The Insight Management Academy (IMA) are the world’s leading authority on transforming insight teams. This year, The IMA’s CEO James Wycherley condensed 16 years of The IMA’s thinking into a book – Transforming Insight. The book contains advice across 42 areas that’ll help insight professionals identify value, drive change, manage their teams, optimise insight’s impact and plan for the future. It’s vital reading for insight professionals. If you want to make insight commercially valuable, then glue Transforming Insight to your desk and refer to it daily.
This week we’ll be discussing Transforming Insight’s key learnings. Today, we’re discussing what insight must do to do drive change.
Accept we’re in the change game
Now you might be thinking why a book about insight discusses how to drive change. Isn’t insight about discovery and knowledge? Yes, it is. But that’s only part of the puzzle. That’s why Transforming Insight lists ‘insight influence’ as one of effective insight team’s core competencies (along with insight generation, insight knowledge and insight communication).
Driving change is especially vital if insight wants to impact the biggest business decisions which Wycherley believes it will as “it’ll be rare for a chief executive to take a decision in the next few years without insight”. So, how do we make sure chief executives use insight?
Practice what we preach
Marketing best practice states that a brand manager must segment their market, identify each segment’s unique needs and position their brand’s offer vs. those needs when communicating to that specific segment. The same principle applies to insight.
Insight teams should segment their internal audiences, identify what insight needs each of them has and communicate to them appropriately vs. these needs. This is how to best drive change within insight’s internal audiences.
Go EAST
Transforming Insight contains a list of recommended reading. And it’s unsurprising to see Richard Shotton’s excellent Choice Factory included in this list. In Choice Factory, Shotton references the Behavioural Insights Team’s EAST framework. This suggests that to encourage a behaviour you must make it easy, attractive, social and timely.
While many businesses apply this principal to change consumer behaviour, few insight teams apply it to change stakeholder behaviour. Too often insight teams rely on existing relationships to drive change. But as Transforming Insight says, “merely having a great relationship isn’t always enough!”.
Learn the change game’s language
Wycherley describes language’s role as “vital” in driving change. And goes as far to say that “the language divide between insights teams and the business creates a divide between them that prevents insights driving businesses forward”.
And while the ways to better use language is a book in itself, the principals are simple:
- Don’t use jargon
- Use familiar words
- Keep it short
So, if insights teams can influence and drive change, insight can increase the chances of creating financial impact. More details on this tomorrow!
Want to know more about Transforming Insight? Then click here.
