealing insights help us get to the crux of a complex issue. Sometimes this is something we didn’t know before, but often they are things that people
working in the area have felt for a long time, but which haven’t been evidenced or articulated before.
Revalatory
Occasionally insights are revelations: they completely transform the way we think about an issue.
When we communicate insights, they usually take the form of a brief phrase that may be backed up by several stories or statistics. This makes insights very easy to share, even though they contain fairly complex ideas.
Often when things get complicated or confusing, insights are the touchstone we return to. In an innovation project, insights are a powerful source of focus, energy and inspiration.
Deep dive - Running an open reflection session
If you are working with a group or team, you can use ‘open synthesis’ to process all of this information collectively. During open synthesis you invite the whole team together for at least a whole day to hear each researcher’s stories from the research
and present each other with their top insights. You will need one person to facilitate the session, to keep track of time and make sure that as much as possible of the material gets covered.
As there is always a lot to talk about and pick through, it is worth each 'researcher' spending time in advance preparing how they will tell the stories and picking out the points they feel are strongest. It helps to be as visual as possible to help
you navigate the quantity of information.
For example, you can print out and stick up photos from each piece of 'lived experience' research or horizon scan both to add richness to the stories, as well as to create a visual anchor for each of the points that are being made.
As the group shares the stories and discusses the details, it is important for everyone to be actively listening and capturing the key points on post-its. It may seem obvious but just in case – here are some rules for 'good use of post-its in a synthesis
process!
Post it rules:
- Write clearly in a thick pen (they should be legible from a distance)
- Write no more than 10 words on each one (succinct is easier to read)
- Write only one point per post it (that way they can be moved independently later)
- Write as many as you can – at this stage quantity is more helpful than precision
- Drawing is encouraged where it makes the point more memorable
From time to time, stop the storytelling and discussion, and share the key points you have noted.
Summarising your findings
You can use this POINTS framework template to bring some initial order to the thoughts
you have collected.
- Problems: What problems do your potential users face?
- Opportunities: What opportunities are there for doing things differently? What could we build on?
- Insights: What feels remarkable, repeatable and revealing?
- Needs: What needs do users have? Especially unmet ones?
- Themes: What themes are emerging?
- System issues: What are the issues within the current system that make things harder?
When you are halfway through your synthesis session, you will need to bring an end to your storytelling. This is always difficult because there is always more to tell, but it is important to have time to make sense of everything.
The next step is to cluster the points you have so that they form groups of ideas which are related to each other. These are the beginnings of the insights you will package up at the end. You may find it useful to prioritise these clusters or specific
ideas as you go. For example, you may want to use stickers to vote on which feel important. Doing this is a good way to surface conversations about our aims: what difference we want to make for people and what we think will be the best ways to
achieve that.
Presenting your synthesis
Once you are done, you will need to prepare for the Imagine stage of your innovation cycle where you will start to generate ideas that you wish to explore further. If you want to engage more people in this process, you will need ways of presenting
what you've learned so far. Design Thinking offers us a number of approaches which help us make our learning more vivid and bring it to life. We've created a Persona brief template as a guide.
Personas
A persona is an abstraction from one or more of the people you met in your research whose story exemplifies some of the key insights. They are usually presented as a single page including pictures with quotes and some details about their life.
Personas are very useful tools throughout the design process for testing ideas and keeping the process strongly user-centered. They can also be an engaging way of rapidly sharing the research with people who weren’t directly involved.
Insight maps
An insight map is a visual representation of the key insights you have uncovered and how they connect together. It is another good way of introducing new people to the research you have done. If you want to make it more detailed you can connect the
insights to some of the evidence that supports them.
Target group segmentation
A segmentation map is a way of understanding in more detail the parts of the target groups you want to focus your innovation on. Since people have different needs, motivations and circumstances, not every change will be attractive or impactful for
everyone. Not defining the ‘target segments’ that you want to focus on is simply saying that you prefer to leave it to chance who accesses and benefits from your service. Focusing explicitly on a segment, or several segments, allows you to design
your innovation carefully around their needs and motivations, as well as being able to communicate with them effectively.
During your Reflect stage, you may begin thinking about the sort of people you would most like to be working with. It could be the people most open to what you could offer, the people in the greatest need, or simply different groups of people whose
different priorities and behaviours feel relevant to the issue you are trying to influence. A segmentation is usually something that will continue to be refined as the project progresses, but now is a good time to start thinking about who you
would like to focus on.
Pause for reflection
Consider the process you have just been through to synthesise your data and pull together your insights and opportunities.
What are the most powerful new insights you have gathered?
What new understandings have you gained about your target group's perspectives?
Has anything changed in your own perspective on the challenge you have set yourself?
Which insights and opportunities do you most want to take forward to the Creation phase of our Innovation Cycle?
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