transforming insight

In this episode, James is joined by Lisa Dutton, Senior Adviser at the IMA, and an expert on influencing skills.

Lisa provides her top tips for choosing which stakeholders we should influence, understanding what it feels like to do their role, and the importance of understanding individuals’ communication preferences.

Please listen to our podcast if you have the ambition to transform your Insight team!

Topics Discussed

• Taking time out to think about our internal audience (2.17)
• Are our communication preferences the same as theirs? (4.13)
• A question of translation (5.32)
• Choosing who we should influence (7.27)
• Having empathy and not being intimidated (9.50)

Highlights

• “Just like a company needs to understand its external customers if it’s going to influence their behaviour, so our Insight teams need to understand our internal customers if we’re going to influence their decisions.”
• “There are often pronounced differences between analysts and researchers within teams, and between both these groups and the marketing teams and wider organisations in which they work. All these types have strengths and weaknesses, and they tend to be compounded when the departments in which we work have a structural bias towards people who are quite like us.”
• “We need to be very deliberate when we think about who we would like to influence, and once we have got those people in mind, it’s then about understanding what it’s like to be in their world.”
• “We can be guilty of seeing ourselves as service providers and being quite intimidated by our stakeholders.”

This is episode 16 of the Transforming Insight podcast. 

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East, and regularly hosts the IMA’s Insight forums - London, Manchester, UK Online and US Online.

The Insight Management Academy is the world’s leading authority on transforming Insight teams.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased direct from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

An Insight team needs to solve problems and identify value opportunities for its company, but then it also needs to drive the corporate changes necessary to profit from those opportunities.

So how do the most successful corporate Insight teams influence decision-makers? Please listen to our podcast if you have the ambition to transform your Insight team!

Topics Discussed

• Sharing knowledge is as important as generating it (1.41)
• Pareto’s law applies to corporate decision-making (3.10)
• Seek first to understand (5.16)
• The benchmarking data on influence (8.27)
• The challenges of influencing remotely (9.31)

Highlights

• “In a big organisation, a great insight, poorly communicated will sink without trace, whilst a reasonable insight, shared brilliantly, that can spread like wildfire.”
• “Market researchers and customer analysts tend to be recruited, developed and promoted for their research and analysis skills, and too little focus has historically been placed on our colleagues’ ability to drive change.”
• “We need to recognise that Pareto’s law applies to corporate decision-making, just like it applies to many aspects of business life. 80% of big decisions will be taken by the top 20% of senior executives, or maybe just the top 10%, or even 5%! so we all need to give a disproportionate amount of our attention to influencing that senior group of managers.”
• “On balance, whilst I recognise that remote working has undoubtedly added to the size of the problem for some teams, I think that the fact that there is now clearly no alternative but to have an explicit plan in place for how we are going to influence, can only be a good thing.”

This is episode 15 of the Transforming Insight podcast. 

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East, and regularly hosts the IMA’s Insight forums - London, Manchester, UK Online and US Online.

The Insight Management Academy is the world’s leading authority on transforming Insight teams.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased direct from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

In this episode, Jan describes what it was like to lead an Insight team at an organisation that had to close its global operation during the pandemic, and how, despite the tragedy, he managed to seize the opportunity to make Insight ‘the lead huskey’.

Please listen to our podcast if you have the ambition to transform your Insight team!

Topics Discussed

• The importance of being yourself (4.45)
• The varied world of cruises (7.30)
• The Carnival Insight team and its journey (10.23)
• Working in Insight when the world stopped (14.03)
• The need for continuous development (20.03)

Highlights

• “We can see [the pandemic] as a huge opportunity here. With all the things that we've got sat there ready to go, this is the time we can see what the business needs, that maybe it hasn't realised yet. We should be turning all these residual contracted tools we have at our disposal to really help the business navigate this pandemic and work out what we can do.”
• “This idea of “Lead Husky” - the Insight leading the business. Going into the fresh snow, no one wants to be this sort of husky in the back. You want to be the husky at the front, really plowing through the fresh snow, working out what, and where, the opportunities are.”
• “So much of the past data ceased to be relevant for the data science models. But by joining together the strengths of the different sides of the Insight function, you could really put Insight in a far better place in your business, and a better place to understand what might happen next.”
• “If you can embed things like always taking time to join the dots at the end of the project. Think: Which are the stakeholders that could do with hearing this story? How does this new finding relate to things that we've seen in the past? How is it contradicting it? These are the times when more interesting things emerge, aren't they? But you need to build in time for that."

This is episode 14 of the Transforming Insight podcast. 

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East, and regularly hosts the IMA’s Insight forums - London, Manchester, UK Online and US Online.

The Insight Management Academy is the world’s leading authority on transforming Insight teams.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased directly from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

The smartest systems are no replacement for developing an acute understanding of Insight’s purpose and role in your company; acting as consultants to nail and map key business issues; approaching Insight investigations like forensic detectives, and farming insight to cultivate knowledge.  

Systems are a means to an end, and in this episode, we consider some top tips for developing them.

Please listen to our podcast if you have the ambition to transform your Insight team!

Topics Discussed

• Systems are a means to an end (1.42)
• Systems do not have to be sophisticated (3.00)
• Start with the Insight team’s own needs first (4.55)
• Only 10% of Insight teams have effective knowledge systems (9.33)
• Roy Hammond’s top tips (10.52)

Highlights

• “Insight knowledge systems do not have to be very sophisticated. If you were tempted to skip this episode because your company isn’t going to give you several $100k to build or buy the system you saw demonstrated at a research conference last week, don’t worry.”
• “I would always start with the Insight team’s own needs first; no matter how many brand managers and marketing executives sign up for email alerts or browse your latest reports looking for inspiration, it is nearly always the Insight team itself that will be the most frequent user of any knowledge system you develop.”
• “Many knowledge management systems work at a project level; they are effectively systems for recording and retrieving lists of projects that have been carried out. That’s OK in itself, but if you want to provide opinions based on accumulated insight, you will need a system that allows the recording and retrieval of insight, not just insights.”
• “If you’ve been to an Insight or research conference recently and come away wowed by an unbelievably impressive presentation about a system used for recording insights and developing a knowledge base, it’s worth bearing in mind that such examples are in a small minority.”

This is episode 13 of the Transforming Insight podcast. 

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East, and regularly hosts the IMA’s Insight forums - London, Manchester, UK Online and US Online.

The Insight Management Academy is the world’s leading authority on transforming Insight teams.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased directly from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved                                                                   

In this episode, James is joined by Emma Jones, Senior Insight Manager at the IMA, and an expert on Insight farming.

Emma provides her top tips for Insight teams who want to develop as knowledge farmers and create a knowledge-sharing culture.

Please listen to our podcast if you have the ambition to transform your Insight team!

Topics Discussed

• Compiling a greatest hits presentation (1.34)
• The heart of the knowledge cultivation process (3.10)
• The Insight farming mindset (5.25)
• Examples from successful Insight teams (8.50)
• The importance of discussing insights (11.38)

Highlights

• “Stage 1 may be as simple as listing the key findings from all the best pieces of work your Insight team has done in the last year. If you have a 1-page summary, or a killer slide, for each of these pieces, you can simply stitch them together to form a ‘greatest hits’ compilation.”
• “Another critical aspect of knowledge cultivation is conversation between Insight professionals. If you have team meetings where all you ever do is report on project progress, you are wasting a wonderful opportunity to develop knowledge and collective understanding.”
• “I’d emphasise that creating effective insight is an on-going process, with every insight project providing context for the next one. Reviewing what we know and prioritising it by relative importance can be a really effective way of building a robust and joined-up knowledge base. In turn, that places our teams in a much stronger position to influence and drive key business decisions.”
• “What I love to see Insight teams introduce is a ‘knowledge-sharing culture’ - a set of unwritten guidelines that promotes sharing knowledge, experiences and insights - all of which can be fundamental to a team’s collective knowledge, intelligence and abilities. It enables people to continue growing both personally and professionally.”

This is episode 12 of the Transforming Insight podcast. 

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, but we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East, and regularly hosts the IMA’s Insight forums - London, Manchester, UK Online and US Online.

The Insight Management Academy is the world’s leading authority on transforming Insight teams.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased direct fromwww.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

In this 16-minute episode, we’ll begin with Sowing the seeds – crystallizing and recording our findings.

Topics Discussed

• The practical steps to take (2.25)
• Who should do the work? (5.41)
• The Insight manager skillset (6.52)
• Taking your time (9.23)
• The need for effective processes (10.58)

Highlights

• “Insight farming appeals to many on a cultural level, as well as offering obvious cost savings by cutting out project duplication.”
• “In a perfect world I would like to believe that everyone in an Insight team should take part; the distillation, crystallisation, and recording forming an integral part of each project. However, there are two problems with this: time and talent.”
• “It’s particularly important to identify contradictions between the outputs from related pieces. Contradictions don’t necessarily mean that either piece of work was wrong – they may just reflect different data sources or different moments in time – but identifying contradictions is key to deciding whether the big picture that has emerged from a range of previous pieces is now out of date, or whether a more nuanced view is now appropriate.”
• “If recording insights and joining the dots is everyone’s second most important task, then it tends to get pushed to the very end of the week by the more urgent task of hunting for new insights.”

This is episode 11 of the Transforming Insight podcast. 

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East, and regularly hosts the IMA’s Insight forums - London, Manchester, UK Online and US Online.

The Insight Management Academy is the world’s leading authority on transforming Insight teams.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased directly from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved.

We need to move away from a world where we spend all our days hunting for new insights, because wise Insight teams know that Insight farming is more valuable to their organisations and more sustainable for the team itself. 

Topics Discussed

• Do senior people care about individual insights? (1.52)
• What sets the most effective teams apart? (3.58)
• Cutting out duplication and responding in an agile way (6.25)
• Farming is more valuable (9.34)
• The importance of process (11.40)

Highlights

• “Insight projects tend to be planned bottom-up: we look back on our work each year and see a collection of projects undertaken to support different decisions made by different stakeholders, not one comprehensive piece of work to which the individual pieces of research and analysis have contributed.”
• “The vast majority of our Insight specialists’ time is spent working on new investigations, so when senior people ask us to explain the big picture, we often have to think on our feet, and there’s every chance that our colleagues would come up with a different answer.”
• “Putting all our focus into new projects means that we never have time to reflect on all the things that we already know, make connections we hadn’t spotted, investigate contradictions, and come up with a comprehensive view of our customers, our markets, and our organisations.”
• “Just like real farming, Insight farming requires patience, hard work, the ability to change Insight professionals’ ways of working and then stick to a plan. Effecting this sort of behaviour change in our teams is not easy, which is probably why the IMA’s benchmarking scores reveal that most Insight leaders consider their teams to be considerably better at generating new insights than at cultivating and harvesting accumulated insight.”

This is episode 10 of the Transforming Insight podcast. 

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Over the last five years, over 20,000 Insight professionals worldwide have received his 5 Minute Insight emails.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visitwww.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased direct fromwww.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

What happens next in an Insight project will depend on the question you have identified and the sources of information and data collection available to you. However, effective Insight teams tend to adopt a common mindset regardless of whether they are data analysts or market researchers. It’s the mindset of the detective. 

Topics Discussed

• The importance of hypotheses? (1.54)
• Joining up across multiple sources (4.32)
• The requirement to form opinions (7.27)
• Technical skills are critical but not transformative (9.34)
• The iterative nature of Insight investigations (11.24)

Highlights

• “Insight teams tend to adopt a common mindset regardless of whether they are data analysts or market researchers. It’s the mindset of the detective.”
• “We need to spend as long trying to disprove our hypotheses as we do trying to validate them. But we are still better off starting with hypotheses and adapting them to the data as we go along than starting with a blank sheet of paper and hoping for a Eureka! moment.”
• “There is a classic trade-off between wanting to drill into more and more of the detail supported by our favourite data source and remembering that Insight projects have to address the overall business issue.”
• “Technical skills are really important for Insight teams, and developing great analytic skills or keeping up with the latest research methodologies is a requirement for all Insight teams. But it’s a hygiene requirement; in itself it’s not going to transform the performance of your Insight team, that happens when we change our mindset and reframe the way we define our roles.”

This is episode 9 of the Transforming Insight podcast.

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, but we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening.
 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Over the last five years, over 20,000 Insight professionals worldwide have received his 5 Minute Insight emails.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased direct from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

The really important questions when you join any company are ‘How does this organisation make money?’, ‘What are its drivers of success?’ and ‘Who makes the key decisions?’

Debra has enjoyed a career spanning market research agencies and big brands, but she thinks she is happiest working in corporate Insight.

She has worked for Safeway, Homebase, British Airways, British Gas and Saga before her current role at retailer Halfords, and in this conversation she reflects on the different cultures and circumstances she has experienced and the common questions that she has found to be key.

Key topics discussed in this episode

• Debra’s career path from agencies to large brands
• The key questions to ask and the importance of frameworks
• Adapting to the culture of different organisations
• Building relationships with busy stakeholders
• Data journalism and the importance of the Rule of Three in communication
• Building customer instinct with the drumbeat of customer knowledge

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team, please listen to our podcast!

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Over the last five years, over 20,000 Insight professionals worldwide have received his 5 Minute Insight emails.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased direct from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

Einstein said that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he would spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the underlying problem and five minutes thinking about the solution to it so in this episode we consider how Insight teams can act like consultants to nail the underlying business issue, and in a subsequent episode we’ll look at how we should investigate it.

Topics Discussed

• How can we generate better insights? (2.10)
• Reflecting on the context for the question being asked (3.59)
• Engaging business decision-makers (4.28)
• Diagnosing like a doctor or a management consultant (5.15)
• Adopting the SCQAB model at Barclays (9.12)

Highlights

• “It should be perfectly possible for intelligent people to draw commercially useful conclusions and recommendations from data and observations without the need for magic spells.”
• “Most Insight projects fail because they start in the wrong place.”
• “We cannot generate insights in a vacuum, we need to speak to business decision-makers. The stakeholder who asked us for the new research might have a clever plan for how they are going to use the new data to help them to solve a problem. Or they might be passing along a request from their boss, which has probably gone to other departments as well, sowing the seed for contradictory data and a confused strategy. I’ll let you decide which is more likely in your company!”

This is episode 7 of the Transforming Insight podcast.

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening.

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Over the last five years, over 20,000 Insight professionals worldwide have received his 5 Minute Insight emails.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased direct from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

Does the idea of making up the numbers fill you with horror? 

It shouldn’t… making up the numbers, in other words becoming comfortable with estimation techniques and focusing on accuracy rather than precision, is actually a critical skill for everyone in Insight. It supports agile decision-making, forces you to explain your assumptions, and facilitates constructive conversations with others who are trying to solve business problems.

Topics Discussed

• The difference between accuracy and precision (3.23)
• Back of an envelope intelligent guesswork (4.47)
• How to handle big numbers (6.27)
• A technique to help our mental maths (7.48)
• How many Insight directors do you need to size the toothpaste market? (10.05)

Highlights

• “To support agile decision-making, our senior stakeholders often need answers fast, even if it’s just ‘something to work with’. So, for every decision, a trade-off needs to be made between insights based on perfect data and agile decisions. This middle ground is where the most workable solutions are found.”
• “In many instances, an accurate range of outcomes is far more useful in Insight than a precise number that will almost certainly never be right and might well give a false impression of confidence.”
• “This bit might surprise you, but we actually want our stakeholders to challenge our assumption. This is because our stakeholders may be in a better position to supply an accurate figure, but also because being transparent about our assumptions helps us to work collaboratively with others and get to better answers.”
• “What I hope becomes clear from a very simple example like this, is that even if we have no prior knowledge of a topic, we can arrive at a perfectly reasonable estimate if we use Facts, Assumptions and Logic.”

This is episode 6 of the Transforming Insight podcast. 

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, but we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Over the last five years, over 20,000 Insight professionals worldwide have received his 5 Minute Insight emails.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased directly from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

To produce insights, we need to reframe our approach to Insight activity. We should move away from a focus on functional disciplines like market research, customer analytics and competitor intelligence, and instead, see each as input to the creation of a holistic story – a story about how consumers in our market become customers of our organisation and create value for it. 

Topics Discussed

• Organisations need joined-up Insight to succeed (1.10)
• Reframing our approach to Insight activity (3.30)
• The MADE in Insight model (3.53)
• Should we start with the market or the money? (8.05)
• Engineers without a blueprint (9.34)

Highlights

• “A key problem for Insight teams is that we behave like engineers without a blueprint. If you think about an engineer – a heating engineer for example, or a mechanic working on aircraft – they will always have a blueprint that describes the key components in a system and the way in which those components work together when the machine operates.”
• “If you work as a corporate Insight manager, analyst or market researcher, the machine you are working on is your organisation. You are researching and analysing the way that consumers in a market interact with your organisation and how that creates or destroys value for your organisation.”
• “The MADE in Insight model was developed to help my Insight managers at Barclays appreciate the four broad categories of our eco-system: the market environment, consumer choices, customer behaviours and financial outcomes, and to encourage analysts and researchers to map from the market to the money every time they were engaged in a new piece of work.”
• “So here’s an interesting question… is it really MADE or EDAM... Where should we start? We can actually start at either end, depending on the nature of the business issue we are looking at.”

This is episode 5 of the Transforming Insight podcast. 

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, but we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Over the last five years, over 20,000 Insight professionals worldwide have received his 5 Minute Insight emails.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased directly from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

Sandra talks candidly about the challenges she faces and the lessons Insight teams can learn from Finance, and she also recommends a book that has changed her working life.

Topics Discussed

• Insight and Analytics at ASOS (1.45)
• Creating a joined-up Insight team (5.45)
• Sandra’s day job and diary (10.02)
• The book that changed Sandra’s working life (15.15)
• An Insight team creating value for the business (23.59)

Highlights

• “I understood what Insight was and I also understood the value, but within the limitation of doing it within a finance function. We looked at transactional data, we were always focused on customer profit and customer value. Knowing what I know now, looking after a broader team, we weren’t looking at web analytics or other customer behaviour, everything was always in the confines of financial numbers.”
• “In a Finance function, you are very much at the forefront of the decision-making at ASOS. The value of the work Insight was doing was very visible to me because it would always inform new business initiatives.“
• “We are fast-growing, and things are changing all the time…When I took over, ASOS was going through a painful growth phase, and we really needed to look at our organisation. Unfortunately for me, I was tasked with looking at some cost-efficiencies for the team. It was a tough decision, but one that I needed to take.”
• “It requires me to work across the breadth of the organisation. ASOS has very big growth ambitions and lots of strategic transformation initiatives. It’s not just organising my own time, but getting that time from busy people, which requires a lot of planning.”

This is Episode 4 of the Transforming Insight podcast. 

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, but we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practices research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About - James Wycherley, Chief Executive, IMA and the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Over the last five years, over 20,000 Insight professionals worldwide have received his 5 Minute Insight emails.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased directly from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

Insight is an expensive business so we have a collective responsibility to make sure that our organisations are getting the best possible return on their investment, otherwise there’s a good chance that those resources would be better deployed elsewhere. 

The 2nd secret of successful Insight teams is that they recognise an underlying purpose: to identify value for their organisations and to drive change within them.

Topics Discussed

• What can we learn from the IMA’s Insight capability benchmarking? (1.03)
• From service functions to proactive business drivers (2.45)
• The four key activities for Insight teams (3.54)
• We shouldn’t just work at the task level (5.48)
• We’re all too busy working on other things (7.47)

This is Episode 3 of the Transforming Insight podcast which will outline the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams. In this episode James Wycherley, Chief Executive of the IMA and author of the Transforming Insight book, explores the underlying purpose of an Insight team.

Highlights

• “Insight is an expensive business. It costs a lot of money to acquire data, to manage it, to analyse it, to buy market research from agencies, to employ people with analytical or research skills...So, like every corporate department, we have a collective responsibility to make sure that our organisations are getting the best possible return on their investment, otherwise there’s a good chance that those resources would be better deployed elsewhere.
• “We should also study our own organisations with the same focus we bring to studying our customers and our market. Why?  Sometimes we know exactly who these people are, and we can try to develop close working relationships with them. “
• “The most successful Insight teams share another attribute. They don’t just work at the task-level, they reflect on their underlying purpose and use this insight about themselves as a reference point and a source of inspiration.”
• “If our teams are clear that their focus should be on identifying value and driving change, then it naturally follows that we would question a lot of the activity that we tend to get drawn into because other people have asked us to do it.”

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future editions of this Transforming Insight podcast. Not only will we explore all 42 secrets outlined in the Transforming Insight book, but we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please hit subscribe - and thank you for listening. 

About - James Wycherley, Chief Executive, IMA and the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Over the last five years, over 20,000 Insight professionals worldwide have received his 5 Minute Insight emails.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased directly from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

The 1st secret of successful Insight teams is that they agree on a more progressive definition of insights and insight as a basis for all their subsequent activity.

Topics Discussed

• The IMA’s definition of insights (2.06)
• The many sources of customer and market insights (3.19)
• The importance of actionability (5.47)
• The difference between insights and insight (7.00)
• The danger of narrow definitions (9.25)

This is Episode 2 of the Transforming Insight podcast which will outline the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams. In this episode James Wycherley, Chief Executive of the IMA and author of the Transforming Insight book explores the IMA’s definition of insight and insights and why it is so important that we don’t define our work according to the data we use or the methodology with which we have the most expertise.

Highlights

• “It seems to me that one of the main issues is that we all have a tendency to define our Insight work according to the data, or the methodology, in which we have most expertise. If you began your career working in a market research agency, there’s always going to be a danger that you will view requests for help from other departments in your organisation through the lens of market research.”
• “If our focus is on the underlying business question it would make no sense to limit the sources of data that we would consider. It’s not a competition where we’re out to prove that internal data is better than market research, or competitor analysis is worth more than complaints analysis. Insight teams have to think more strategically than that.”
• “If insights are individual, contextualised discoveries, insight is the accumulated understanding that is built up from many insights. It relates to the process of collating evidence and findings from multiple projects and sources, reflecting on the connections, and investigating the contradictions.”

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future editions of this Transforming Insight podcast. Not only will we explore all 42 secrets outlined in the Transforming Insight book, but we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So hit subscribe, and thank you for listening. 

About - James Wycherley, Chief Executive, IMA and the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Over the last five years, over 20,000 Insight professionals worldwide have received his 5 Minute Insight emails.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased directly from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

But, be honest, do you work in an Insight-driven organisation? Very few of us can say that we do, in fact Insight teams across every sector in Europe and North America often report that it is actually getting more difficult to do their job. If, as Insight leaders, we want our organisations’ performance to be transformed by Insight, we first have to transform our Insight teams and the role they play in our companies. 

Topics Discussed

• The exponential growth in customer data (1:15)
• Our ability to understand human behaviour (1:40)
• CEOs’ appetite for consumer insights (2:00)
• How many organisations are truly insight-driven? (3:30)
• The discipline of Insight management (4:40)

This is the very first episode of an exciting new podcast series that will outline the 42 secrets explained in the IMA’s Transforming Insight book. In this fascinating episode, you will learn:

• The first key imperative for every Insight team (7:40)
• Insight teams need to drive change (8:50)
• The importance of developing a strategy for Insight (10:05)
• How we can optimise the impact of Insight (11:15)

Highlights

• “Data is the world’s fastest growing resource, and the appetite and ability to use customer and market data is growing exponentially. With no exaggeration, it can be said that there has never been a greater opportunity for Insight teams to transform the performance of an entire organisation.”
• “I think that the increase in available data and ways in which it could be manipulated, together with the ever-expanding demand from decision-makers, have combined to make Insight teams more task-focused. We are doing more and more analysis and research, but in itself, this doesn’t make our companies Insight-driven. Far from it.”
• “If we want our organisations’ performance to be transformed by Insight, we first have to transform our Insight teams and the role they play in our companies.”

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future editions of this Transforming Insight podcast. Not only will we explore all 42 secrets outlined in the Transforming Insight book, but we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So hit subscribe, and thank you for listening. 

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA). A popular keynote speaker and acknowledged expert on Insight leadership, strategy, and communication, he is the author of the book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams, and over 35 IMA publications. He has provided thought leadership in the UK, Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Over the last five years, over 20,000 Insight professionals worldwide have received his 5 Minute Insight emails.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Copies of James Wycherley’s book Transforming Insight: the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams can be purchased directly from www.transforming-insight.com

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved

 In the Transforming Insight podcast, we not only explore all 42 secrets outlined in the Transforming Insight book, but we also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members. You won’t want to miss this! So hit subscribe!