The problem with neat insights
Editor’s note: Jaime Solorzano is the head of insights at Q2Q Global. His work in financial anxiety and complexity in qualitive research won the Esomar Peter Cooper Award for Qualitative Excellence at Esomar Congress 2026. Find Solorzano on LinkedIn.
Commercial research has a habit of tidying up contradictions in qualitative respondent inputs. This tidying up can make the story easier to use in a deck and provide insights that are simpler to explain to the client, but it can also remove the elements that can best explain a decision or an individual’s behavior.
Spend enough time doing qualitative research and you start to recognize the moment when a messy piece of fieldwork becomes a nice, usable insight. In financial research someone might tell you they are careful with money. They check their balance repeatedly, keep notes, make plans and worry about losing control. They also, from time to time, spend impulsively and regret it afterwards.
There are several ways you could write that up. The familiar one would be something like “control versus enjoyment.” Nothing in that statement is obviously wrong. It captures something that is happening. It is also the sort of phrase that survives a debrief, makes sense in a strategy meeting and can be remembered by somebody who never met the participant. But it also changes the material.
In a recent ethnographic study into financial anxiety, we spent around two-and-a-half hours with 24 people in their homes across Mexico, the U.S., Spain and the U.K. Alongside interviews, the research included observation, financial artefacts such as apps and spreadsheets, and attention to routines, interruptions, household dynamics and nonverbal behavior.
The more time we spent with people, the harder it all became to describe it in a neat insight soundbite. One participant could be intensely disciplined about tracking money and then behave in a way that seemed to undo all that work. Others who dismissed financial anxiety in people around them had their own private rituals of panic. Some talked about wanting simplicity while maintaining surprisingly complicated systems of accounts, cash and selective disclosure.
Our first instinct as researchers is often to reconcile those things. We look for the underlying tension that makes both sides fit together. That instinct is useful, but when a tension becomes too tidy, can we trust it?
In this study we called this coherence bias: the tendency to turn contradictory behavior into a cleaner narrative of balance or trade-off. The person who monitors obsessively and spends impulsively becomes “control versus enjoyment.” The person who wants transparency while hiding parts of their financial life becomes “openness versus privacy.” A contradiction is converted into something more stable and easier to explain.
The trouble is that the contradiction may have been doing more explanatory work than the tension. Take the obsessive planner. In the research, planning did not always lead to better financial behavior. People sometimes produced detailed plans after a moment of alarm, felt calmer once the plan existed, then failed to stick to it. That failure could bring shame, which in turn prompted another attempt at control. But “control versus enjoyment” makes this sound like a tug of war between two competing desires. However, planning could itself be part of the anxiety. It could be a ritual that restored a temporary sense of order. The impulsive spending did not simply sit on the other side of the scale; it could help expose what the planning was actually for. That is a richer explanation, although a less convenient, harder to explain slide.
We saw the same thing around notions of transparency. Financial services research often finds that people want clarity, simplicity and openness. Our participants said many of those things too. Yet some also maintained hidden accounts, cash workarounds or selective disclosure. In some households, complexity gave people privacy or a feeling of control when full visibility could feel less reassuring than exposing. When you consider that, then “people want transparency” starts to look incomplete.
Complexity mapping for researchers
It would be easy to blame researchers for over-simplifying people, but the pressure towards coherence is built into commercial research. Qual fieldwork becomes a transcript. Transcripts are given themes and the themes become a deck. That deck gets condensed again because we’re told a 40-slide deck can’t keep the attention of senior stakeholders who need something more digestible. Then a handful of neat insights are used to make a key business decision.
Our study deliberately produced two outputs from the same body of research. One followed a familiar commercial structure: personas, tensions and opportunities. The other kept more of the contradiction intact through a complexity map. A complexity map is a qualitative synthesis tool that brings together recurring behaviors, emotions, tensions and social dynamics across participants without forcing them into fixed personas or neatly resolved stories. Rather than smoothing over contradictions, it keeps them visible and looks for patterns in how different aspects of people’s lives connect. The aim is not to preserve every piece of messiness, but to organize complexity in a way that stays closer to how people actually behave and experience the issue. The participants didn’t change, only the way we presented the data. The conventional version was good but that was partly the problem. It contained recognizable tensions such as security versus freedom, planning versus spontaneity and independence versus dependence. They were credible and easily parsed into a business decision. They also made some very uneven situations sound neatly balanced. Secrecy inside a relationship can become a tension around independence, or controlling a partner’s spending can disappear into a story about security.
There is a broader habit in research of treating inconsistency as something that needs explaining away. We assume there must be a stable consumer underneath it somewhere. But that doesn’t reflect lived human experience. Someone can care deeply about sustainability and order fast fashion clothing they know will not last. Or an individual can care about the environment and still only place half of their glass and plastic in the recycling bin. We are beings of contradictions not easily explained, and those behaviors may expose context, identity, guilt, habit or competing obligations. Flatten them too quickly and you often end up describing the category in language that sounds sensible while explaining surprisingly little.
Embracing contradictions
One change we have made in our own synthesis is to deliberately go looking for evidence that irritates the emerging story. Before an insight is finalized, we ask which observations do not fit it cleanly. If the conclusion is that people want simplicity, who chose complexity? If we have described somebody as highly controlling, where did they behave recklessly? If a persona looks independent, what happened in the household that suggests otherwise?
We formalized our concerns about these complexities with an “insight compression test.” We review our own assumptions, asking questions such as; what contradiction did we resolve too quickly, what behavior complicates our neatest conclusion and what ambiguity might still be useful if we leave it alone for a while? That does not mean every contradiction deserves a slide, or that research should become an exercise in preserving mess. Some inconsistencies really are the incidental ordinary variability of human behavior. We’re looking for the contradictions that keep turning up, those are worth holding onto.
Commercial research will always have to simplify. Nobody is asking clients to make decisions from two-and-a-half-hour ethnographies and a pile of field notes. We can, however, be more careful about what gets tidied up on the way. Sometimes the awkward bit is not getting in the way of the answer. It is where the answer is hiding.