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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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