Brian Kilfeather-Larkin

Just finished an invigorating strategy workshop but one thing I noticed was the amount of time the word ‘insight’ was mentioned and it got me thinking… are we living in a world of ‘insight inflation’. The word is used a lot but, honestly, most “insights” aren’t insights at all. We use the word constantly — in brand plans, advisory boards, research decks, strategy meetings. But when you boil it down, what’s labelled an insight is usually something far more ordinary: a data point, a quote, a...

This week I’m attending a strategic tactic workshop — the kind where cross‑functional teams wrestle with evidence, pressure‑test assumptions, and try to turn inputs into something that actually informs action. And quite often we’ll be looking for the nuggets or “insights” among lots and lots of data points. We don’t have an insight problem. We have an insight engine problem. Even in rare disease I find that teams are drowning in data but starved of clarity. We generate observations,...

This article was originally published on LinkedIn in 2025 Just finished a forecasting workshop with J+D Forecasting and Ipsen... one thing that's still ruminating as we head to the weekend is that there’s this tendency when building forecasting tools to keep adding — more logic, more detail, more exceptions. I guess it starts with good intentions: trying to meet what seems like endless stakeholder needs and the need cover every possible scenario. But the result is usually the same: a complex...