The Age of Information is booming, perhaps even bulging. If you tried to download all the data available today, you’d need more than 180 million years to do so. And that’s happening at the same time we continue to create more than 1 trillion megabytes per day of new information.
You might imagine, then, that all this information would spur an acceleration of innovation to match the output of data. But even with artificial intelligence and the generative likes of ChatGPT, we aren’t making large enough strides, considering what’s available to us. Indeed, the last time we found ourselves in a period of significant innovation, pursuing the ideas with the biggest spark, was more than 120 years ago, in a period called the Age of Insight.
In contrast, today, we often find ourselves stuck, overwhelmed with too much data or too many ideas, unable to decide what to pursue to accelerate innovation in our organizations and, at a societal level, solve our biggest challenges. How do we know which idea has the most value?
Innovations, both big and small, start with a new idea. Often, these ideas occur as a moment of insight—the result of a novel connection in our brains made between existing and new information. It’s the creation of a new pathway that triggers a spark of innovative energy. These kinds of groundbreaking insights are what bankers want to build new financial products for their customers, marketers desire to attract a new demographic for their product, and politicians crave to develop policies that drive their support to new levels. Insights are also what enable novelists, TV producers, speech writers, and comedians to move people. Inside organizations, insight is the active ingredient in learning, training, coaching, and mentoring, as well as change initiatives of any sort. Put simply, insights change how we see the world.
To accelerate innovation, we first need to increase our quantity of insights. Studies show insights involve quiet signals deep in the brain, just under the surface of awareness. Anything that helps us notice quiet signals—such as stepping away from our computer between meetings or closing out of social media while we drink our morning coffee—can increase the chance of insight. Of course, the increased use of technology is making this more difficult, filling every moment with alerts and an endless supply of content, drowning out the signals that sit just below our awareness. So having more insights means creating space for the quiet to reach the surface.
Beyond increasing the quantity of insights, we also want to increase the quality of them—to be able to sort through big new ideas and find the ones that have real value, which can be hard to measure. Think about the last time you went to a meeting and were faced with an abundance of new product ideas without a way to determine the quality of these ideas or how any of these might create insight for customers. It would be incredibly hard to try to decipher which ideas to move forward with.
Enter the Eureka Scale. Debuting in 2015, the Eureka Scale allows us to assess the strength of our insight experiences on a five-point scale, where a level five insight involves the richest emotional, motivational, and memorable elements. For example, think of a recent insight that appeared in the back of your mind while you were washing dishes, only to be forgotten as you sat down at your desk. This may have been a level one or two insight since it didn’t go much further than your kitchen. Now think about a moment that caused you to yell with excitement, finally making a critical connection to bring the project you’re working on to new heights—something that made you stop what you were doing to write it down so you wouldn’t forget and didn’t leave your memory for several weeks. This could have been a level four insight. Now, remember some of the moments that truly changed your life, such as the moment you realized the job you had wasn’t enabling your true potential and caused you to take a risky but successful jump to a new career. That’s likely a level five insight.
Our insight experiences result from the combined impact of five elements, each of which varies in intensity and contributes to the scale values. Think back to the last time you had an intense insight: the emotions you felt might have consisted of relief or happiness, and the motivational drive may have pushed you to dive further into the project. The fact that you remembered this experience so well, or what’s known as the “insight memory advantage,” may have led to repeated amazement known as aftershocks that you reflect on afterward and the other ideas or implications that follow. The Eureka Scale combines these five variables into a single value and allows us to define the importance of a new idea.
Because insights are one of the best ways to drive engagement, innovation, and behavior change, the Eureka Scale has broad applications for measuring and improving individual and organizational performance. In any communication or marketing strategy where the main goal is to increase idea sharing or action, for example, organizations can test several approaches to messaging against the Eureka Scale. The messaging that produces the largest insights in a group of customers will increase the likelihood that they act or share this information.
Similarly, any learning, coaching, or leadership initiative will be most successful if they motivate people toward action. The Eureka Scale can be used as a measure of how impactful any kind of learning intervention has been for participants’ growth—both in the moment or afterward. Consider how useful the Eureka Scale could be in assessing the value of ideas after a team retreat or across different kinds of work environments and learning approaches.
In order for organizations to benefit from another age of insight, it’s not enough to try to access more data or increase the number of insights we generate. Instead, it’s about making space for the biggest ideas to emerge from all the information. Using the shared language of the Eureka Scale as a way to measure how important ideas are, relative to each other, will enable better decision-making toward viable and competitive outcomes. And if we’re to enter a new age of insight, we must design our environments to allow for the best insight possible to surface.
David Rock is cofounder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, a cognitive-science consultancy that has advised more than 50% of the Fortune 100, and the author of Your Brain at Work.
Emma Sarro is a researcher at the NeuroLeadership Institute.
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