I was reading the Farnham Street Blog about “Surprise”: anomalies and how we should take notice of them…

…because surprises are examples of when our confirmation bias is challenged – something doesn’t quite sit right with what we were expecting.

Then I realised that ‘what surprised you?’ is a wonderful question we should be asking when we are analysing research findings, and a great question to ask our research participants too.

Surprises, or differences in what we are expecting alert us to the fact that we need to re-think or discover new thinking – in other words an insight could be round the corner.

Surprise!