Beyond the post-its part five: Mining for insight

A slight delay in part five as Covid decided to make a very late appearance in the Swallow household. Two parents battling Covid and two energetic children without it make for a very interesting combination.

Now we have a huge amount of individual insight from the interviews; it is time to make sense of this and group it into something more manageable and actionable.

There is a range of approaches people take when analysing qualitative information from interviews with real people. Typically speaking, I follow the following steps:

1.     Surfacing individual sentiment:

As a starting point, I go back through every interview. If I have done the interviews online and had permission to record these, then I upload these into Otter.ai to turn these audio files into text to make it quicker to review them. As I re-read the transcripts, I will highlight anything that stands out. This is where you can identify gaps in your research or questions you wish you had asked differently. Often people are quick to jump to solution mode when you speak with them about their experiences. Our focus in this work is to get to the motivation behind a statement rather than the statement itself.

In this current project to co-design a digital plan for a local government client, a great example of this is several people raised the need for ICT to come to the satellite sites to be more visible for training and education purposes. When you drill into this, it is more about ensuring there is access to training on a schedule that suits people that do not work a typical 9-5 and are not behind a desk. ICT coming onsite is only one solution to this, but this could also be addressed through several other means (on-demand training, chatbots, and in-team ICT assistants, to name a few).

While you may be more comfortable doing this in an online tool such a Miro or Mural for me, I still love the speed and lack of distraction that comes with using good old-fashioned post-it and pens. One idea or quote per post-it note (and you do not need to worry about marking what question it related to, those were just a tool to get to insights).
 

2.     Grouping into themes:

You’ll now have burned through a stack of post-its and have a bunch of individual insights. Now comes the fun bit of grouping them into themes. To me, a theme makes the next step of creating the insight statements easier. Looking across the interviews, what themes emerge that a pervasive across multiple people? Generally speaking, if the insight is derived from one person, then it could be an outlier. That doesn’t mean it is not important, but either you need to do some more research to understand if that is a shared experience or sentiment, or you can deal with that at a more one-to-one level.

Once you have all your themes developed, there may be some clear categorisation of these themes that will make this insight easier to consume for others. In this recent project for example, the insight was broken into two main groupings; the work (data, integration, single view of the customer, security) and how we do the work (engagement model, prioritisation, education & training, communication, mindset).
 

3.     Developing insight statements

You will now have all your individual insights sitting under one of the themes you’ve created. This alone is still hard to consume if you haven’t been the one to do the interviews. It’s now time to create ‘the what’ and ‘the so what’ in terms of what the insight is telling us. An insight statement should succinctly summarise the sentiment within a theme. An insight statement should help articulate why something is the way it is (not just what is happening or not happening but why) as well as the human motivation for change. Someone who has not been involved in any of the interviews should be able to read it understand the importance and feel the desire for change. Yes the F word was used intentionally here as this is about humans and humans are emotive beings so we have to use that emotion to drive change.  

As an example, one of the themes in the recent Digital Plan project was prioritisation. The insight statement for this theme was:

We appreciate that we have to prioritise projects, changes and BAU support across the organisation. We also acknowledge our request may not be the most urgent, but we are unclear about how prioritisation decisions are made and why. While it’s not always critical for you, it often is for us, so the lack of transparency and certainty creates more questions and frustration.

No one person said this statement, but it summarises how people felt across multiple interviews. While it is pointing toward a direction for change (creating and communicating a transparent prioritisation framework), it doesn’t suggest a fixed solution as there could be multiple ways to tackle this which are worth exploring.  

Now all you need to do is repeat this for each theme you have.

Right, we have done the hard yards – now the fun part comes. Co-designing the plan based on what we’ve learned. Stay tuned.