Leading Insight With Purpose
By Insight Management Academy
- article
- Insight Transformation
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James will also facilitate a panel of insights leaders at the Corporate Research & Insights Summit in London in September. If you work in-house in an inside role, check out the rest of the agenda and apply for a free ticket here:
The Corporate Research & Insights Summit
In my 3rd article in this Corporate Insight Leaders series, I suggested that if you want to transform Insight and its impact in your organisation, you need to become a more transformational Insight leader. And a key enabler of that is to write your own Insight leader’s playbook.
What should you put in the first chapter? I’m with the English-born, American author Simon Sinek on this one: we should always start with the ‘why’.
Therefore, when I created a 9P framework for the Insight leader’s playbook, I decided that the first P should be for Purpose. You need to determine what this is for your Insight team and, if you’ve given it thought in the past, whether the purpose you previously wrote down is still appropriate.
Let’s start with a question:
Why Does Your Insight Team Exist?
It might seem an easy question to answer, but if you found it too easy, look at your answer and ask yourself again, ‘but why?’, and see if that leads you to a more profound answer.
Many Insight leaders I speak to would say “my team exists to bring the customer voice into decision-making”. That’s a noble cause. But why does your organisation want to bring the customer’s voice into decision-making? It’s probably because it thinks it will lead to better decisions. But why will they be better decisions?
In my 10 years as Insight Director at Barclays, we arrived at the view that Insight existed not to drive decisions that were generally better, but those that specifically enabled our organisation to unlock more sustainable economic value. We couldn’t do that unless we identified financial opportunities for the organisation through better customer understanding, and then encouraged the organisation to take those opportunities.
So the Barclays Insight team’s purpose was “to identify value for our organisation and drive change within it”.
What’s the Optimal Purpose For an Insight Team in Your Organisation?
You might arrive at a different conclusion or a different form of words for your Insight team, but many of the best examples I’ve seen do reference the same twin responsibilities that we recognised at Barclays:
- The requirement to focus on evidence-based, problem-solving and opportunity identification, with the functional aspects of Insight like survey design and analytics being seen as a means to an end.
- A recognition that customer and market knowledge itself has no value until it is applied to business decisions, and the reality is that the way we share our knowledge is at least as important as the ‘quality’ of the insights we produce. Not always easy to accept, but true.
Once you have drafted a purpose, I have three more challenges I’d like you to consider. They relate to the scale of your ambition, the relevance of your purpose to day-to-day ways of working, and the extent to which your purpose will motivate your colleagues and inspire others to join you.
Are You Being Sufficiently Ambitious and Seeing the Bigger Picture?
When I first developed my thinking on an Insight leader’s playbook, the challenge I was addressing was that too many Insight teams act as service functions, responding to data and research requests from other departments. They don’t aspire to shape the definition and development of an Insight-driven organisation, or, if they do, their leaders often haven’t written a dynamic plan for how they are going to transform Insight and its impact and make that aspiration a reality.
Two years on and AI is rapidly reshaping many people’s view of what corporate Insight teams should do, how technology could be deployed to assist them, and what this means for the relationship between Insight teams and decision-makers in other departments. I’ve suggested that every Insight professional should aspire to be an Insight activist rather than an Insight producer, assessing their contribution not on the basis of how many research projects have been developed but on the value of the ideas adopted by decision-makers.
Do you believe your company should be Insight-driven and does your purpose reflect that ambition?
Is Your Purpose Relevant?
Tim Downing, now a senior academic at Coventry Business School and former UK Director of Insight & Foresight at Molson Coors, joined me for Episode 31 of the Transforming Insight podcast, talked about what he called the ‘golden thread’ that he believes must link an Insight team’s purpose and its day-to-day activity.
For example, if it’s your stated ambition to shape the most important business decisions taken this year, has your Insight team developed a value-based prioritisation process to determine how it allocates time and budget? And have your analysts and researchers been trained in ‘how to say no, nicely’ when other departments ask for data to support lower-value projects?
The purpose we develop for our teams has to be reflected in the activity we observe all around us. That means the purpose has to be grounded in reality, and our processes and ways of working have to mirror our ambitions.
Is Your Purpose Motivational?
I’ve worked in Insight for 27 years, and I don’t think there’s ever been a year when we thought our corporate lives were easy. Developing great insights is difficult, driving change in our organisations can be even more difficult. But if you’ve been to an Insights, Research or Analytics event in the last 2 years, you’ll probably have come away thinking there’s more disruption in the sector at the moment than ever before.
In your organisation this might be reflected in reporting line changes, headcount cuts, budget restrictions or the number of senior colleagues who have left your company. You yourself might have felt immune to this disruption so far, but I’d be surprised if at least some of your colleagues weren’t concerned about the future or how their roles might change.
My personal view is that the future will belong to Insight-driven organisations, and there are exciting times ahead of many corporate Insight professionals. But we only have a window of opportunity to shape the change that is already happening around us.
In this environment, it’s particularly important that we write down a purpose for our team that will motivate our colleagues and inspire others to join us; to set out our stall for the rest of the organisation to see; to drive agencies to want to put their best people on our projects; and our own C-suite to sense our appetite to create a financially successful, Insight-driven organisation.
Taking the Next Step
If you want some further inspiration on how to develop your Insight team’s purpose, you might want to read The Insight Leader’s Playbook, complimentary copies of which are currently available to any corporate Insight leader who completes the IMA’s new 7-minute self-assessment survey, The Insight Leader’s Healthcheck. The IMA can also provide a Leading Insight with purpose masterclass.
Once you have developed your purpose, what’s next? There’s little point working on your team’s purpose if others in the organisation don’t know what it is, or worse still, have different ideas about your role and how they should engage with you. So the second P in the Insight leader’s playbook should be for profile, and I’ll share some ideas on how we can all work on that in the next article in this Corporate Insight Leader series.
James will also facilitate a panel of insights leaders at the Corporate Research & Insights Summit in London in September. If you work in-house in an inside role, check out the rest of the agenda and apply for a free ticket here:
