Our 18-month research initiative set out to answer the
question, “Why does some research have a remarkable business impact, and other
research fail to achieve its intended impact, or have no impact at all?”
The difference between impactful and not impactful boils
down to two key characteristics:
- Understanding of the business context
- Effective communication
I once received some amusingly misguided advice from my
college adviser, who curiously suggested that I not take a communications
research class because, as he implied, it was beneath me. (Fast forward two
decades to the irony that I own a company specializing in media research, and
blog about it.)
Fortunately for me, I was lucky that my first manager after
I graduated from college disagreed with the sentiment that communication was a
soft skill unworthy of the attention of an esteemed statistician. Indeed, he
sent me packing to an AMA seminar on communication styles, noting that anyone
working in client service needed to know that discipline. It was one of the
best things I’ve ever done.
In today’s day and age, researchers need to be effective
communicators. Certainly, we also need innovative methodologists, and skilled
analysts. But all of that work is only as useful as we’re able to communicate
it to the end-users of the information.
I noticed two things that struck my attention this year at
Re:think.
- Many researchers still spend way too much time talking about process, and way too little time discussing insights and action steps.
- Even more lack basic presentation skills.
In work, and in life, we deal with people all day. And some
of them don’t communicate the way we do. Effective communicators pay attention
to how others communicate, and adjust
their own styles.
Researchers, unfortunately, often aren’t so good at this. A
trend I noticed this week: presentations that largely amounted to a staged
reading of bullets on a slide, sometimes complemented by charts populated with
12 pt font data that couldn’t be seen past the 2nd row. As I joked
with a fellow conference attendee, it begs for a drinking game. (Drink once for
a slide with only text, drink twice for a slide with all data and no discernible
takeaways.) Had I actually played this game, my colleagues would have been
dragging me out of the room in a blistering state of inebriation, within about
half an hour of my arriving at the conference.
Fellow researchers, the potential for alcoholism aside, we need to do better. When we don’t communicate well, the people we’re talking to don’t
listen.
But what really surprised me at this year’s conference was
how many presenters lacked even the basic fundamentals. In one session, five
different people took turns presenting. As each walked up to the podium, I was
listening for two introductory pieces of information.
- Tell me who you are.
- Tell me why you’re standing up there. (i.e. What are the objectives that you were trying to understand in your research? Why should I care?)
Of five senior research executives, only one of them did
both of these things. Four them didn’t state their objectives, and dove right
into results (of what?). All five had several text-only slides. One actually
had entire paragraphs on their
slides.
In another session, I looked at my watch 25 minutes into the
30 minute session. At this point, the presenter was still discussing the
research process (again, more bullets on a slide). I had yet to learn anything
salient about what the research had accomplished, or what that meant for our
industry. And in fact, I never did. I literally walked away with no understanding
of what the presenter had learned from his research, and how his company (or
clients) had turned the results into action steps.
Impactful research requires impactful communication. We have
to know our audience; we have to communicate to them how they want to be
communicated to. As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, market researchers
are the voice of the consumer. And if these last few days are an indication, we
need to embrace communication skills as much as we embrace analytical skills if
that voice is to be heard.
The RAABT forum will be working on action steps for
implementing learning and training for researchers in areas of business and
communication, based on our own research findings. In the meantime, I offer
some practical tools that I’ve personally found to be useful in communicating
research.
- If you’re going to give a live presentation, use the tools of “live”. Nothing sends people nose to mobile device to check email quite like a presentation that amounts to text slides and data dumps. A presentation is not a report, it’s a story. Prepare for that. Use visuals, be dynamic, and don’t make people read. If we wanted to read your results, we wouldn’t be there in person. And if you start reading your own slides, we reserve the right to walk out.
- Have a point of view. The traditional view of researchers is that we must be impartial third-parties. And indeed, in designing research and analyzing results, impartiality is critical. After that, it’s time to have an opinion. Research is a means to an end, it’s not the end itself. If you can’t tell someone what the results mean, what end-users can do with it, and what action steps might (note that I didn’t say “will” – there are boundaries) unfold from the results, then it’s not research, it’s just data. That is likely to be misinterpreted. Which in turn gives non-researchers the impression that our function is not all that valuable. And that benefits none of us.
- Tee things up, and then get to the headline. The Achilles Heel of researchers is that we often like to show people all the cool work we’re doing. “Look at all this amazing analysis, I’m so valuable!” It’s our job to be the wizard behind the curtain, and then it’s our job to make it look like magic. My general rule is this: show just enough data and analysis to inspire trust in your process and demonstrate that you didn’t make the results up, and then cut to what you learned and what the story is. Have a headline, and don’t bury the lead on page 22. Which brings me to….
- Tell a story. Have a beginning, a middle, and an end. “Here’s what we did, and then here’s what we did next” is not a story, it’s a process. The best presentation I saw at Re:think led with the headline, “Mobile use isn’t actually mobile.” (Those of us in media already knew that, but it was still a great headline.) Then it went into what they meant by that, how people actually use mobile devices, and what that could mean for advertising strategy on mobile devices. I put my phone down, took notes, and walked away with a clear understanding of the implications of the research for my own business. That is the sign of a good presentation.
- Don’t be afraid to be entertaining. Research itself can be dry, but that doesn’t mean the delivery has to be. Tell war stories, give examples, tell jokes. During our RAABT presentation, David used a picture of a boxer after a knockout to demonstrate the concept of “impact.” He had the room enraptured within the first minute. Make it fun for the room to learn what you have to tell them.
- Pay attention to how others communicate. Effective research requires gaining buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders, and there is an art to doing this. I work with some people who are so busy, they defer to trusting my judgment and just want to be told the answer without frivolous exposition. Others are more receptive when they’re led to the well, but not actually handed the water; they want to be given the insights and then discuss possible outcomes. And then there are those who solicit your opinion and genuinely want to know what you think - but won’t actually follow through on it unless they come up with them idea themselves. I once had a colleague who would constantly ask my advice, and never act on it. And then one day, I answered his question with my own question. Normally, I find this behavior obnoxious, but damn if it didn’t work. He almost immediately got to my POV in his answer, and when he came up with the conclusion, he acted on it. Manipulative as this approach may sound, it made us more effective as a team. I equate it to teaching – sometimes your job is to provide the answer, and sometimes it’s to teach others how to get to the answer themselves.
-Kerry
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