The modern workplace is noisy. Not just the literal kind, Teams/Slack pings, meeting alerts, and inbox overload, but the deeper kind of noise. The constant flow of demands, decisions, deadlines, and data. In this environment, it’s no surprise that truly insightful thinking often gets pushed aside. 

But insight doesn’t emerge from noise. It requires space. 

Too often, teams are caught in a cycle of reacting: to the next request, the next metric, the next urgent question. And while agility is important, constantly moving forward without pausing to reflect can mean missing what matters and missing great insight. 

We gather research, attend debriefs, write reports often only to jump straight into the next thing. But without time to digest, connect the dots, and think deeply, it is difficult for insights to truly take hold. 

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.  

Doug Larson

So why do we struggle to make space for thinking? 

Part of the challenge is cultural. Many workplaces equate thinking with idleness. Blocking out time to reflect can feel indulgent, even unproductive - especially when inboxes are full and calendars are booked. People see a gap in the diary and a meeting is put in. But thinking isn’t a luxury. It’s where strategy lives. It’s how knowledge becomes understanding. 

There’s also the pressure of 'the new.' New data, new platforms, new customer behaviours. Amid all this novelty, it can feel more exciting (and safer) to chase what’s next than to sit with what we already know. But jumping too quickly into action risks repeating mistakes, missing patterns, or overlooking long-term shifts that only surface through reflection.  

So how do we create space for insight in a noisy world? 

To start with we need to normalise thinking time. That could be as simple as blocking out a weekly 'white space' hour in your calendar. No meetings, no email; just time to revisit past work, sit with a tricky question, or look for overlooked connections. Some create ‘no meeting Fridays’ to encourage this. 

Next, consider how you close projects. Insight isn’t just what’s delivered; it’s what’s absorbed. Build in space after the research to reflect, both individually and collectively. What surprised you? What resonates now that didn’t before? How has your perspective changed? What are you still unsure about?  

Revisit more than results. Sometimes there’s valuable insight not in the main findings, but in the quiet outliers - the quotes, comments, or data points that didn’t fit the story at the time. As we talked about in Squeezing the Data, looking back at existing data with new questions often brings fresh relevance to what once felt irrelevant. 

There’s also value in creating visible prompts for insight. A whiteboard of 'still to explore' questions. A monthly session to re-examine past research. A shared log of interesting patterns, hunches, and anomalies, to be added to at any time. These don’t have to be time-consuming. They just need to exist. 

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes… including you 

Anne Lamott

Perhaps most importantly, making space for insight is about intentionality. Insightful teams don’t just act fast, they think slowly when it matters. They balance delivery with reflection. They don’t treat insight as a moment, but as a process. 

In a noisy world, space is a strategy. Creating room to think isn’t wasted time; it’s where your most valuable ideas will come from. So instead of asking what’s next, sometimes the better question is: what are we missing? 

Challenge Assumptions. Talk to Hummingbird Insights