Have you seen James Endersby’s (Chair of the MRS) post last week about how tough life is right now for clientside insight teams?
I can’t stop thinking about it. In his conversations with various insight leaders, a few themes emerged.
- They’re battling for budget
- They feel pulled in too many directions
- They have no time
Do any (or all three) of these ring true for you?
As I read the post, I couldn’t help wondering if we as a sector are trying to do too much. Given we feel under budget constraints, overwhelmed and lacking time, the obvious solution is to do less.
Should we be cutting back on the projects we commission? Should we be letting go of some of the less impactful elements of what we do (dashboards, anyone?!)? And should we instead be focused just on what has the most impact?
We could directly address each of these three challenges by:
- Reducing the amount we spend commissioning primary research
- Focusing on just a few strategically-vital projects
- And so freeing up time to focus on what makes a difference
If we do that, we’ll be in a much stronger position as a sector.
I’ve been doing the third one for years – helping them get more value from past research to really make an impact in an organisation.
One client said the report I produced synthesising all they knew on a particularly hot topic for the business was “the most shared report by our team in the whole of last year”.
If you feel like you’re doing too much, consider what you could stop doing. Where you could cut spend to free yourself up to fund some low-cost insight synthesis. And then use the time saved to communicate this around the business.
Featured image by Andersen Jensen on Unsplash