Over the past few weeks, we’ve written about how to improve business impact when it comes to Research skills.  The first that we talked about was insight.  Sure, it’s important that Research functions generate sound insights that promise business impact.  But what if no one does anything with them?

At one of last year’s in-person member meetings, several heads of Research named insight activation as one of their most significant challenges.  And as we got deeper into discussion, here’s what they wanted to know: How do you know when you’ve gone far enough?  Who’s ultimately on the hook for ensuring insights are activated?  I’m not sure anyone will ever have the answer to that question – but we certainly have some points of view on increasing the likelihood that your business partners actually do something with the recommendations that you deliver:

• Screen your insights:  It’s easy to critique others’ insights – especially if your function’s done a good job building a common understanding of what good insight looks like.  When generating insights, ensure that you’re pressure testing your own work as well.  Test your insight output against a standard set of criteria that should be present in any strong insight similar to what we’ve seen members do at Lilly or Nestlé. 
• Create clear, targeted communications that tell business partners what to do with the insight: Make sure that business partners understand what the insight means for their world by creating prescriptive, targeted communications that highlight what the insight means for their function, product, or BU.  One of our insurance members has created a set of four simple filtering questions that enable researchers to cut to the chase when sharing insights with different stakeholders.
• Equip business partners to own the insight: Get the broader organization focused on insight by giving business partners easy-to-use tools , templates, and training to use as part of their day-to-day.  Some companies even work with Marketing to build insight competencies into cross-functional performance expectations.

Interested in learning more?  Join part two in our Next Generation of Research Skills Webinar series this upcoming week (Insight Skill Development).  We’ll cover insight generation and activation – and also highlight some new work we’ll be publishing later on this month.

Snow removal is not Washington D.C.’s strong suit.  On Monday, all federal agencies enjoyed a two hour delayed opening because of a whopping 0.7 inches (1.8 cm) of snow that fell here over the weekend. Perhaps the city should forgo the plows and heavy machinery in favor of some of the tools featured in this article, which promise to make snow removal easier and safer.

With the importance of good tools (and the importance of good insight) in mind, the Market Research Executive Board has compiled some of our best insight generation exercises, worksheets, and practice guides into one easy-to-use toolkit. (The best part? Our tools carry little to no risk of back injury!)

Insight generation is one of the most important and most difficult tasks of any market research function.  MREB research has shown that a shift to make quality insight generation a priority is associated with a 70% increase in business impact. These 15 hands-on tools are designed to support you and your team in scoping and focusing your efforts, thinking creatively, and framing your insights in an actionable and impactful way. MREB members, access the toolkit here.

We know that customer insight is not just good for the company, it is essential for long-term survival. Indeed, 70% of severe business failures result from inadequate customer understanding. And yet, according to our own study of business partners, most Research departments have yet to fulfill the strategic role desired by researchers and business partners.

Foundational research competencies like research skills and project execution are not enough to drive business impact.  We’ve found that the biggest opportunity to advance Research’s impact lies in five consultative skills:

1. Insight
2. Business Problem Solving
3. Influence
4. Communication
5. Synthesis

Over the next few weeks I’ll write about each of these skills, starting today with insight.  And to make sure that we’re all on the same page, we define insight as the identification of some relationship or meaning within diverse sets of data that promises significant business impact.

To make sure you are hitting the right insight bar, the theory of insight is not enough.  For example, by providing a simple framework for insight development grounded in customer behavior, Vodafone makes sure researchers know what a great insight looks like and how to go about developing them independently.  MREB members, access the full overview for developing insight skills here.  And stay tuned next week for more on Skills for the Next Generation of Market Researchers.

In a recent HBR post environmental psychologist Sally Augustin outlines ways to make your workspace a place where you can accomplish your best work.  And her recommendations have me thinking I need to make some changes in here:

• Protect your back-you will feel more comfortable if you find a way to sit so that your side rather than your back faces your workspace entry point.
• Remove the red-thanks to teachers using red to grade our childhood papers, the color now inhibits cognitive tasks.
• Seek rounded leaves-people pay attention better when there are leafy plants around.
• Personalize-folks with a workspace that tells a story about who they are find more satisfaction with their jobs.
• Organize and declutter-I would write more here, but I’ve temporarily lost track of my keyboa…

Alright…after a trip to the dumpster and the garden center I’m ready to continue.  The environment that you work in matters, and not just in a physical sense like Sally wrote about above.  When we analyzed what made successful teams more insightful, we found that it’s all about the environment. 

Research can create an environment conducive to insight generation by fostering an open, creative culture.  To boost insight from your team you need to:

• Clarify the Insight Mandate-featuring insight in the mandate of the function is important but not enough—mangers must help researchers internalize commitment to insight and raise the bar of business impact through experiential training.
• Create Team Support for Risk Taking and Creativity-creating an environment where researchers take risks, push for creativity, and encouraging peers to do the same is not as easy as simply encouraging researchers to express creativity and take unlimited risks—there need to be guardrails to prevent time-wasting and inappropriate risk–taking.
• Coach Insight Generation-Using standard manager techniques that help teach process management or presentation skills can shut down creativity and aren’t appropriate for unstructured activities like insight generation.

What do you do to make yourself the best work environment?  Share your tips of the trade in the comments section below.

Andrew O’Connell at HBR recently pulled together a collection of 2011’s (sometimes disturbing) recommendations on how to get ahead in business, and his list proves the old “reality is stranger than fiction” adage.  But many of the studies that Andrew references (even some of those most seemingly from left-field) do correspond with more straightforward, doable action items that you can add to your list of New Year’s resolutions:

• To improve performance, get someone to wish you luck: a German experiment saw a marked improvement in performance time on a dexterity task when participants were wished luck.  We too have found that language and interaction can have a substantial impact on work performance.  For example, avoiding directive management by focusing on Socratic coaching techniques helped one FS company improve creativity on its research team.  And there was, of course, that list of phrases only bad managers say that we shared a few months ago.
• To generate ideas, run electric current through your brain: participants in a University of Sydney study were 3 times more likely to solve a difficult problem if they received electrical stimulation in the anterior temporal lobes.  This recommendation sounds a bit invasive to me…maybe we can start by addressing team environment issues that stifle creativity.  Encouraging calculated risk-taking and specialized roles will probably be more welcome than electro-shock therapy with your colleagues.
• “A-B-D” — always be disagreeable: professors at Cornell, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Western Ontario found that men who are less agreeable than average earn more than those who are more agreeable than average.  I’m not sure about the Research benefits of disagreeing, but we did find that being contrarian—telling them something they don’t know—is the best way to make a difference in a business decision. 
• To enhance your recall, try gazing at a dead cat: an experiment on language retention at Washington University found that those who saw a negative image (like that of a dead cat) were better able to remember a newly learned Swahili word than those who viewed a neutral image.  Our research this year confirms that pulling emotional levers is the best way to get folks to pay attention (just look at how well this bullet title worked).  But to avoid offending our friends at PETA, let’s leave the animal images out of it and focus on other methods to invoke surprise, doubt, wonder, or intrigue from your business partners.

Do you have a New Year’s resolution for moving your career forward?  We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

Guest blogger Christopher Frank is the co-author of Drinking from the Fire Hose: Making Smarter Decisions Without Drowning in Information (Portfolio/Penguin, September 2011). He previously spent 10 years at Microsoft as senior director of corporate research, worked at Accenture as a consultant in the consumer and technology practices, and founded an online start-up called Drei Tauben Ltd.  @chris_j_frank  

Imagine yourself in a conference room, 20 minutes into a meeting when the presenter finally makes it to slide four of a 42-slide deck. At least you can read this one, unlike the others, which were crammed with numbers and charts. You look around wondering if anyone else is following the presentation. Rather than searching hopelessly for one relevant piece of information, what you really desire are insights to see clearly into complex situations. 

Regardless of your industry, job or target customer, we have become data hounds. The business climate worships numbers – and rightly so since figures hold weight. Facts are supposed to make you more confident in your decision and certain of your direction. However, in our information economy, the challenge lies in keeping your head above the flood of data, learning how to separate real information from disparate facts and applying the judgment to inspire others to act.

The goal seems easy: identify the data you need, use the information to yield fresh insights and then deliver the new learning to fuel growth. Then why is it so hard? It seems like every meeting and conference call becomes a futile effort to survive the data deluge. In essence, data is unfortunately the main character and any meaningful dialogue is a supporting cast member. Given the increasing pace of data flowing at decision makers and the business survival challenges facing companies, this needs to change and change quickly.

Putting Yourself Through Data Rehab
How do you find the truly essential nuggets of information and use them with confidence to make decisions and effectively lead your teams? The answer, ironically enough, is found in asking questions. The right questions help leaders zero in on the most important information to keep strategic initiatives on track and drive team progress and innovation.

We identified seven core questions – not complex analytical questions learned in business school, but a product of business experience. Read More »

For many years I looked to Bill Lumbergh as my “what not to say” as a manager tutor.  (I’m gonna need you to…)

But we now have an updated list of phrases that should never pass a manger’s lips thanks to workplace expert Liz Ryan.  She recently blogged the 10 things only bad managers say.  Among the most groan-inducing:

• I’ll take it under advisement
• Who gave you permission to do that?
• In these times, you’re lucky to have a job at all

Most of the quotes Liz lists seem to show an under-appreciation (to say the least) of what folks bring to the team and company.  And for Research departments statements like these not only make people feel terrible about their workplace, they also have a direct impact on the quality of recommendations created.

We’ve run the numbers, and we know that more insightful teams foster an environment that:

• Builds personal commitment to a clear insight mandate
• Reinforces the sharing of hypotheses and judgments, not just proven conclusions
• Leads staff to self-directed learning rather than prescribe staff activities
• Engineers opportunities to build career momentum despite limited department size and budget

MREB members, to see what your group can do to improve productivity across the board, check out our work on fostering an environment that unleashes researchers’ potential.   And if you’d like to measure the impact your department has on internal partners’ decisions, contact us about deploying the Business Impact Diagnostic.

By Aaron Field

Steve Jobs’ untimely passing sparked a spate of well-meaning and mostly laudatory remembrances.  The memorialists talked about many admirable traits (many very close to my geeky heart) but one thing has bothered me in the coverage.

Jobs was a bad role model for modern companies.

Consider a couple of quotes:

“We didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not.”

“For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

In essence he advised against customer research – relying instead on personal foresight. And it worked beautifully for Apple, Pixar, and Apple again. One can only envy his seemingly effortless understanding of our needs before we knew them.

I envy him. But I would not copy him.

Most products designed for and by the technical staff are dismal failures. Remember the Segway? Steve Jobs among others said it would revolutionize the modern city. To be fair the Segway (and surplus WWII amphibious vehicles) are revolutionizing novelty tourism . (Segways vs. Ducks)

The truth is that Jobs was a once in a generation talent. Not so much for technical know-how but for his uncanny insight into us.

But executives who are not Steve Jobs (i.e. everyone) need researchers who are business partners. They want real insight that can impact the business (not data reporting!). And it really does work. Customer-focused companies outperform their competitors.

In the end we can honor Jobs’ genius by recognizing its uniqueness – not by copying it.

As someone who wants to Google my keys if I can’t find them, a big, thick book is not where I usually go looking for information – especially when I’m in a hurry.

Unfortunately market research often reads like a “big, thick book” – chock full of information but impossible to use. Faced with a ream of information can you really blame business partners for asking Google? I do it all the time.

Turns out that big, thick tomes of information do serve a purpose – making people feel good. In a recent survey, business executives were most confident in a decision being “well thought out” when the supporting research was “comprehensive” and “accurate.”

But when asked if the supporting research made a difference in the business decision (not feeling good but having impact). A very different picture emerged. “Making a difference” requires market research to do at least one of two things: say something new or say something contrarian.

Now you may want to argue that one can drive business impact by making people feel good, we looked into that possibility too and found that the correlation between those two concepts is nearly zero — 0.006 to be exact. What it means is that while comprehensive and accurate information (the kind Research tends to provide) makes a decision appear “well thought out”, it does not “make a difference” in the decision process. If it is up to me, I’d stop massaging people’s ego and start sharing some news worthy information.

The first and most important step towards achieving that is knowing what’s news. What do people know already? What would be newsworthy to them?

• Proactively ask and help business partners articulate their needs and visions. This involves getting them to think at a level beyond silos and short term objectives. Johnson & Johnson avoided overlapping, low impact projects by getting research to work with business partners on identifying and prioritizing unknowns through a “Strategy-Driven Learning Agenda”. Similarly, Eli Lilly launched a “I Wish I Knew” process for business partners aimed at finding game changing questions that can improve understanding across the board.
• Find out what they know, then tell them what they don’t.  Instead of blindly throwing darts at the wall hoping to hit a pain point, asking business partners probing questions before and during the research process help eliminate much of the uncertainty regarding what and how to present. Members, see how one company discovered this through their “problem diagnosis and scoping process”.

The balance of art and science necessary to be a successful market researcher depends a great deal on your creativity.  It’s what turns interesting information into a strategy-changing insight, but sometimes we can lose sight of the importance of fostering an open and creative environment.  I was reminded of the importance of this issue as I read a psychology blog that outlined 6 practices sure to squelch creativity in your organization.  I was struck by how many of the general issues mentioned in the blog (listed below) can rear their ugly heads in researcher’s day-to-day work:

6 Ways to Kill Creativity:

1. Mismatch roles
2. Ration resources
3. Restrict freedom
4. Reduce group diversity
5. Provide no encouragement
6. Provide no support

This list doesn’t have too much to disagree with, and some of these issues can seem pretty daunting.  But luckily there are a number of Research-specific solutions you can put into play:

Encourage Calculated Risks-it seems to me that the last 4 creativity killers have all to do with the environment that your team creates and fosters, and we have the data to show that departments that foster open, creative cultures have more impactful insights.  You need to create an environment where researchers take risks, push for creativity, and encourage peers to do the same.  Companies like Diageo do this by changing their teams’ focus from risk-aversion to judgment-based (asserting judgments backed by information and experience rather than just sharing what the data proves).

Specialize Roles-we all know that different people are good at different things, so why don’t we focus on these specialties more?  I’ve said it before: Research teams provide more compelling guidance when team members play to their strengths.   We’ve seen BT carve out specialized roles for those interested in client consultation and Motorola create a dedicated synthesis role.  The point is, don’t try to be a team of bionic researchers.  Focus on the areas that you are best at and are most interested in.

Provide Resources and Time-and, as usual, resourcing comes into play.  But for creativity we aren’t simply talking about budget.  Sometimes it seems that the scarcest resource is time.  But time is a key ingredient to creative insights, and to make this time you need to build it into your research process.  Unilever does this by breaking its insight generation into two separate days: forcing a separation between observation and conclusions allows the team to break through its own conventional wisdom and assumptions.

What have I missed?  How do manage creativity in your day-to-day jobs?  Tell us about it in the comments section below!

Related resources:

• Diageo’s Judgment-Focused Research Guidelines
• Researchers: Play to Your Strengths
• Avoiding the Bionic Researcher Trap
• Research Role Specialization Resources
• Unilever’s Customer-Insight Laboratory