CURATED
INSIGHTS:
Addressing the
missing link between
content, insight and
wisdom curation, and
critical thinking.
BY JOHN BURGE, BOB DANNA AND L ACI LOEW
C
ontent curation is not a new
phenomenon. For decades,
employees have attempted
to collect and sort informa-
tion, and management has
sought to derive associated quantitative
business value — largely to no avail. The
challenge has always been how to separate
the signal from the noise or, in other words,
the actionable 2 percent from the rest.
But how do you meet that challenge? In-
sight curation may be the answer.
Overlooked Aspects of Insights
Insights have been referred to as the new
currency of business, and today’s economy is
often referred to as the insight economy. Con-
sultancies and think tanks have made it clear:
To compete today, companies must rely on
critical-thinking experts sharing insights.
In fact, insight-driven organizations
are growing at an average of more than
32 Chief Learning Officer • September 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
The Human Side of
Extracting
Business Value from
Information
30 percent annually and are on track to
earn $1.8 trillion by 2021, according to
“Insights-Driven Businesses Set the Pace
for Global Growth,” a 2017 report by For-
rester Research Inc. As such, we must imple-
ment and operate networks of insights. Big
data and business intelligence are not enough.
The path to action lies in insights, and in-
sights come from human expertise.
What does this mean for the average
employee? What is the human aspect of ex-
tracting business value from information?
Is their role limited to setting up the pro-
cesses and machines that spit out numbers
and charts, or do we rely on the minds of
humans to form the insights as a result of
information they consume? If insights are
to be digitally shared with peers for assess-
ing them, collaboratively determining ac-
tions or making decisions, or increasing
business valuation, does a person need to
reduce their insights to writing?
Chief Learning Officer • September 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com 33
 The answer is yes — and that means they need
the skills to author effective, high-quality insights.
Value Starts With Critical Thinkers
Creating high-quality insights requires critical
thinking. Leaders everywhere seek critical thinkers.
Advertised job postings have doubled since 2009 ac-
cording to analysis by Indeed.com, and a 2016 Davos
World Economic Forum report lists critical thinking
as No. 2 (behind only problem-solving — a requisite
critical thinking skill) in the top 10 skills for the global
economy in 2020.
FIGURE 1: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMAN AND TECHNOLOGY
Actions and decisions driven by
ins
knowledgeable processing of
bra
Insights information.
yee
plo
Education, expertise and
Em
Knowledge lessons learned.
Electronic documents,
s
tem
Content web content, videos,
sys
etc.
tion
rma
Text and numbers
Info
Data that machines can
understand.
Source: Laci Loew & Co. and Pandexio Inc., 2018
Why the urgent and growing need for critical
thinking? In an interview with Forbes for a 2017 arti-
cle, “How to Hire and Develop Critical Thinkers,”
William T. Gormley Jr., professor at Georgetown Uni-
versity, said: “Today’s global and interconnected soci-
ety is exposing us to more different people, with differ-
ent views and mounting amounts of new information.
We need tools but also the human capability to sift
through it all and evaluate everything coming into our
lives. And it’s not just about assessing this or that argu-
ment. We also need critical thinking to help set priori-
ties and be adaptable to all the change coming at us.”
Critical thinking may also be the key to closing the
wisdom gap in business today. In a 2014 HuffPost ar-
ticle, “Thinking Matters: Critical Thinking Is Crucial
for Success,” James Martin from Oxford University
said, “A serious problem right now is the gap between
our skill and our wisdom. Today, deep reflection about
our future circumstances is eclipsed by the rush to
build faster, cheaper, smarter, more-efficient gadgets.
Society’s best brains are saturated with immediate is-
sues that become ever more complex, rather than re-
flecting on why we are doing this and what the long-
term consequences will be.”
34 Chief Learning Officer • September 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
To succeed in business, we must do better than
consume content. We must contemplate, evaluate,
synthesize and apply the content we consume. In oth-
er words, critical thinking is no longer just “nice to
have” — it is a business differentiator. What separates
high-progress organizations (those that get better
business results than their lower-performing peers)
will be the extent to which their employees are pur-
poseful about questioning the status quo, igniting
wonder, creating insights and sharing their wisdom
across the enterprise. Insights will be the new measure
of business success — the new “currency of business,”
according to Forrester Research.
What Makes Insights Actionable?
Insights reflect complex thought processes, which
means they are not synonymous with raw data or in-
formation but rather are the output of critical think-
ing. As such, humans are necessarily involved in form-
ing insights.
While data, information and content often come
from machines and computers, only humans are ca-
pable of complex thought processes for the foreseeable
future, notwithstanding advances in artificial intelli-
gence (see Figure 1). Thus, information and content
fuel the formation of insights in the minds of employ-
ees but in and of themselves are not insights.
Insights are actionable when they are aligned, con-
textual, relevant, specific, novel and clear.
•A lignment: Insights are more likely to drive ac-
tion when they are closely tied to key business
goals. Aligned insights have a direct relation to
business performance metrics (growth of intel-
lectual capital, employee engagement, financial
return, sales growth, customer satisfaction, tal-
ent turnover, productivity) that you control and
influence.
•C ontext: Insights shaped by experience, back-
ground, benchmarks or other comparison data
generally promote action. Ample supporting evi-
dence ensures the insight does not morph into
opinion, unwarranted skepticism or objection
and encourages action, innovation, creation and
problem solving.
•R elevance: Insights are actionable when readily
accessible and consumed by the right people in the
right amounts when needed. If insights are buried
in knowledge repositories or traditional learning
management systems or learning experience plat-
forms and not accessible via digital workplace plat-
forms and devices that enable critical thinking,
they may never make it to those in need.
•S pecificity: Succinct, explicit insights that offer
“why” with evidence to prompt more inquiry
drive immediate action.
 •N ovelty: Innovative and provocative insights that
stand out beyond the 24/7 information flow with
which employees are overwhelmed are compel-
ling. Insights that gain the curiosity of those who
should be paying attention and challenge the hu-
man mind get acted on much more frequently
than those that simply reinforce what we may al-
ready know.
•C larity: Clearly communicated insights expressed
in a single tight, cogent sentence with empirical
reference pave the pathway for action.
The more insights line up with these attributes, the
more actionable they will be and the greater the value
they will offer your business.
Authoring Actionable Insights
Authoring and sharing actionable insights are
long-overdue critical thinking skills that are essential
for the future workforce. We spend more than $150
billion per year training employees on routine infor-
mation and manual tasks. However, when it comes
to insights — the most basic building block of criti-
cal and systems thinking and among the top skills
needed for the future workforce — we provide little
enablement, if any. In fact, until now, few have even
thought about curated insights, focusing instead on
content curation, which often does not produce a
single insight.
3. Collecting the evidence nuggets at a topical level,
ensuring contextual appropriateness (an inter-
mediate level of critical thinking).
4. Connecting the evidence nuggets and sharing a
clear, innovative and informed insight in a co-
gent sentence to accelerate problem resolution
(expert critical thinking).
Fortunately, authoring actionable insights can be
learned. Writing effective insights starts with under-
standing the foundation on which they are built.
There are three foundational elements of every great
insight: evidence — information nuggets one en-
counters (content consumed); knowledge — the
things one knows (education, expertise and lessons
learned); and context — what one is paid to do (role,
function, company purpose).
An evidence-based model (Figure 2) has been de-
veloped for incorporating these foundational elements
into an algorithm for scoring digitally curated insights
for actionability. A baseline factor in the model is
length, with the Twitter limit as an upper bound for
scoring. In addition to length, there are four compo-
nents representing specific word types that reflect in-
sight actionability based on the foundational ele-
ments: analytical thinking about the evidence,
application of the evidence, integration of empirical
evidence, and context and commitment level of the
application or action.

FIGURE 2: AN EVIDENCE-BASED MODEL FOR WRITING ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS Measuring Business Value
Following are examples of high-quality, high-scoring
Algorithm looks for key Algorithm looks for key actionable insights that incorporate empirical data/facts,
analytical verbs. action verbs. analytical verbs, modal verbs and action verbs — the
(e.g., assets, builds, clarifies, Analytical Actionable (e.g., deliver, design, word types used by the insight value algorithm. These
creates, frames, presents, enhance, execute,
shows, states, suggests,
Reflects analytical Reflects some
improve, integrate,
words are italicized.
thinking about the form of action or
verifies.) organize, plan, study, • A 20 percent rate of IT turnover suggests our
evidence and how it application, the teach, etc.)
informs action. “result” of the insight. HR group might examine flight risk in our IT
department.
• The 25 percent increase in harassment allega-
Algorithm looks Factual Contextual Algorithm looks
for key numbers Reflects Reflects context for key modal tions implies our leadership should rectify exist-
and symbols. integration of key and commitment verbs. ing violations.
facts into the level for • The finding that 30 percent of worker tasks can
(e.g., %, $, #, 1/2, 1/4, <, (e.g., our clients, HR team,
insight itself. application.
>, =, ~.) marketing function, you, we,
etc., should, would, could, shall,
now be automated requires us to re-evaluate our
might, will, can, must, etc.) 2018 staffing plan.
To present easily understandable feedback to in-
Source: Laci Loew & Co. and Pandexio Inc., 2018 sight authors, the model reduces algorithm results to a
point-based scale ranging from 1 to 5, with 1 being
the least actionable and 5 the most actionable. Algo-
The writing of actionable insights is a critical think- rithm weighting factors are optimized by manually
ing skill that matures with practice and generally oc- comparing the perceived actionability of more than
curs over four phases: 100 insights to their scores (selected from a database
1. C onsuming content to fuel thinking. of several million insights based on permissions). In-
2. Identifying relevant and specific nuggets of evi- sights are then rewritten and rescored based on the
dence aligned with a problem to be solved (the
beginning of critical thinking). INSIGHTS continued on page 57

36 Chief Learning Officer • September 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

INSIGHTS continued from page 36

model and manually compared a second
time to assess perceived actionability based
on revised scores.
This scoring system seeks to achieve four
outcomes. The first two are short-term, fo-
cused on improving human performance:
(1) identification of the most actionable,
well-formed insights for better-ordered
search results facilitating the surfacing and
sharing of expert insights and knowledge,
and (2) offering feedback to insight creators
to help them create more effective and ac-
tionable insights going forward.
The third and fourth outcomes are more
long-term, focused on leveraging the digital
power of insight curation and critical think-
ing platforms. As countries around the
world transition from knowledge-based
economies to the era of the expert and the
insight economy, it is increasingly important
that we develop systems and methods for (3)
The scoring system is not intended to ADVERTISING
rate insights as valid or invalid but rather SALES
as more or less actionable. If people do
not clearly understand an insight, why it Clifford Capone
is important and how it can help them, Vice President,
Group Publisher
the insight will be overlooked and forgot- 312-967-3538
ten. Writing insights effectively is import- ccapone@CLOmedia.com
ant to their adoption, fruition and use.
As cognitive systems continue to strip Derek Graham
away routine knowledge work, expert Regional Sales Manager
312-967-3591
critical thinkers will play an increasingly dgraham@CLOmedia.com
valuable role in driving business actions AL, AR, DE, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KS,
KY, LA, MD, MI, MN, MO, MS, NC,
and decisions. A key to enabling this val- ND, NE, OH, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX,
VA, WI, WV, District of Columbia,
ue is the curation and sharing of Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan
Newfoundland, Europe
well-crafted insights. Such insights repre-
sent intellectual capital that increases
Robert Stevens
overall business value. CLO Regional Sales Manager
312-967-0751
John Burge is CEO and co-founder of software rstevens@CLOmedia.com
AZ, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT,
platform Pandexio. Bob Danna was a NM, NV, OR, UT, WA, WY,
managing director in the Human Capital British Columbia and Alberta

scaling human expertise, and (4) delivering practice at Deloitte Consulting LLP until he
evidence-based content to a wider commu- retired in 2017. Laci Loew is a human capital Daniella Weinberg
Regional Sales Manager
nity via the coming together of humans analyst, consultant and executive vice 917-627-1125
thinking critically and technology enabling president of marketing at Pandexio. They can dweinberg@CLOmedia.com
CT, MA, MD, ME, NH,
the sharing of human insights. be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com. NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT,
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