Insight libraries: build vs buy?
🌱 This one started as an idle scratchpad, and then turned into a Twitter thread on its way to becoming the email you’re currently reading.
Ever since I started my new position (and before, I mean this is something of a theme for me) I’ve been thinking about where to store research artifacts: the raw field notes, the recordings and data, the reflective notes, the analysis tools and synthesis frameworks, the eventual insights. All the material stuff that goes into and comes out of the work of knowledge production.
I think many of us in the field have realized that research reports are boring and no one reads them, they’re dead documents rotting at the bottom of a OneDrive folder awaiting the day when, by pure alchemy of search term serendipity and supermassive machine intelligence, someone stumbles on them.
Okay, yeah, I like atomic insights. I also like knowledge networks and graphs, knowledge gardens.
So that brings us to something I’m wrestling with: where should the garden grow? And what shape should the library take?
Buy an off-the-shelf research repository/insights library (there are some good ones, Dovetail and EnjoyHQ are currently catching my eye) and consider that the end of it.
or
Begin, at what will likely be great cost and immense effort, building a Library of Our Own (an Lo3, if you will).
To answer questions of placement and shape, it might be useful to start with what goes in it and how it will be used.
What goes in it?
An insights library contains… Insights. Organized in a way that makes them discoverable and available to support decision making. Those insights likely (if they’re any good) connect to evidence (sometimes referred to as nuggets).
An insight library will be home to the results of experimentation across the years, ideas that were tested (or launched) and failed — or succeeded. It also contains the emerging signals that point towards what’s coming: customer requests, competitor’s movements, market shifts, maybe even best practices (though perhaps an insight library is not a home for facts, this is a question for another time)
How will it be used?
An insight is only as good as what you do with it, so an insight library will support decision making across an organization. Perhaps ideally an insight library for an organization should strive to be a fount of common knowledge that waters a common understanding of the organization’s purpose, it’s position (or niche) within the broader landscape of business competition and human needs, and it’s approach to this intersection.
It will form a central piece of the organization’s brain, a place where many decisions will will be shaped and many ideas refined, some ideas might even emerge from the mass of insight contained in the library.
An organization has a unique culture, built up, among other things, from the stories it tells itself about itself (purpose) and about the outside world (niche, the beyond). The better stories are based on real, informed, foundational knowledge, so the place where these stories a held, the library, has to be embedded within the cultural ideas of that organization and a useful participant in the organization’s rituals and processes.
So, can something like a library for foundational knowledge be pre-designed and purchased off the rack? Likely not ready to wear, but is heavy tailoring enough? Or does this library need to emerge from within an organizational culture, taking shape around ideas that the organization holds as central?
I now need to admit that I conveniently skipped over the question of whether a single library is the right approach. Are organizations single or are they themselves made up of smaller organizations? Does an organization need one single well of insight? Can such a thing even exist?
I suspect the answer is no, by the way ❤️ — so our library will have to play nicely with (perhaps containing or being itself contained by) other libraries.
Stay tuned and sound off in the replies, I guess!
Seeds, currents, and orbits (?)
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