Insight doesn’t create change. Decisions do.

Modern organisations are rarely short of insight. They commission studies, assemble dashboards, and convene workshops with impressive regularity. Evidence is gathered, synthesised, and presented with care. Yet progress often remains elusive. The problem is not ignorance. It is hesitation.

Insight explains the world as it is. Decisions attempt to change it.

This distinction matters because the two are frequently conflated. Insight feels productive. It offers clarity without commitment. It allows people to understand risk without assuming it. Decisions, by contrast, impose consequences. They require trade-offs, expose uncertainty, and attach responsibility to named individuals. It is at this point that momentum tends to slow.

When programmes stall, the response is often to seek further validation. More research is commissioned. Additional viewpoints are gathered. The rationale is sensible enough. If certainty remains elusive, perhaps more evidence will resolve it. In practice, this rarely works. Information gaps are not always the constraint. Frequently, the uncertainty is political, emotional, or organisational rather than analytical.

At some point, the question shifts. It is no longer whether the organisation knows enough. It is whether it is prepared to act on what it already knows.

Well-designed research does not aim for completeness. In complex systems, completeness is an illusion. Its purpose is narrower and more practical. It should reduce uncertainty to a level where action becomes defensible. It should create shared confidence among those who must commit. And it should make continued inaction harder to justify than movement.

When insight is produced without a clear decision in mind, it often becomes ornamental. Interesting, credible, and widely praised, yet strangely inert.

It circulates, informs discussion, and then settles quietly into organisational memory, cited but rarely used.

Momentum, when it appears, tends to follow a different pattern. The right stakeholders are involved early, before positions harden and incentives diverge. Perspectives are surfaced while curiosity still outweighs defensiveness. Insight is framed around the choice it must inform rather than the topic it happens to explore.

In these conditions, decisions feel less like leaps of faith and more like natural conclusions. Responsibility is easier to assume when people recognise their own thinking in the outcome. Resistance diminishes not because it has been managed away, but because it never had space to take hold.

The language of “buy-in” often signals that something has gone wrong upstream. When insight arrives late, as a finished product seeking endorsement, persuasion becomes necessary. When understanding is built collectively, commitment follows more quietly.

For anyone working with research, strategy, or transformation, a simple question is worth returning to. If an insight never gets acted on, what decision was it meant to support?

Until that question is answered, even the most rigorous analysis risks becoming another contribution to organisational reflection rather than organisational change.