Secrets of corporate insight teams: James Wycherley, CEO of IMA & Author of Transforming Insight

Speaker A: M

Speaker B: what if there were a book that had a collection of all the tips and tools and tricks that you typically think about to be successful as an insight team? Well, that book is called Transforming Insight and has been written by James Wycherley, who is the CEO of the Insight Management Academy out of London. Uh, today we'll have the opportunity to hear from him about what insight teams do best and what the opportunities are, and specifically the high level view of the 42 secrets of successful corporate insights teams. As a specific gift from the Insight Management Academy to the Digging for Insights podcast, we will be getting a free PDF summary of Transforming Insight book in case you want to check it out before you officially purchase the book itself. And you can get that by simply emailing me@stepheniggingforinsights.com that's Stephen. S T E P H E n@digit diggingforinsights.com um, This is Digging for Insights, the marketing research podcast for insights professionals and businesses looking to deeply understand their customers so they can grow. I'm Stephen Griffiths, a Fortune 500 corporate researcher. Join me as we talk with experts about inspiring case studies, career advice and research methods that will lead to growth. Well, today I'm excited to welcome James Wycherley to the podcast. James is CEO of the Insight Management Academy, which is a, uh, leading institution based out of London focused on helping organizations get smart on how to use insights. He comes from a background of, uh, leading insights at Barclays bank and was there for 10 years as director of Customer and Market analysis and has recently authored the book Transforming Insight. And we're excited to have you on the podcast. James, welcome.

Speaker A: Thank you very much. It's great to be here.

Speaker B: It's great to have you too. You know, a lot of our audience is familiar with market intelligence and consumer insights, but maybe not as familiar with the ima. Could you talk a little bit about your, um, organization and what led to the book that you've recently written?

Speaker A: Yes, of course. Yes, it's been my pleasure. So the IMA is the Insight Management Academy. It's an organization begun 17 years ago ago, largely by accident, I would say. And to explain, there was a moment in 2003, 2004, where a large group of organizations, particularly in the USA and in the UK, decided that they needed to have an insight or an insights function. And a whole group of us who went to bed one night as heads of analysis or heads of market research woke up the next morning to find that we were heads of insight in our organizations instead. And it Followed that. We wanted to know what that meant. Was being head of Insight different to being head of Research or analysis? Was it just a rebranding exercise or was it something rather more fundamental? And so a, uh, group of us met in London to discuss that. So I represented Barclays bank, as you say, and a number of my peers from the other large UK banks. Were there many of the supermarket heads of Insight, a number of large brands and FMCG organisations and service providers as diverse as Nokia and Ebay and Transport for London, Tesco and Sainsbury's and, um, other big retailers known particularly in the uk. And what we discovered was, I guess firstly that we thought that there was something fundamentally different about Insight, that whilst research and analysis and competitor intelligence and other forms for gathering intelligence about your customers and markets were of course really, really important to Insight, they were the inputs rather than the output. And the output from Insight really was about problem solving and value identification and driving change within our organizations in order to crystallize that value. And that required a bit of a rethink about how we changed our Insight functions from being largely service functions, reactive service functions in our companies, to being rather more proactive drivers of change. Second thing that came out of those, uh, initial meetings was a decision that we'd all benefited greatly from talking to each other. And so there was a resolution that from whatever sector we came from, whatever organisation we were trying to get into the habit of meeting as a regular forum to discuss ways in which we could make Insight more effective within our organisations. And that was the beginning of the Insight Management Academy. The forums had met each quarter for the 17 years that have followed. And there's been a whole range of, uh, propositions and products and support services developed over that time, like benchmarking, best practice, publications, training and development and advice given by a group of people who now work full time with the Insight Management Academy to support other corporate Insight leaders. And, uh, my own role. Well, as you say, I was head of Insight at Barclays for 10 years or more and having been on sabbatical in 2014 for a year, I was given the opportunity to go and work full time myself at the IMA rather than go back to the bank. And I just decided that having benefited so much from all the advice and support that the IMA had given me, this was the time to put something back into it and to try to further that research about best practice myself. And, uh, the book, well, that was just a logical extension of doing network.

Speaker B: Well, it certainly served its role in terms of Giving back to the community and maybe also bringing some awareness to the IMA. You know, I've been in Insights for over 10 years and had never heard of the IMA before and was uh, especially intrigued. There's lots of market research and insight organizations. What I love about yours is the focus on the application insights. How do you not just do good research or statistical analysis or write good surveys, but how do you make change within organizations and love that focus of being proactive rather than just reactive, uh, serving up market research requests, which I think is really important.

Speaker A: So this is where I need your help Stephen, uh, and that of your listeners because you're dead right. Lots of people haven't heard of the ima. I think for many years it worked almost as a private members club where a small group of senior Insight directors, largely based in and around London and the southeast of the uk met on a regular basis. And um, the best practice that was discussed had a transformational impact within our organisations. But I think it's true to say that it didn't really spread beyond that small group of organisations. And my focus ever since becoming chief executive here is to find ways of engaging more organisations in that conversation because the more companies, the more sectors, the more different types of organization that are involved in the debate, the richer the understanding becomes for everyone. And speaking personally, I always used to think that I uh, benefited most from hearing from heads of insight in completely different sectors to my bank because the lens through which they viewed insight, the best practice techniques and tips and tricks that uh, other sectors have adopted were very often completely different from what I was doing and they challenged my thinking a lot more. So yes, the more that get involved in the conversation the better.

Speaker B: Just to hear a little bit more about the development of the book, I had the chance to read almost all of it and uh, really enjoyed how applicable it was. Some of the principles seem like, oh, that makes sense. But it talks about the 42 secrets of successful insights teams. It's about putting it all together and consistently applying it to really get the value out of it. And I know, I feel like I have personal anecdotes for almost each one of your secrets about. Oh yeah, I remember a time when we didn't record uh, the past research very well and didn't incorporate into future research or remember a time when maybe we didn't brand ourselves as well in terms of an insights organization within the broader uh, context. And so I really enjoyed the take there. Talk me through how you put together the book so specifically and I know you Reference a lot of other reports that the IMA has created as you created your book and maybe just talk through that a little bit that this isn't it, uh, doesn't appear to be just the whimsical thinking of James, uh, put together over a few months, but a lot more research has been put into making this happen.

Speaker A: Well I'm glad that it didn't come down as lockdown madness because I did write the book during the first two or three months of the first lockdown in the UK in April, May, June of 2020. So it was what I hope is a one off opportunity to focus for a uh, concentrated period of time on writing a book like that. I hope for obvious reasons that we don't get too many opportunities like that. But at the same time it was trying to make the best of the situation. But yes, let me talk you through uh, the approach to the structure of the book and the thinking behind that. So I mentioned earlier that it's been a common finding of Insight directors that if we want to make insight effective within our organisations, we really have to start by thinking about the role that insight plays within our companies and the purpose of the insight teams themselves, but then go on and think about how we bring a change about in more specific areas. Now when the conversations first started at the Insight Forums back in 2005 there was no set syllabus. Instead the ideas have grown very organically based on the discussions that we've had. But over a period of time some patterns have started to form and what we found is that there are some aspects of transforming an insight team and the role that it plays which you would regard as being to do with the day to day role of insight managers, researchers and analysts. And there are some things which are very much more about the top down strategic transformation of the Insight team and the role it plays in its company. I would say in general that more focus tends to be given in organisations to the former than to the latter. When we think about Insight team development, we're more likely to think about how to improve our researchers communication skills or their influencing skills than we are probably to think about how do we develop a bit of strategy for our insight team or address, as you mentioned, the perception of its brand within the organization, but both are equally important. So I'll uh, walk you through the structure very briefly and then of course we can talk about individual aspects, uh, if you'd like to know a little bit more about them. So the 42 secrets are divided into four key blocks and then there are two extra chapters at the end. The first of those blocks is all about identifying value for our organizations. And we believe that insight teams identify value for their organizations both through generating new insights and particularly joined up insights that pull from the best of lots of different sources of data and lots of different disciplines. So I'm talking about joining together between research here and analytics or competitor intelligence or web analysis or social media analysis. Insight teams really I see that working as internal consultants and working quite a data agnostic way to use the best data, the best sources, the best techniques that are applicable to solving individual business issues. But the focus is on the business issue, not on the fact that traditionally we have been market researchers or analysts or we focus particularly on one type of data or another. The other big way in which we identify value for our organizations is accepting that there's a big difference between insights, in other words, individual contextualized discoveries about how customers interact with our organization and create value for it, and insight, which we define as being the accumulated knowledge and wisdom which comes out of lots and lots of different research and analytics projects. Now the curious thing to me is that it's very rare to find an insight leader who will say that there isn't more value in all that accumulated understanding and knowledge than there is in the next individual insights project. And yet when you look at the work that our teams do, it's equally rare to find an insights team which isn't more focused on the next project project, as opposed to putting aside proper time and reflection and effort to understand the connections and join the dots and to build up a corporate knowledge bank around what's going on in particular markets or segments or channels or products or brands, because that's where the true long term value of insight lies, I think. And of course we always need to investigate the latest hot topic or add to our store of knowledge on particular issues to look ahead to what's coming next. So of course we're going to be generating new insights all the time. Unless we place equal value on managing that store of knowledge, then I think we're missing uh, a big opportunity. So that's identifying value. Second area is driving change. And we do that through both influencing senior decision makers within organisations, but also through communicating to the wider organization both the insights and the insight that uh, I was just talking about. I think in both instances there's sort of a whole set of mindset and behaviors associated with effective insight work. So in terms of influence, I think it's a case of really understanding decision makers far better than we Historically have done. I think insight teams, uh, are ironically better at understanding the external audience for their company's products and services than they are about understanding their internal audience for their insight and knowledge very often. And so again I think there's a balance to address there. And then of course when you think about building better relationships with people about the tactics of persuasion, but on the communication front, well, of course there's specific techniques that we can use. Storytelling, visualization, very much at the forefront of a lot of team development work at the moment. And we would definitely support that. And storytelling for one is probably the top request that we get for insight team transformation work at the moment. But equilimp important to think about the structure of communication, about having a communication plan for which audiences we're trying to reach with which content and through which channels. And again to set aside some proper focus time on that. So that's sort of driving change. The third area, well that's all about leading insight through development of insight strategy and through the role that insight people play and um, the skills, the behaviors, the areas of development through recruitment and team development that we need to focus on there, including the role of the insight leader, which I think is a massively undervalued area of research. Being an insight leader is a fantastic job within an organization, but being a great market researcher, uh, or a great analyst doesn't necessarily prepare you for being a great insights leader, uh, nor necessarily does having headed a different department in marketing or strategy or finance or category management. So I think that's uh, an area that we could all learn more about. And the very last part of the piece, the final block is about optimising impact. I think there are two ways again in which we do that. First, through the positioning of our insight teams within the hearts, the minds and the decision making processes of organizations. And then secondly through commerciality and making sure that every aspect of insight work is really aligned with the fundamentals of how organizations create value. And um, seeing the work that insight team do as very complementary to that as opposed to setting up what I'm afraid is all too often a distinction between the commercial focus of an organization and the customer focus of an insight team, I think that does us a lot of harm and doesn't help us to either identify value or drive change within our companies. Gotcha.

Speaker B: And you mentioned. So those are the four main areas. Identifying value, driving change within the organization, leading an insight organization, attracting talent, leading well and um, then optimizing impact. That commerciality you uh, mentioned. There's two additional Chapters as well. Do you want to talk on those briefly?

Speaker A: Yes, certainly. So it seemed to me as I was going through the book that there was something about maintaining the momentum and seizing the opportunity. So I don't think insights teams have ever been in the spotlight to the extent that they are at the moment. The appetite of organizations for using customer market insights has been growing steadily over the last five, 10, 15, 20 years. And that's true pretty much across sector, particularly as organizations that have never known the ultimate identity of a customer in a pre digital age or pre social media now are far more likely to know exactly who they're dealing with and what those customers and consumers look like outside of their interaction with that specific organization. So there's been far more focus on using data to make evidence based decisions more broadly and far more customer centricity, I think within uh, organizations of most sizes. What has been different throughout the pandemic has been the speed with which executives have wanted a read on what was happening. What have consumers thinking, saying or doing, what's changing, what's going to stay the same? Are we going through a really weird phase and then going to go back to how things were before or have some of the fundamental building blocks changed and we're never going to go back to where we were? And the best insight teams I think have really risen to that challenge and spotted the opportunity that they have an opportunity to make a difference in the short term, um, by stepping up and really bringing together the wealth of the things that they know about customs and markets and understanding how those things could influence decisions here and now, but also putting down a marker for the future. I think it would be a real shame if insight teams were to go back whenever the pandemics and the lockdowns come to an end. It'd be a real shame if insight teams went back to the rather more reactive role that they played in companies before. And so I think the most astute and wise insight leaders are thinking about the positioning of insight and how that's going to be affected by the role that they have played over the course of the last couple of years.

Speaker B: You know what I love about your mentality and talking through these things is it's fairly comprehensive, right? Definitely from the client side perspective. And I love, as you mentioned earlier, that it's informed by benchmarks. And so, you know, I believe on the website you mentioned that there's over 300 organizations that have benchmarked with the IMA in order to not just say, you know, these are important areas, but specifically how do different companies rank on these different areas? Can you talk to me a little bit about what are the common themes you're seeing across client side, um, insight organizations about maybe common weaknesses and uh, what we can learn from those, just as a high level view.

Speaker A: Yes, of course, you're right. Everything that we do, and I guess this follows from being a corporate insight person myself. I want it to be evidence based. I don't want to just make it up sitting in my garden on a sunny morning during the lockdown. I want to examine the evidence, I want to be curious and explore more. I want to talk to people, I want to collect data, all that stuff that we do to create insights within our own organisations. And um, the benchmarking plays a really important role in that. It started because when we had a relatively small group of organizations involved in Insight forums, we wanted to get a read on the extent to which different member organizations had adopted different aspects of the best practice topics that we were talking about. And it was no more complicated than that. And then as more organisations have got involved we've codified our understanding rather more and we now collect insights on a routine basis across our membership. So as you say, about 350 insight leaders have completed our Transforming Insight Leader survey over the course of the last three years and that gives us a wealth of data from which to construct a benchmark so that every subsequent organization who completes our uh, surveys can then see how their responses compare against the benchmark that we've put together. The area that Insight leaders think that they're best at or think that their teams are best at is generating insights. I guess there's a whole heritage behind that, isn't it? It's easy for people to think, oh yes, well our day job is doing research and analysis M and they think about all the technical skills that their teams have got and apply to that task and they're right all the time. We're discovering new market research techniques, aren't we? And new data that we can analyze and thinking about how we can use that more creatively. I do think there's more work to do in actually joining up insight across the research and the analysis functions. So I think there's actually still some way to go on that. But compared with other areas like influence and communication, insight generation is definitely ahead. The weakest of the, what I think of as the doing territories, so generation, knowledge, influence and communication. The weakest of those four is knowledge. If the uh, insight leaders could do one thing it would be to uh, put far more effort behind having conversations between analysts and researchers about what they're working on, but what they're finding out and what the implications are and how that relates to things that other people in the team have, uh, understood or previous pieces of work that have been done. I don't see sufficient living conversations about those aspects. And it is through those conversations that we identify connections and also disconnects. Some of the most powerful insights, uh, over time have been created when people have realized that there's been a big disconnect between what the research says that people say and what the analysis says that people do. And we don't discover those things if we don't talk to each other about them in the first place. So knowledge is the area, I would say, whether there's most to do on that, on the sort of, the more leadership aspects. Well, I think everybody could benefit by writing an Insight strategy that doesn't have one in the first place. Although we might want to examine a bit more about, uh, what people really think an insight strategy is. But the territory where there's the most to do across those transformation areas is undoubtedly commerciality. We've just had a set of Insight forums in London two weeks ago, Manchester last week. We have an online Insight forum coming up next week. And in each of those we're talking about what we call the value of insight. In other words, this whole aspect of the work that an Insight team does to add to its organization's commercial success, but also understand what role it played in that commercial success ultimately by calculating a return on investment for Insight. Out of everything that the IMA does, out of all the questions that we ask on our benchmark, out of all the team development work, it. It's that aspect of commerciality in general and ROI in particular, which is the weakest link at the moment. And I think that requires quite a big mindset change, but also embedding of some new habits within Insight teams.

Speaker B: Gotcha. Yeah. I love this conversation because it mirrors a lot of the experiences that I've had in my career. I think everyone who calls themselves a marketing researcher is proud of the report they put out and making sure people see that. I think you bring up a really good point that it's about connecting all of those things and that creating that knowledge that really adds value. And then I love your point about making sure it lands with the business, that commerciality as well as, uh, strategy. So how do you talk about your Insight team within the product organization and make that connection there? I wonder if we can just dive into the first area there you mentioned Insight knowledge and this importance of, uh, joined up insights. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? And I know you specifically go into knowledge management systems and would love to just get some examples of how this comes to life within organizations.

Speaker A: Yes, by all means. I'll start with my own experience at Barclays, if I might, because there was a particular moment in time when I went along to an induction meeting with a new marketing director that we had. It was quite common for me to be wheeled into somebody's office when, uh, a new senior executive, uh, arrived, uh, along I'm sure with many other department heads as part of their induction. The instance that sticks in my mind was that this, uh, new marketing executive said, so you're the uh, head of Insights, Tell me some insights. Then, having resisted the temptation to punch him, because that's never great in an induction meeting, I thought, do you know what? That's actually quite a good question. It's a very good question because what I instantly understand he's asking for here is not the results of the latest BrandTracker survey or the latest NPS study or that piece of analysis that uh, one of my analysts finished yesterday. What he's asking is for me to draw all those things together and tell him what he really needs to know about Barclays franchise in the market he's working with. About our relationships with customers, about the shape of the market, about the key consumer dynamics, about where we make money or where we lose money, about how different products are used across different channels, how different customer segments interact with us in different ways. In other words, he's wanting me, quite understandably, to draw all that stuff together from across the, the multiple pieces of research and analysis that my Insight team, uh, are uh, doing this year and more importantly perhaps has done over many years. Now, the irony was that whilst that was a great question to be asked, I had to make up the answer because none of the researchers or the analysts or the competitor intelligence people working in our Insight team at that moment were focused on answering that question. They were all focused on answering very specific business questions, questions. And um, so it really made me stop and think about the way in which I was using our resources within the Insight team. And that if there really was great value in the accumulated knowledge, indeed greater value in the accumulated knowledge for driving really big strategic business decisions than there was in an individual project, then we really needed to think about changing the balance of how we spent our time, our money and our focus. And I wasn't the only one so one of my peers at Transport for London, for example, around the same time started to put together fact packs around particular consumer segments, around particular dynamics, around particular trends. The Insight team at Waitrose, one of the large UK supermarkets, started getting involved in the customer planning exercise every year, which in their organization preceded the commercial planning and the trade planning plan. And so that was a one off opportunity for them every year really to pull together everything that they understood about key consumers and key markets and um, key brands. So it looks different in different organizations and I think the most successful organizations in that respect have managed to attach that work to a particular business initiative like an annual plan or a medium term plan or a trading plan or a cassette plan, because that's given them license to free up resources to work on it in a way which is quite difficult to do. If it's a bit conceptual, it's fine for you and I to recognize sitting back that there's always going to be more value in accumulated knowledge than there is in the next individual Insight project, but actually doing something with that understanding in an environment where organisations, stakeholders are jumping up and down, wanting more market research on something, wanting more analysis on something, wanting to understand the latest consumer trend that they read about in their newspaper or flick through on the Internet that morning, it's far more difficult in practice to do it if you can't attach it to an immediate business benefit.

Speaker B: I really like your point there about making it actionable and attaching it to like a plan or a business opportunity. I remember one head of Insight that I used to work with who is very successful at that, where I think if the president said, hey, you know, what are the insights? It wasn't just, well, here's some interesting facts that you could look up on a report but was very focused on. These are the three things that you need to do to move this business, the biggest opportunities and if you have questions about those, I have a whole deck that we created for our annual plan process. You can look in to see all the details but ultimately these are uh, the things you need to know. And that ability to on your feet, know how should the business act was extremely powerful and made him very influential with the organization. So love how you talk about that.

Speaker A: I totally agree with you. And making sure that that's socialized around your insights team as well. So it's not just something that sits in a PowerPoint deck or the head of the Insight director, but it's something that the whole team are uh, aware of, contribute to discuss, help to update on a regular basis, so that whoever is interacting with the organization, they're always able from the Insight team to provide the context before they provide the specific. So many times I was approached for pieces of new research or analysis at, uh, the bank, and I found myself saying, okay, yes, we can definitely do something to help you in respect to that business problem or that opportunity that you've got. But let me give you a bit of context first, because unless we frame this whole project in a way which is founded on customer market insight, then simply trying to commission a new piece of market research or a new piece of analysis, you're never going to get the best out of Insight that way. And there's a joke that we have in the UK of somebody being stopped by a, uh, motorist who's asking for directions and the old guy who'd been stopped scratching his head for a moment and saying, well, if you want to get there, you really don't want to start from here. And I often felt that way about quite a lot of the projects that we were asked to get involved in. If Insight teams are invited to the party too late, then they're going to spend forever saying, well, yes, we can help you to try to get where you're getting to, but it would be so much better if you'd asked us earlier so that you weren't starting from where you are now, but from a position that was actually rooted in customer market understanding in the first place. And I don't think you can bring that up about unless you invest that time and effort really structuring and codifying your accumulated knowledge, joining the dots together, articulating it in different reports or visuals or fact packs or on your Internet or your Insight hub or your portal, or however it is that you communicate with the, uh, rest of the organization. And systems, as you mentioned, certainly have a key role, uh, to play here. But I would caution against people thinking that systems are the default answer. I actually think it's first and foremost about crystallizing and recording what it is that you know and then discussing that either literally across the desk or metaphorically across the wider Insight team, and then building on that understanding and then figuring out what it is that you want systems to help you to do. Systems are an enabler here. They're not the answer in themselves. There was, uh, one organization that we used to work with a lot that had what I would describe as a graveyard of old market research pieces. They absolutely recorded the stuff that they did. But what that meant in practice was simply filing report after report after report for year after year after year. They weren't codifying their understanding, they weren't crystallising what it was that they knew. They weren't actively managing their accumulated knowledge. They were simply filing some stuff on an enormous system that they've got. So systems are an enabler, facilitator of this as they are of so many things. The bigger issue is thinking about how the conversations take place and what sorts of documents can effectively crystallize the understanding that you're trying to pull together.

Speaker B: That makes sense in my experience. I love the point you make in your book as well, that it's less focus on the system and just find a system that works. And ideally there's some great software packages out there that are specifically designed to archive market research and make it searchable. Like Google that actually looks into PowerPoints and Word documents and pulls out key phrases and findings that really make it easier to search those previous works. That's sort of the Cadillac version that I've seen. And then there's all the way to the well organized SharePoint archive that isn't super searchable. But you know, if you organize well, it's at least you can on a very low budget try to make things work. And so I've seen both of those. The other thing I've seen that I really liked is this idea of one pagers. So whether it's a customer segment or it's a piece of the business or brand, but they have literally like a, uh, one page front and back that has the key facts of it, maybe the size, the growth, who's buying it, some of those like purchase frequency and things like that. And I find that it's a little more detailed, but it's super helpful if you're sitting in a meeting or a strategy, you don't have to say, oh, I'll get back to you with this poll. You just have the one pager right there. And as leaders have it as well, it just really allows a, uh, good solid grasp of the facts of the business at your fingertips. And updating that every year, I've seen as another way that can be really effective.

Speaker A: I think one pagers are such a powerful way of summarizing key things. The brevity which you have to accept if you really are pulling something onto one page means that you have to succinctly capture the very essence of what it is that you know. And as you say, then signpost more detailed understanding. And that is such a key skill for insight teams in general. We often used to talk at Early Insights forums about journalistic skills, of which there are many actually which are pertinent to insight. But one of the key ones is that ability to summarize in a headline and then in a short paragraph the absolute essence of what a particular audience needs to know. We talked about it for many years and used the journalist analogy. And there came a moment when one of my Insight team went on maternity leave and I thought, well, rather than replacing this lady while she's on maternity leave with a like, for like researcher or analyst or insight manager, let's bring in a journalist. So we brought in a journalist from the Wall Street Journal for, uh, nine months to work within our Insight team and to view all those different stories that we were producing as if they were news stories coming through a newsfeed, and then to apply the same journalistic techniques that he would have done back at the Wall Street Journal to thinking, so what's the headline here? What is it? What's the hook that is going to get people interested? What are the key facts and um, supporting evidence that sit behind that headline? How do we visually bring to life that story within an infographic or a key chart of some description? And by having somebody with those skills within the Insight team, even for only nine months, really meant that it got everybody to up their game in that respect because they could see the power of these one pages that were being produced. All of which is sort of taking us down more into the insight communication territory as well. But because they were focused around these key underlying deep consumer trends and insight that was being produced over many pieces then, it was so much more powerful than simply producing headlines around the latest piece of round tracker research or customer satisfaction at, ah, work or whatever it was that the team were doing.

Speaker B: I feel like I've received that feedback, uh, in the teams I've been at both in terms of are we communicating well to senior leadership? And there's a huge skill in there. Love the idea of having someone from the Wall Street Journal or someone who's good with the journalism background to help with that. But I even think in terms of speaking in terms of your team and how do you represent the work that you've done? I think a lot of times, ah, people tend to be humble and maybe analytical about what they do, but maybe not quite as good at articulating exactly the value and the good work that the team has done. Which leads me a little bit into that second area that you mentioned, this insight strategy, this idea of creating a team and um, articulating what it does across the broader organization. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Maybe some examples to bring it to life as well?

Speaker A: Of course, yes. So Insight has the potential, I believe, to transform the performance of any organization, whether that's commercial organization, whether it's a public sector organization, whether it's a not for profit or charity. If we can really harness all the understanding that we have about our audiences, our customers, our consumers, our users, however we define the, uh, people who interact with us in the market that we're working with. But if we want Insight to transform our organizations, then we have to think about what role the Insight team is really going to play within the organization. To start with, we can't say, oh, insight ought to be a really strategic asset for the organization and then not manage it like a strategic asset. So for me, an Insight strategy piece starts with, uh, quite an analytical piece actually, of understanding our organization within its market and what the key challenges are that it faces and the key opportunities are that it has to address, then working back to decide and which of those opportunities or challenges is the Insight team going to help it with and which is it in a great place to help it with at the moment, bearing in mind its capabilities and bearing in mind the knowledge base it's already pulled together and which does it have quite a gap to address if it's actually going to fulfill that function that we've described. And of course, like all great strategies, as important as deciding what you're going to do is deciding what you're not going to do. And I think it's probably true to say that Insight leaders, and I'll include myself within that, are very, very poor at deciding what we're not going to do. Insight people tend to be conscientious people we like doing a professional job, we like saying yes to people, we like trying to help. And I'm afraid whilst that undoubtedly wins us friends in the short term, it doesn't necessarily give us a really effective Insight team over the long term. So having a strategy which helps to define what it is that we will do, but also what it is that we won't do, I think is really important. So there's that sort of analytic phase and of course coming out of that is a statement of intent, a vision, a purpose of what we're going to do and captures the essence of the Insight Team's that can then lead on in some organizations to a mission statement of some sort. I was working with the ebay team just before Christmas on their mission statements and how different parts of the eBay insight function might have slightly different mission statements to describe the role that they played in their company. But it also leads on to a whole series of strategic options. Because unless we can connect the vision that we have for our Insight Team of some very specific choices that we make, I don't think there was really very much point in doing it in the first place. So I'm thinking here about things like which of our organization's key decisions will we put our weight behind and, um, which will we not so that we can actually focus in some places to a disproportionate level and have that real impact? What would the output of our Insight team's work be? Are we going to produce lots of reports or dashboards or spreadsheets, or are we going to facilitate workshops? Are we going to communicate in a far wider range of ways around, uh, our organization? How will we work with other departments that produce intelligence of some sort, like finance analysts, uh, for example, or strategy analysts within our organization, or people who run M CRM or targeting work within our companies or other management information functions? What will we do internally versus externally? What will we delegate to market research agencies or other suppliers? What will we do in house because we think it's more important that it's done that way? What will our measures of success be? What resources do we need both what skills and capabilities do we need to develop? In other words, we shall start getting into those decisions which good insight leaders are of course thinking about, but too often they think about without connecting it back to an underlying purpose, an agreed vision for the Insight team, which gives them a mandate to actually operationalise those decisions and those choices and then to start saying yes or no to individual pieces of work as they're making plans for the year. I don't know any Insight leader that doesn't have a plan for what their team's working on over a period of time. But if you write a plan that doesn't bear any relation to your strategy, well, you're going to get to the end of the year. You're not going to be any further forward than you were at the start. You're going to have made a whole lot of people happy in the short term, but without insight actually having very much fundamental effect on the biggest decisions that the organization is trying to take. So, yeah, Insight strategy, absolutely critical for me, but I would say not a, uh, territory that a lot of Insight leaders necessarily feel well equipped to address. Insight leaders have often been great researchers or great analysts. That's how they got promoted to being the Insight leader in the first place. But it's one of those classic business issues of what got you here is not going to get you there in terms of moving on to the next step. And I think probably one of the areas that we support Insight leaders on more than any other is this whole question of strategy and positioning within an organization, because it's one of those things that's easier to see from the outside in. In fact, at an Insight forum two or three years back, we had representatives there from a whole range of organizations. Great big insurers like Legal and General and Prudential and Aviva, retailers like Tesco and Sainsbury's and Asda and John Lewis in the uk, as well as ebay and multinational brands like Kraft, Heinz and Nestle and McDonald's, people that we work with a lot of. And we sacked them all halfway through the day. We fired them. We said, you're no longer the Insight leader at that organization. But the good news is you've got a new job this afternoon. You're now the Insight leader of one of the other member organizations represented here. And we got them then, throughout the rest of the day to think not about their own Insight strategy, but how they would approach the Insight strategy if they were parachuted into one of those other member organizations. And we did it, uh, because it's so much easier to write an Insight strategy for an organization that you don't actually know that much about because you can see the wood for the trees. Whereas when we're in our day jobs, we are so surrounded by all the minutiae of dealing with requests for more analysis or doing the performance plans for our team, or talking to that research supplier who's let us down over the latest project, or taking that presentation that one of our researchers has just done, um, and thinking, do I spend five hours working with them to make it better, or do I just say, oh, forget it, I'll just do it myself? Working on it for the next hour or whatever. And all the team learning. There's just so much stuff, isn't there? And it's very difficult to stand back, I think, and see the wood for the trees. And it's rather easier if you're thinking about a different organization. So, yeah, it was just a little device that we adopted for the afternoon. But then we thought, okay, so what have you done in respect of this adopted organization? And how could you then take back the learning from that to your own organization when you get back to your workplace this week?

Speaker B: Oh, I Love that exercise. Yeah, I think you're exactly right that sometimes an external perspective makes things so much simpler than if you're in the weeds of all those details. I know of one organization at, uh, Insights, organization that did a strategic overview like you're talking about, and they did some big surveys of all of their market research and Insights employees and gauge how they're using their time. And what they came back was, you know, 60, 70, 80% of their time was that day to day stuff, you know, oh, you know, fire drill request that's going to be due next two weeks. And really very little of the time was these big strategic things that are going to move the function as well as move, you know, the annual goals of the entire business. And, and it was just this big. Aha. It's so easy to get stuck in those little things. And how do you get close enough to the business that they trust you and come to you with questions, but also a little bit distance so you can work on the really big stuff

Speaker A: that's going to move the business.

Speaker B: And finding that balance, I think is very tricky. And so I love that you bring that to life.

Speaker A: In the strategy side, Intercontinental Hotels Group have a phrase, black pudding research, which came out of requests that some of their decision makers had, uh, when designing the breakfasts that were going to be provided in some of their hotels. And one of the questions was, what sort of black pudding should we have on our, um, menu, should we include it automatically within a full English breakfast if you come over, should we have it on the buffet, etc. Etc. And um, the head of Insight there said to them, let's stick it on the menu and see if people buy it, shall we? And let's not bother doing any research on that. Let's save our research budget for deciding which the next market is that Intercontinental Hotels Group ought to go into, which hotel chain it ought to think about purchasing something that's truly strategic, how we brand our organization or how we engage different audiences. Uh, let's stop doing black pudding research. The phrase has just stuck with me. I think it's a really great example.

Speaker B: Uh, that is a great deal. I used to work at General Mills and so yes, I think anytime, whatever business you're on, you always have those very small questions that a business leader has that might not be super strategic. And so elevating that to a level that's beyond black pudding, uh, totally makes sense. I'm curious as you talk about strategy and, you know, where do you position yourself within an organization? I think I've seen uh, it positioned differently in different companies. So some, the strategic, the insights group lives within marketing, sometimes it lives within a uh, strategy group, sometimes it lives, maybe not centrally but just you know, there's an Insights person on each of the big businesses. I'm curious, in your conversations with other companies, where do you see best fit or does it really just depend on the organization? It doesn't really matter where you sit within the broader scope of things.

Speaker A: Yes, I think it depends. I don't think there's one right answer and I don't think there's necessarily an answer which holds true either. An Insight team would report to the part of the organization where the biggest decisions to which it could add value and that might change in different periods of time and it would certainly be different from one sector uh, to another. So in banking for example, Insight usually reported through the Chief Marketing officer. And yet it wasn't really the marketing decisions that I was most focused about because many of the biggest commercial decisions were being taken in the current account team, the mortgages team, the savings and the investment team or the branch banking team, the mobile banking team. And so in that instance the structure got in the way of us being as effective as we could. But at other times, while in other organisations more marketing led organizations then you would absolutely ought to be reporting to the Chief marketing officer. So I think it's uh, a case of uh, to quote one of my former uh, directors of form follows function. You figure out first what the key function is that you're trying to address and then you decide on the structure that can best put you in a place to fulfill that function rather than thinking, oh well in a perfect world we would be reporting to so and so because I don't think that necessarily holds true across different sectors or across different time periods.

Speaker B: That makes sense. Very contextual. So sort of switching to our last area here we talk about, you mentioned commerciality. I know you've done a lot of trainings and you mentioned the recent Insight forums have been focused on that. Can you bring that to life a little bit what commerciality looks like and maybe some examples?

Speaker A: Yes, I think commerciality is a really, really big topic and as I mentioned earlier, out of all the areas that we benchmark for Insight Team capability, it's the one that most organizations have the, the most development areas to address on. There are a number of reasons for that. One is that it's about the heritage of Insight teams themselves. As we discussing insight teams or rather the research teams and analysis teams which have Traditionally made up. A lot of the Insight work have very often been set up in the first instance, probably many years ago, as quite reactive service, uh, functions within their organizations. And if you're a reactive service function, you could argue that you don't really need to understand the commercials of the organization particularly you're fulfilling a role in producing a piece of analysis that's been prioritised by somebody else. However, if Insight teams are going to become proactive drivers then um, they need to be able to understand which pieces of work are going to have the greatest value in them in order to be able to prioritize their work. They need to understand the commercial context for all the customer market activity that they see to know what's significant and what isn't. They need to be able to speak the language of finance to drive change within their organisations rather than leaving it to other key decision makers to translate from the insight written in a customer and market language back into the business to the rest of the organization. And they carve back into the language that the rest of the business speaks, which is usually the language of finance. And finally, the absolute nirvana for an Insight team is also to be able to calculate a return on investment so that Insight is not seen as a cost but as an um, investment because that's the only way ultimately that we'll succeed in getting an increase in the money spent on Insight team activity. Quite rightly. Why should an organization put more money behind an activity which can't even show what value it's demonstrating from the work that it does? We wouldn't do that behind sales or behind marketing activity. So why should we do it behind as organizations leaders, why should we do it behind Insight either? So there's a whole thing about heritage. There uh, there's also I think a uh, softer, more perhaps emotional point in terms of Insight people. I don't know if you agree, but I think very often Insight people aren't drawn to things which are out and out commercial. It's not a language that we associate with as much. We see commercial activity as something that the rest of an organization focuses on. We position ourselves as customer people. We're nice people. We're the voice of the customer within the organization. We're here to help save the organization from itself. And sometimes it's more commercial tendencies, particularly if those short term sales are at the expense of the long term customer and market franchise that the organization's got. And so it is that we almost construct uh, an emotional barrier I think between ourselves and our focus on the Customer and the rest of the organization's focus on the commercial. Now, uh, one of the interesting things is the more that you get to know the rest of an organization, very often you find that a lot of the stuff that's being done there is not commercial at all, or at least is not geared up, uh, to be commercially successful precisely because it's not aligned with customer and market insight. So we've got to get rid of that disconnect. I think at the Insight forums the other day I showed a picture, a very simple picture of a market stall, a lady approaching a market trader and um, purchasing some fruit, ah, and vegetables. And um, what I love about that picture is it's the very essence to me of commerciality. You have a customer, you have a provider and you have an interaction taking place between them that can be calculated in financial terms. And that's the essence of commerciality to me. No organization can be successful without understanding each of those three points. The customer and the market they come from and why they're there and what need they're trying to satisfy and how they're going to behave and how they behave last week and how they might behave next week. The provider that is their own operations, how they've sourced their product, how they've delivered it, how they've chosen their price, the point of sale, the products that they've got, the architecture for those products, the operations that sit behind servicing them, etc, etc, and then the financially denominated interaction that takes place, the value exchange that takes place between the customer and the provider. Now insight teams clearly have a major role to play in providing all the knowledge about the customer element of that. But I think they've also got a role to play in terms of helping the organization to join up its knowledge between the customer, the provider and the financial data as well. Because I don't think that many finance departments are particularly well equipped to immerse themselves in our customer market insight or indeed many operational or product look to providers to immerse themselves in either the customer or indeed the financial bit. Great insight People have got those gisting skills. They're able to see across a, uh, picture to understand what's important, the curiosity to dive further into it, to join together, make the connections, the links. And so it is, I think that not only do we have a role to play in providing the customer market insight that ought to contribute so much to commercial success, but also I think we can help the organization to read across the different types of knowledge that it's got and make Those connections. So, uh, I think sometimes I hear organizations, insight teams say that they feel a bit beaten up by being asked to become more commercial when they don't really want to become more commercial. They want to focus on the customer and the market and leave the commercial to somebody else. But I think the question really needs to be reframed. It's not should insight teams become more commercial? It's how can insight teams help our organizations to achieve more commercial success because they can't do it long term without great customer market insight. So it's how can we help them to ah, become more successful in what they do and what again, mindsets, changes and behaviors and habits could we adopt which would make that more likely?

Speaker B: I love that. You know what you mentioned about return on investment, the ROI is so true. I can't tell you the number of conferences I've been at where we try to unlock how do we calculate, how do we propose roi. And I think having that idea of what is the financial impact of the research we're doing and trying to track that over time and setting goals of things that can be trackable, um, I think is a huge, uh, space that um, an opportunity for most insights or organizations in my view. This has been incredibly helpful. Thank you so much, James, for walking us through your book and helping us understand the areas that we can get better at as insights teams. How should people reach out to you or contact to learn more about IMA or your book or things like that?

Speaker A: Oh, I do hope that they do because as I said at the start, we're a very, very collegiate organization that exists to expand a conversation about best practice and these topics. And the more corporate insight leaders that want to get involved in that conversation, the better. But we have a website, www.insight-management.org, where you can read a whole range of articles that we posted over a period and learn more about the topics that I discussed. If people would like to buy copies of the book transforming the 42 secrets of successful Corporate Insight Teams, then we have our own e commerce site, www.transforming insight.com where you can order copies from us direct. And big news, drum roll. We ourselves will be beginning a podcast called Surprise Surprise, Transforming Insight early in 2022. And there'll be a spin off email and social media associated with that. It'll be available free to corporate insight leaders. So please sign up for that. Please listen out for it. I hope that very much like the great work that you do with your podcast that will help to challenge people's assumptions about the work that Insight leaders do and make them question the habits and behaviors that their insight teams have gotten into over a period of time. And as I say, the more people that want to get involved in that conversation, the better from my point of view.

Speaker B: Wonderful. And I know as part of a gift to the listeners of this podcast, uh, you'll be providing a free PDF document that's an introduction to Transforming insights and shares a lot of the highlights we've talked about today. So thank you in advance for making that possible.

Speaker A: You're very welcome.

Speaker B: My guest today has been James Wycherley, uh, who is the CEO of the Insight Management Academy. Thanks so much for joining us today, James.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: And that concludes my interview with James Wycherley, the CEO of Insight Management Academy and the author of the Transforming Insight book. There were two things that really stood out to me as I was able to talk with James in the last hour or so. First is around knowledge. How powerful it is not to simply know what the recent research says, but have an overall understanding of the topic and how it all connects together and be able to act as a partner to business leaders. I just want to share a couple tidbits that maybe didn't come out in the episode itself that I think are really helpful tools and tactics to get a little bit smarter at, um, instilling and communicating insight knowledge across the organization. The first, as I mentioned, is one, uh, pagers. So this idea of having one page that highlights a specific customer segment or business or brand that has the key fact, size, growth rates, buying patterns, that's easy to reference for leaders as well as insight teams. The second is having a ready to go onboarding for new leaders that really gives this overview of what the business is doing, what the key opportunities are so that if someone is new to the team, they immediately see what, what are the insights that we know about the business already. The third is having an annual review. When possible, try to insert yourself as the insight team and helping, you know, if the business is deciding to grow 3% in the next year and has goals for how they want to grow in the next three years, chances are they can really benefit by deeply understanding the market and their, uh, customers so that they can create plans that make the most sense. And so attaching insights teams to those annual reviews is a great way to forward. And finally is making sure you have a good knowledge management system. Best in class. Knowledge management systems, as I mentioned, basically serve as a software that is like Google. You can search for keywords, phrases and be able to pull up research reports that are relevant if you don't have the resources or that in place yet. Sometimes just a really well organized SharePoint is helpful. I've even seen on transition documents where you have a single word document and you basically give a sentence or two about each of the research projects and just a quick link to the SharePoint file for each one of the projects. And that alone can be a really good reference if someone asks you, hey, could you tell me more about this or that? And you can easily paste in a link or two and include it as you talk to your internal business teams. So that's insight knowledge. The second is around commerciality. One of the biggest takeaways of all of this is that the key for successful insights teams isn't in the actual research we do, but it's taking the findings from that research and applying it to the business. I remember when I worked for the at uh, General Mills in the convenience and food service division and it was a smaller team than other ones I had been on before and so I worked very closely with sales and product development organizations and it was really interesting seeing for instance having the opportunity to pitch new product ideas to the 711 national buyer who came to uh, General Mills and being there in the meeting as I am talking about consumer trends in order to talk about the new products that we're coming out with and how to uh, overall increase their store sales, but not just giving a report that sits in an archive somewhere or hands off someone else, but really seeing how the work I was doing was going to help in with the sales process. And the closer that we as insights leaders can get to those sell in points to the key decisions to the strategy meetings, the more likely we'll be able to have and know what's important so that when we create new research later on we'll better understand what parts of our research matter most. As always, you can find links to this episode in diggingforinsights.com and uh, once again feel free to email me stephendiggingforinsights.com if you like the free PDF for the overview of the Transforming Insight book. Until next time, I'm wishing you the best as you dig for insights that will grow your career career and your business.