By James Wycherley, CEO  >>  Insight Management Academy

Every insight leader wants to develop the most effective insight function they can. For some, that might mean a focus on generating better insights about consumer behavior and its drivers. For others, that might mean a focus on knowledge development. And for a number, there will be a focus on how that knowledge is disseminated around an organization.

There are a lot of best practices for all insight leaders to learn from in each of these areas.

Our organization, the Insight Management Academy (IMA), was set up in 2004 to support client-side (end-user) research and analysis teams in large organizations. The IMA’s Insight Forum has been meeting every quarter in London since early 2005, and at every meeting we discover new angles to these topics and fresh examples of best practice.

However, a focus on what people do and which processes they follow is no substitute for thinking about our people themselves, their skills and how they deploy them. According to the IMA’s capability benchmarking, less than one in every six large organizations has an insight strategy, and even fewer have a structured plan for thinking about their insight people.

This makes no sense. Faced with choosing between great people who need to adopt new processes or having great processes but a mediocre team with poorly balanced skills and little aptitude for the job, very few leaders would go for the mediocre team. Clever analysts, incisive researchers, creative insight managers – these people can bring joy to working in an insight team and unlock a world of potential for organizations who want to use customer and market understanding to improve business performance.

So how do insight leaders improve the situation? The starting point is to map the various aspects involved and to establish some key principles for each area. The next step is to reflect on where you would like your organization to get to and how far away from that you are at the moment. There is no insight function in the world which has completely nailed every aspect of developing its insight people, but there are marked differences between the evidence provided by some teams on one aspect or another and the norm.

The rest of this article is devoted to a quick introduction to the IMA’s thinking on the five key areas we have identified. We have also published individual guides for insight leaders on each topic, drawing on our own expertise and the collective experience of our corporate members.

Key areas to consider

Successfully developing insight people isn’t a topic which can be viewed in isolation because it is closely connected with many other aspects of insight management. But it does have distinct elements to it which will be missed if you only focus on team projects, processes and strategy. The IMA recommends that all insight leaders pay attention to the following:

  • insight leadership
  • insight skills and attributes
  • insight perspective
  • insight recruitment and development
  • insight teamwork

Insight leadership

What does an insight leader actually do? Research with members of the IMA’s Insight Forum suggests that, for most, the role is extremely busy and increasingly varied. The challenge is twofold:

How do you perform individual aspects of the leadership role as well as you can?

How do you determine and manage the balance between the different aspects so that you are doing the right things as well as doing them well?

We believe that one useful way of bringing order to what can sometimes feel like a fairly chaotic existence is to think about the job of an insight leader as incorporating the following three roles: technician, manager and entrepreneur.

The idea for this came from a celebrated book about the challenges faced by small business owners, “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber (the E standing for “entrepreneur”). Gerber contends that most new small businesses fail because:

Most businesses are founded by technicians – people who love producing something to a high standard and have set out to do it on their own but who do not necessarily have the wider business management skills to make a success of a company.

It is fatal to assume that, if you understand the technical work of a business, you know how to run a business that does technical work.

Small business managers need to pay more attention to two other aspects of their role – the managerial role and the entrepreneurial role.

Why is this relevant to insight leaders?

Leading an insight team within a large organization has a lot in common with running a small business. The team needs to thrive and survive in the context of organizational change and reorganization, just as a business must compete in an external marketplace.

Additionally, many leaders have been offered the opportunity to lead an insight team because they have previously proved themselves adept at the technical aspects of a market researcher or analyst role. This technical experience can be enormously valuable for insight leaders but those who continue to act as technicians will have a very narrow approach to an insight leadership role.

Just like a small business owner, an insight leader needs to balance the technical aspects of their role with the managerial and entrepreneurial aspects. In the IMA’s insight leader guide, “IMP602: How to lead an insight team,” we examine what each of these aspects involves and we present a tool that can help insight leaders to ensure that they give each the attention it deserves.

Insight skills and attributes

“Our people are our greatest asset” is a cliché for a reason: it’s true. For an insight team to perform well, the caliber of its people is crucial. Despite the increasing amount of data available to organizations, and the greater automation of data collection, analysis and reporting, insight teams continue to need very skillful people who can identify the key insights and business implications and then influence decision-makers to take the necessary action.

The range of skills needed in an insight team is growing. A key cause is that new technology is changing the nature of data collection, data analysis, knowledge management and communication. Progressive organizations are also recognizing that skills in communicating insight and in influencing decision-makers are as important as the ability to generate insights in the first place.

In his book “Good to Great,” Jim Collins makes the point that successful business leaders make it their primary concern to “get the right people on the bus.” Successful insight leaders have the same priority.

The IMA finds it helpful to think about four main categories of skills and attributes required in an insight team: business skills and personal attributes; specific insight skills; market research skills; and insight analysis skills.

Since the IMA founded the Insight Forum in London in 2005, there have been a number of debates about the relative importance of technical skills versus business, personal and investigative skills.

On the one hand, many teams which originally identified themselves as market research functions not surprisingly prized the traditional research toolkit as taught in agencies across the world. Some of these teams have started to take a more relaxed view of the need for technical qualifications now and instead have prioritized business, personal and generic insight (or “sense-making”) skills. As one insight leader told us: “I need consultants who do research, not vice versa.”

On the other hand, it has been notable that the analysis side of the house has been going the other way, with rather mixed results. In the early 2000s, a number of banks and retailers developed teams founded on business skills and investigative aptitude, investing in excellent data management systems, which reduced the need for expert data analysis. But as the world of data has exploded, we have seen a massive increase in the number of data analytics teams with brilliant technical skills but not necessarily well-rounded business skills.

A related debate over the same time period is the extent to which it is realistic to find “insight unicorns,” people who can tick all the boxes. A few of the larger insight teams have taken the approach of dividing team members into two camps: those who focus on technical work and those who focus on the interface with the rest of the business. More commonly, insight team members are required to have a solid combination of all four skill sets but with space to accommodate people who are stronger in one area than another.

Insight perspective

Bill Gates claims that Hans Rosling’s 2018 “Factfulness” is one of the most important books he’s ever read. He reportedly sent a copy to every student in the U.S. who graduated that year! The IMA believes it’s equally important for insight leaders and their teams, despite the fact that it never actually references corporate insight at all. So, why is it so relevant to us?

Before becoming chief executive of the IMA, I worked for one of the world’s biggest banks for 20 years, spending over half of that time leading all its analysis of retail customers and markets. An important part of that role was to run data-based investigations into critical business issues, supplying decision-makers with facts, figures, insights, ideas and recommendations for how new propositions should be launched, new channels developed and customer needs addressed.

But it became increasingly apparent over that time that insight within a global bank, as in every other sector, is only partly about investigating specific issues. Much of the time it’s about challenging assumptions and providing customer and market context. It’s about painting a picture to show stakeholders how value is really driven by customer behavior and how this behavior is in turn driven by a wide range of habits, circumstances, beliefs, needs and aspirations. The problem I experienced is not that senior people don’t know particular statistics. Rather, it’s that in a commercial organization there tends to be an endemic focus on short-term revenue and cost metrics, not on the fundamental truths of how and why customers do business with the organization.

It’s no surprise, then, that in its daily conversations with corporate insight leaders, the IMA increasingly finds that they have sympathy with Rosling’s mission to “fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview.” Or, in other words, they appreciate the critical need for their teams to develop “an insight perspective” and to share this with senior decision-makers.

If we’re going to develop an insight perspective, and encourage an enhanced corporate worldview shaped by customer and market knowledge, then it is worth going back to Rosling’s book. We should consider the application of 10 key instincts which he believes are often the barriers to human beings seeing things as they really are. These are: the gap instinct, the negativity instinct, the straight-line instinct, the fear instinct, the size instinct, the generalization instinct, the destiny instinct, the single perspective instinct, the blame instinct and the urgency instinct.

These instincts and the way to develop an approach to counteract them are discussed in the insight leader guide “IMP604: How to develop an insight perspective.” It can involve both a mind-set and behavior change from our people.

Insight recruitment and development

Corporate insight teams are reliant on people. Technology can enable people to generate and disseminate insight – it helps facilitate how things are done. But it is only people who can influence decisions about what is done at a strategic level. And it is only people who can act as trusted advisers to key decision-makers.

This is why it is so important for an insight team to find, develop and retain the right talent.

Insight team leaders face many daily challenges. People issues are often not seen as being as urgent as the demands of stakeholders until you face a crisis. Yet you need your team to perform at their best in order to deliver what stakeholders need. When recruiting, developing and retaining staff some corporate policies present more challenges than they used to, such as reduced HR support, a blanket ban on the use of specialist recruitment agencies, lower training budgets and flatter team structures.

Given all of these challenges, how can you find, develop and retain the best talent for your corporate insight team?

The answer is to give the acquisition and management of people the thought and time it deserves. Specifically:

  • Be clear about the skills needed in the team as a whole; audit current skill levels and come up with a long-term plan for closing the gaps.
  • When you recruit, be clear about the most important skills required and the most effective way to identify the best candidate.
  • Take a considered approach to onboarding new staff.
  • Take the time and trouble to understand what is important to individual team members and how their performance is affected by their ability, motivation and opportunity.
  • Think creatively to identify workable ways to develop and reward staff.

We may not always be in charge of the process, but understanding best practice gives us some ammunition to shape what happens in our organization. Ultimately, the issue is that if insight is to deliver competitive advantage, then our organization must be at least as able as its competitors to recruit, develop and retain really good insight people.

Insight teamwork

What matters most – how well you perform as an individual within an insight team or how well the insight team performs overall? The answer you give probably depends on your perspective and how your organization rewards performance.

But if you were the chief executive of your organization, wouldn’t you be most interested in how the insight team performs overall? That is certainly the perspective we take at the IMA.

In team sports and the military, it is clearly the team’s performance overall that really matters. The success or failure of such teams is also generally easy to judge; they either win or they lose.

We all know from history and experience that individuals within a sports or military team can be very talented, but that is not enough to guarantee a team’s success. Key drivers of success are: team members’ commitment to a meaningful common purpose, having a clear performance goal, having the right mix of skills in the team and blending those skills together effectively.

What is true for sports and military teams is also fundamentally true for teams in organizations. That is why there are so many motivational speakers from the worlds of sport and the armed services.

The lessons from such speakers are relatively easy to apply to project teams where there is a clear end goal, such as building a new tower block or launching a new product. But it’s not quite as straightforward where you have an ongoing function such as insight. Would a suitable performance goal for an insight team be to deliver a certain number of insight projects or pages of output? Surely not.

So, there is a profound question to be answered about what insight team excellence looks like in terms of outcome. But we also need to focus on what excellence looks like in terms of how the individual members of an insight team work together to maximize their collective impact.

In this area, best practice includes: working as a “true team” (as defined by Katzenbach and Smith in “The Wisdom of Teams”), encouraging teamwork, taking collaboration seriously and having a development plan for the team overall (in addition to the usual development plans for individuals).

Here is a summary of the key points made in this article:

  • Insight teams are heavily reliant on the talent and behavior of their people, yet very few insight leaders take a really comprehensive approach to managing their people.
  • The process of developing people cannot be seen in isolation; it is closely connected with other aspects of insight capability development.
  • The IMA’s Insight Roadmap provides a comprehensive structure for leaders who want to think in a top-down way about all the aspects involved in insight capability development.
  • The IMA can also provide any corporate insight leader with a free benchmarking exercise to understand how their function performs in each territory.
  • However, there are a number of topics specific to people development which every insight leader should explore: insight leadership; insight skills and attributes; insight perspective; insight recruitment and development; and insight teamwork.

The IMA has published an insight leader guide on each of these issues, available on our website www.insight-management.org.