Insight Agents’ Founder, MD, and Chief Data Storyteller, Sam Knowles, is author of the ‘Using Data Better’ trilogy of books, all published by Routledge. The trilogy comprises: Asking Smarter Questions: How To Be an Agent of Insight (August 2022); How To Be Insightful: Unlocking the Superpower that Drives Innovation (May 2020); and, Narrative by Numbers: How to Tell Powerful & Purposeful Stories with Data (April 2018).
Asking Smarter Questions
For too long, the simple act of asking questions has been overlooked as almost too trivial to contemplate. Asking Smarter Questions champions the art of curiosity, setting out a framework to make every question count. The building blocks of insight are data and information, often joined together in novel, unpredictable ways. How we surface new information to make meaningful connections between data points is by asking smarter questions. By taking this approach, you can make your organisation less confrontational, more collaborative, and more productive – especially in the more distributed, remote settings that characterise the 2020s.
Managers, directors, and leaders will find the universal principles, expert interviews, and data-driven recommendations a source of inspiration. Asking Smarter Questions is for professionals in businesses and organisations across all sectors, with particular relevance for those in: market research, intelligence, insight, analytics, strategy, marketing, communications, planning, new product development, and innovation.
Routledge publishes Asking Smarter Questions: How To Be an Agent of Insight in August 2022. To buy the book, click on either button below to visit Amazon or Routledge. And if you want a code for a 20% discount with Routledge, please send us an email. You can also visit the book’s own website.
“Sam is a true innovator in the field of insight. His works take you on a voyage of discovery and never leave you feeling lost or overwhelmed. You’ll leave invigorated, challenging ideas in ways you never thought possible. But don’t just take my word for it, take a read of this book, you won’t regret it.”
Simon Frazier, Head of Marketing & Data Innovation, Institute for Practitioners in Advertising
How To Be Insightful
How do we advance? As individuals, families, and businesses? As societies, nations, and as a species? In a world where there is nothing new under the sun, we humans are remarkably resourceful at creating new things – for good and for ill. From the iPhone to Brexit, from Repeal the Eighth to smart toilets, from Skolstrejk för klimatet to the veggie burgers that ‘bleed’ beetroot juice. Innovation truly is a universal human superpower.
If we stop and think about how we think for just a little time – and then apply a simple and structured framework – we make it much more likely we will solve challenging insight problems. How To Be Insightful tells the story of insight, from the earliest attempts to define it in Greek philosophy and on to psychology and most recently neuroscience. And it provides a simple, practical model that makes solving insight problems very much more likely.
Routledge published How to Be Insightful: Unlocking the Superpower that Drives Innovation in May 2020. The book was named Book of the Year by PR Academy. To buy the book, click on either button below to visit Amazon or Routledge. Again, you can visit the book’s own website.
“This is a wise, brilliant, often funny (read the chapter endnotes; or try this criticism of clients who had no hinterland in the arts and popular culture that ‘they didn’t know their Arsenal from their Elbow’) and, yes, profoundly useful book.”
Richard Bailey, PR Academy
Narrative by Numbers
As jobs in the knowledge economy become increasingly similar, there are two skills everyone needs if they’re going to thrive. These are the ability to interrogate and make sense of data, and the ability to use insights extracted from data to persuade others to act. There’s a new equation in business:
Analytics + Storytelling = Influence
There are some simple and effective rules of data-driven storytelling that help everyone to tell more compelling, evidence-based stories, whoever they need to convince. Narrative by Numbers by Sam Knowles shows you how.
Routledge published Narrative by Numbers: How to Tell Powerful & Purposeful Stories with Data in April 2018. The book was shortlisted for the Business Book of the Year 2019. To buy your copy, click on either button below to visit Amazon or Routledge, or visit the book’s own website.
“We need this book! Evidence and numbers help us to make sense of the world, to transcend how things appear, and find out how they really are. But this is not a technical journey – it’s a human one of meanings and relationships, and Sam Knowles shows why we need to grasp that first. With an armful of words, a poem crafts meaning or passion or action. But what do we do with an armful of statistics? Sam Knowles has the answers.”
Tracey Brown, Director, Sense About Science
For gluttons for punishment and those in search of both a bargain and a collectors’ item, all three books are available as a limited edition, individually-numbered, personally-signed box set at an unmissable price. For more information on availability and pricing, please send us an email.
