Not another Chat GPT article.
Why good old-fashioned human analysis will remain a vital skill

You’d have to be living under a rock to not notice the copious amounts of word vomits, spewing from the feeds of LinkedIn in the past six months about ChatGPT.

Personally, I’m very excited about the possibilities and how it can enable marketing’s work. Not simply because it speeds up the process of and provides a great starting point for certain tasks, but that technological innovations are a good thing (when managed correctly!). Generative AI is the next leap of technological innovation – it’s exciting.

In our business, we’re already exploring how these technologies (not just ChatGPT) can help the way we operate and benefit the organisations we work with. I’m also alarmed at some of the stupidity taking place too – be that feeding confidential company information into a public testing forum, or blindly lifting falsehoods to pass off as ‘gospel’.

Brilliant from bland

But progress and idiocy aside – human analysis and interpretation will always be a much-needed and vital skill in marketing’s armoury. The ability to think deeply, explore concepts and interject them into campaigns and positioning is what sets brilliant from bland. And that quest is best reached through our ability to listen and ask.

One of the techniques we use almost daily in our business is the ‘Five Whys’. I’m sure many of you will have come across it at some point in your careers. In some quarters (product development) it’s criticised for not going deep enough to uncover true root causes. But in our marketing world, particularly when trying to get under the skin of customer challenges and insights, it’s a great starting point to delve deeper.

What is the ‘five whys’?

The ‘five whys’ is a problem-solving technique that quite simply, involves asking ‘why’ five times to identify the root cause of a problem. It’s often used in quality management and process improvement methodologies, such as Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing. The technique aims to dig deeper into the underlying causes of a problem by repeatedly asking ‘why’ and uncovering successive layers of causation.

Let’s consider an example: A cyber security breach occurred, resulting in unauthorised access to sensitive customer data. But why did it happen?

Why was there unauthorised access to customer data?

Answer: The hacker gained access to the organisation's network.

Why did the hacker gain access to the network?

Answer: The hacker exploited a vulnerability in the organization's outdated software.

Why was the software outdated?

Answer: The organisation did not have a regular software update and patching process in place.

Why did the organisation lack a software update process?

Answer: The organisation's IT department was understaffed and overwhelmed with other tasks.

Why was the IT department understaffed and overwhelmed?

Answer: The organisation did not allocate sufficient resources to the IT department, leading to a lack of personnel and inadequate attention to cybersecurity measures.

By asking ‘why’ five times, we have identified a root cause: insufficient allocation of resources to the IT department, resulting in a lack of personnel and neglect of cybersecurity practices, including software updates.

This simple, human-driven process is a very useful methodology for us. The technique helps prevent treating symptoms rather than addressing the underlying issues. It encourages a deeper understanding of problems and promotes effective problem-solving by focusing on the fundamental causes.

Generative AI, is of course, here to stay. It’s impressive in its ability to process and generate human-like text, but it still falls short of replicating the complexity, creativity, consciousness, and understanding of the human brain. Our brains remain the most sophisticated and adaptable cognitive system known to us. So let’s keep using them.