How to read a People Intelligence Insight
Every Insight card carries a badge that tells you how much weight it can hold, a date that tells you how current it is, and filters that only appear when they actually do something. This article explains all three, and how to tell an Insight apart from a chart you pinned yourself.
The honesty classification
The coloured label at the bottom left of every card is not decoration. It is the Insight's own statement about what kind of claim it is making. There are four.
Factual. A count, a rate or a status, read directly from a record someone created. How many mandatory trainings are overdue. How many people left last month. What the last review cycle concluded. If you disagree with a Factual Insight, the disagreement is about the underlying record, not about the method. These carry the most weight and are the right basis for operational action.
Diagnostic. A composite or a derived reading built from several signals: a behavioural engagement index, a team health index, a behavioural profile, a network centrality score. It is designed to point you at where to look, and it is a reasonable description of a pattern. It is not a measurement of a person's worth, motivation or ability, and it should never be the sole basis for a decision about an individual. Treat a Diagnostic Insight as the start of a conversation.
Predictive. An estimate of something that has not happened yet, produced by a model. A Predictive Insight is only allowed into the catalogue with a validation record attached: the method, the measured performance, the window in which that performance is considered valid, and how it is monitored. Without that record it cannot be certified.
Experimental. Shown with a flask icon next to the classification. The Insight is offered because it is useful, but it is still under validation. An Experimental Insight must never be the only basis for a decision about a named person. Use it to open a development conversation, never to close one.
A tile with no badge is your own chart
This is the single most important thing to know about reading your dashboard.
Your dashboard can hold tiles from two origins. Insights come from the GFoundry catalogue and always carry a badge. Charts you composed in the Data Analyst Agent and pinned yourself do not, because there is nothing to badge: nobody certified them.
A pinned chart differs from an Insight in three ways that change how you should read it.
No metric contract. There is no written statement of its population, its exclusions or its limitations. You know what you asked for; a colleague looking at the same tile in six months does not. Give a pinned chart a title that says what it counts.
No version. If the meaning of an underlying field changes, a catalogue Insight tells you it needs refreshing. A pinned chart says nothing.
It does not refresh. A pinned chart is a frozen snapshot of the moment you pinned it. A chart pinned in March still shows March's numbers. To bring it up to date, ask the question again and pin the new chart.
None of this makes pinned charts bad. They are the fastest way to keep a number you care about in front of you, and a chart you rely on every month is the strongest case for asking us to turn it into a certified Insight. It just means the two are not interchangeable, and a meeting goes badly when someone quotes a frozen chart as if it were this week's data.
Why an Insight can disappear
Insights have a lifecycle, and it is visible to you.
Certified: validated and safe for the decision it states. This is the normal state.
Experimental: offered, badged, under validation.
Withheld: temporarily taken out of the catalogue because we found something that needs correcting. It cannot be added while it is withheld.
Retired: permanently withdrawn, usually because a better Insight replaced it. Cards already on your dashboard stay visible and say that the Insight is no longer maintained, rather than vanishing without explanation.
A change in presentation does not change the version. A change in meaning always does, and a card built on the old meaning tells you it needs refreshing rather than quietly showing you a different number under the same title.
The freshness stamp
Each Insight card shows the date of the data it was built on. That date comes from the source snapshot, not from the moment you loaded the page, so a card never claims to be current when its source is not.
Behavioural Insights (engagement, archetypes, team health, wellbeing, the organisational dimensions) are rebuilt on a weekly pipeline. Expect the stamp to move once a week.
Training Insights follow a daily extract and carry their own, more recent date.
Evaluation and talent-review Insights move when your review cycle moves.
Cards are served from a cache so the page loads quickly. Use Refresh on a card to recompute it on demand. Refresh applies to catalogue Insights; a pinned chart has nothing to recompute, as explained above.
Filters
A filter chip appears on a card only when that Insight genuinely supports it. The available filters are:
Team. Narrows the Insight to one or several teams. Some talent-review Insights use the team recorded in the review rather than the platform team, because those are two different taxonomies and mixing them would produce a population that matches neither.
People. Narrows the Insight to a chosen set of employees, for a specific cohort you want to follow.
Manager and director. Available on the Insights that walk the reporting line. The director is derived from the manager's manager, because no organisation supplies a director field.
Review period. A named review inside a cycle, on the Insights that read the evaluation process.
Time window. Only on the Insights that have a real window, for example turnover, exits per month, learning activity, the onboarding cohort and the archetype history. Most Insights describe the current state and therefore have no period control at all.
Team and People are mutually exclusive, because each one defines the population and you cannot have two populations in one card. The interface prevents the combination.
To compare segments, add the same Insight twice with different filters. Two cards side by side is a comparison you can read; one card you keep re-filtering is a comparison you have to remember.
Pinned charts carry no filters. The cut was decided when you asked the question, so to change it you ask again and pin the new result.
Small groups and suppressed results
Insights built on anonymous survey responses (eNPS, wellbeing by team, the team health index, the organisational dimensions) will refuse to render for a segment that is too small, and say so. Filtering a five-person team out of an anonymous survey would let you work out who said what, which would break the promise made to the people who answered.
Insights that list named employees behave differently: they do not suppress, because naming people is the point of those cards and a count threshold would protect nobody. What controls those is authorisation, which is to say who is allowed to open them at all. If you believe someone can see a nominative Insight they should not, that is a permissions question and worth raising with us immediately.
Cards that say they have nothing
A card with no data still renders, and it tells you why. That is on purpose. A blank space is indistinguishable from a bug, and an Insight that silently disappears when it has nothing to say teaches you to distrust the whole dashboard.
No data for this Insight: the source is connected but has no rows for the population you selected.
Does not apply: for example, an onboarding card for someone outside the window you chose.
Partially available: some Insights combine several independent sources and degrade item by item. A headline band may show two real numbers and two explained absences, rather than pretending to be complete.
A query error is never presented as an absence of data. If something failed, the card says it failed.
Five reading habits worth having
Check whether it has a badge at all. Badge means certified Insight. No badge means a chart somebody pinned, frozen at the moment they pinned it.
Read the description before the chart. Every Insight states what it is not, and most misreadings are of things the card already warned about.
Check the badge before you act. A Factual list is an action list. A Diagnostic ranking is a place to look.
Check the population, not just the number. Several Insights cover only people with a formal review, or only people present in two sources at once. The card always says which.
Remember that behavioural scores are internal. They are normalised inside your organisation and adapted to the modules you have switched on. They do not compare to another organisation, and they do not measure a person's engagement as a human being. They measure what happens on the platform.