Show & Tell: The Case Against ‘Actionable Insights’
Is the research world too focused on actionable insights?
Hear me out: Sometimes we can undermine our ability to get to insight when we force it.
Not every research deliverable needs to be a clean, linear parade of 3-point findings that ladder up to a set of tidy recommendations. Sometimes the most powerful thing research can do is provoke - to bring people into a messy part of the real world, and to facilitate a better conversation about what’s to be done.
In real life, people’s aspirations, fears, mental models and lived incentives don’t always line up neatly. When one thing is true, the opposite is almost universally also true. The conflict between those opposing truths is where interesting stuff happens, and often is also the crux of debate inside organizations.
Is this the most financially savvy generation yet? Or are Gen Z reckless spenders? Both.
Do people want reality TV to be deep, or shallow? Both.
Do people hate AI, or are they impressed by its potential? Both.
Qualitative insight usually involves some form of affinity clustering, where individual observations are laddered up into themes, and re-organized into insights. But, as any brand strategist can tell you, laddering can go painfully wrong if you climb too high. All of a sudden you end up in the realm of generalities, and things so universal that they don’t do the job you need them to.
And honestly, that’s exactly how a lot of traditional research reads: So safe, so abstract, that it loses strategic value. But, that’s a rant for another day.
Imagine if Chanté Joseph’s Is Having a Boyfriend Embarassing Now? had been written in the same tidy format most research reports follow. It would have lost everything that made it such an effective piece of cultural investigation. And, it definitely wouldn’t have been so widely shared or have sparked the conversation it did.
I’m not saying that every piece of research needs to be a thinkpiece. Sometimes you just need to know if the ad you’re about to put out resonates the way you think it will. But, if you want to convince people of things, and command attention inside of your organization, one of the best ways of doing that is to create something that stands out from the river of other very corporate documents that people need to consume as part of their day to day.
Beyond standing out, work like this also needs to create the space for new forms of conversation - ones that will get you to novel insights that your competitors will have a hard time replicating.
This is especially critical for brands in categories that are effectively at parity - Banks, FMCG, Telcos, etc.
If you’re running the same research protocols as your competitors, you’re going to arrive at the same insights. Goodbye meaningful differentiation. Hello, uphill battle for commercial advantage.
Just look at what’s happening in FMCG right now. Everybody has added protein to everything, sprinting toward the same strategic destination. Some companies are doing this offensively, and for others it's a defensive/reactive play, but the destination is the same saturated place.
Rethinking The Traditional Research Report
Sometimes the job is more show than tell. To show the full complexity of what’s really going on, and simply to create the space for the right conversation.
With that in mind, we’ve been having great conversations lately about how research can be designed so that it commands attention, and provokes these types of strategic conversations. Two project formats seem to have really resonated with people:
Signal Sessions
Short, structured conversations around a targeted question or tension. 3-4 rapid depth interviews, packaged into a short podcast style deliverable. It's fast. It’s easy. You can throw it on while you cook, drive, etc. You get people looped into the strategic decision-making process, fast.
Story Sprints
A riff on the pen portraits that people seem to really love in our research reports. 8-10 depth interviews packaged into a short editorial-style deliverable that reads more like The Cut than a research report. Something that your cross-functional colleagues will actually take the time to read.
All this to say, it doesn’t have to be a report to get people talking or to create the conditions for effective, strategic action.
In fact, for the big, thorny, existential questions? It probably shouldn’t be.
Shameless plug: Both of the above are great ways to use that Q4 use it or lose it budget. They’re fast, and cost-effective. If there’s a question or tension you want resolved heading into next year, let’s talk.