How to Build the Insight Edge with Vivek Banerji

We've never had more data, more dashboards or more AI-powered analytical tools. And yet, as any research or insights leader will tell you, the gap between information and genuine insight seems as wide as ever. Why is that?

That's the question at the heart of a recent episode of the Insights and Innovators podcast, hosted by Niels Schillewaert (Head of Research and Methodologies at Conveo). His guest, Vivek Banerji, is uniquely positioned to answer it. A former McKinsey consultant and insights leader at PepsiCo, Vivek is now the founder of Insight Dojo and the author of The Insight Edge: Crafting Breakthroughs in a World of Information Overload.

Across the conversation, Vivek makes the case that breakthrough insight is a discipline that blends empathy, curiosity, multidisciplinary thinking and the courage to say "I don't know." Below are five of the most compelling exchanges from the conversation, in Banerji's own words, edited for brevity and clarity.

Why Doesn’t More Information Automatically Lead to Better Insight?

I think people are conflating insight with information. You can see it the way people talk about it. They'll always conjugate insight with information. They'll say analytics and insight, data and insight. And there's this underlying assumption that the more information I'll have, I'll have great insight. The reality is quite different because there's a nonlinear relationship between insight and information because you can have vast amounts of information and no insight. On the other hand, you have people who've just looked at one observation and created this breakthrough product. Science and art are full of examples like that. Business is full of examples like that. It's that non-linearity, and how you leverage that non-linearity between insight and information to create insights which are powerful.

What Do Organizations Need to Actually Sift through the Noise?

The first thing I always point to is defining what the big problem actually is, instead of collecting information on things we already know. Second, it's important to acknowledge that we don't know a lot of organizations that put up a front of certainty because they want to project expertise, but that gets in the way of real understanding.

And then it's about staying multifaceted in how I think, the methodologies I use, and how I engage with people. So to sum it up: I have to contextualize what I'm doing around the big problem I'm solving, acknowledge the uncertainty and admit when I don't know something, and stay multifaceted in my thinking, my tools, and how I interact with people. And I believe this is something we can train ourselves to do, it's like any field of mastery.

Can You Share an Example of How Empathy and Curiosity Uncovered a Hidden Insight?

One of my clients had a menopausal product, and they came to us because sales were plateauing and they had no idea why. They already had a strong hypothesis: they wanted to test some concepts and present the product as close to a pharmaceutical, backed by evidence. We told them we heard them, but wanted to explore a bit more first, so we went into doctors' offices to see how they actually talked to menopausal women. I walked in expecting doctors to be skeptical of natural products, but instead they talked about them like they were legitimate technologies.

I realized the barrier our client imagined didn't actually exist. We found that about 70% of doctors fell into this category, and the real barrier wasn't that the product was natural, it was that there was no coherent story about how it worked on menopausal symptoms. So we brought some doctors together and co-created that story. Sales increased by 40% in six months, and following that same strategy, they're market leaders today. They still give us the credit for it.

What Is a “Pragmatic Polymath,” and Why Does It Matter for Insights Professionals?

This idea came up back in 2008, when I presented it at an Esomar conference in Turkey. At the time, I was at McKinsey, and I noticed there were two types of people. Generalists were good at laying out the problem, but often shallow in their solutions because they lacked depth in any one field. Experts, meanwhile, were being pushed to become more and more narrow and distinctive in a single area. To do this work well, you actually need enough depth across multiple areas to create the right approaches.

That's what led me to argue you can't just be a one-track specialist or a pure generalist, you have to be poly. You need to go deep in multiple fields. I'm not advocating for being a generalist like a typical management consultant, but I'm also saying don't lock yourself into being a specialist in just one thing. For insights leaders especially, I think being a pragmatic polymath is essential, because the work constantly requires cross-pollinating across different disciplines.

Where Does AI Fit into Building the Human Insight Edge?

It's really hard to say because things are changing so fast, and every day brings new surprises about what AI can do. But right now, I think people with strong real world expertise and good judgment are the best users of AI, because they can apply it far more creatively. There's a concept called the generative AI paradox: to use AI well, you need judgment, but if you use AI without judgment, you never actually develop that judgment. For insights people, I feel we need to see ourselves as custodians of a certain amount of humanism. That's not just about bringing the human voice into the work, it's about thinking bigger, about the planet, and ecological sustainability. The future isn't inevitable, we can shape it in a more human centered, sustainable way, and as insights professionals, we have a real role to play in that.

The Takeaway

Vivek's central argument is refreshingly simple: technology and data can amplify insight, but they can't manufacture it. Real breakthroughs still come from defining the right problem, sitting with uncertainty, empathizing with real people, and cross-pollinating ideas across disciplines; what Vivek calls being a "pragmatic polymath." AI, used with judgment, can sharpen that edge. Used without it, it just produces more information, not more insight.

As Vivek puts it, the goal is to go deep enough in enough different places that you develop the intuition to spot the insight hiding in plain sight, the way his team did in a doctor's office that ended up rewriting a client's entire market strategy.

Listen to the full episode, "How to Build the Insight Edge with Vivek Banerji," on the Insights and Innovators podcast: https://mrii.org/podcast/how-to-build-the-insight-edge-with-vivek-banerji/