Happy tenth birthday, Insight Agents!

How can you tell if you’ve got a sustainable business idea?

When you start something new, you can be sure that no end of well-meaning gurus and sages will come forward to offer their guidance about the amount of time you need to be in business to earn your spurs as a bona fide enterprise.

“If you’re here in 12 months’ time, serving more clients than those you started out with, you might just be onto something.” Check.

“Three years – three years is a really good yardstick of sustainability. Customers coming back for more, growing your reach and influence.” Mmm-hmm.

"Any business that makes it past its fifth birthday and is still exhibiting signs of growth – that shows it’s well established.” Gotcha.

“When you get past the seven-year itch, you’ll know that customers recommend you and your pipeline is stable.” Oh, OK!

Next week Insight Agents – the boutique, three-person, data storytelling consultancy that I run with my life and business partner Saskia Gent ; I serve corporates, she (and sometimes we) serve universities – turned ten. Yes, ten. We opened for business on 13 December 2013.

What started out as a purposeful way of taking what we’d learned working for others – and providing those learnings on our terms, not others’ – has reached double-figure years. And while what we do and how we do it has evolved to meet our customers’ needs – adapting to changing market dynamics, technological advances, and riding out the potential chaos of the pandemic – our essential offer remains the same. If a little bit sharper and clearer than back in 2013.

We help all sorts of organisations make smarter use of data. In the questions that they ask to surface the right data. In the insights that they articulate, using that data. And in the stories that they tell of the impact that they have, using those data-driven insights. Simple really. And still thriving and growing after a decade.

So many thanks to the more than 150 clients served so far – businesses, universities, charities, and government departments – too many to mention here. Here’s to the next chapter, the second decade, the teenage years. It’s been one hell of a ride to get to where we have. Judging by the energy and focus of our “working on the business” annual offsite last month, we’ve only just begun.

How data storytelling accelerates organisational success

We humans like there to be simple solutions to complex problems. Particularly in our VUCA world of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. We find it more straightforward to tell – and listen to – narratives apparently explained by single factors. But is it possible to make a claim as bold as the one in the title of this lead article? Can it really be that enhancing data storytelling capabilities truly accelerates organisational success? Isn’t that a bit reductionist?

In our quest for simple and elegant solutions to the challenges that face us, we use a wide array of shortcuts – known as cognitive heuristics – to try to solve them. While heuristics help us make decisions when confronted with mountains of data, they often lead us to make very predictable mistakes in data processing and decision-making under pressure or uncertainty. This has been characterised as System 1 thinking by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his popular 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, in contrast to more deliberative, considered, and slower System 2 thinking.

?Let’s consider some real-world examples.

?The war in Ukraine was caused by Putin’s imperialist ambitions.

Trump won the 2016 U.S. Presidential election because of fake news.

Leicester City won the Premiership that same year because of Claudio Ranieri’s leadership.

In each case, the stated cause clearly has some impact on the outcome; to put it in statistical terms, the dependent or predictor variable (Ranieri’s leadership) clearly had SOME impact on the independent or outcome variable (Leicester City’s victory). But single-factor – or single-most-important-factor – solutions routinely ignore and downplay both other causes AND the way that they affect and load onto other, interacting factors.

In the case of Leicester City’s triumph, in addition to Ranieri’s management style, we might also consider Vardy, Mahrez, and Kanté all peaking in the same team at the same time; the Premiership’s traditional Big Six clubs all underperforming for different reasons in the same season; Jose Mourinho imploding and being sacked by Chelsea, not for the first time; the Sky billions having a significant impact on smaller clubs’ abilities to attract bigger and bigger name players; media momentum; bookmakers’ commentary … plus, plus, plus … So, Ranieri matters, but not in isolation. (Please note: I’m not a fan of the Foxes, but it’s a useful example).

Humans are regularity and irregularity detectors, seeking out evidence that confirms (or denies) our position. And we’re always looking for causes that can explain effects. The Freudian psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, described the innate human thirst for knowledge as the “epistemophilic instinct”. Once we acquire language as toddlers, this instinct is what drives us to make sense of the world by continually asking “Why? Why? Why?” Indeed, as the journalist and author Warren Berger says in his excellent book A More Beautiful Question, by the age of five children have asked the question “Why?” a staggering 40,000 times.

Getting back to the impact of data storytelling on organisational success: how can I make such a claim when it’s self-evident at first, second, and 34th glance that organisational success depends on a huge variety of factors, from leadership to luck, from market maturity to economic headwinds from the world’s biggest economies – from the U.S. to China – from city sentiment to journalist sentiment, from fashion to social media commentary. How can I possibly make such bold claims for the ability of a corporation’s executives to blend narrative and numbers, stories and statistics?

In part it’s based on practice and analysis. Those organisations we’ve worked with over the past ten years that excel at data storytelling find it very much more straightforward to tell their tale with impact, appealing to not only the emotional parts of the brains of their target audiences that make decisions but also to the rational parts of their brains that go on to justify their decisions.

In part it’s based on the impact of the training courses we’ve run in the past decade on the three core components of data storytelling: asking smarter questions to surface the right data; using that data to articulate genuine insights into those we seek to influence; and, communicating with humanity and empathy and in sync with the target audience’s likely data tolerance. We’ve now trained thousands of individuals in hundreds of teams from dozens of organisations, and time and again our clients tell us that improving data storytelling skills accelerates organisational success.

And in part it’s because this is the one domain over which we have some dominion.

Narrative and numbers. Stories and statistics. For too long uncomfortable, fire and ice bedfellows. But now – for increasing numbers of organisations – more like cheese and crackers than chalk and cheese. As more and more are discovering, the defining equation of success in the modern knowledge economy is quite simply this: Analytics + Storytelling = Influence.

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, why not complete our scorecard? 12 questions, three minutes of your time, and an instant, personalised report on your data storytelling strengths and weaknesses; what works well and how you could become even better if … And if multiple members of your team or whole organisation complete the scorecard, we’ll happily aggregate the results and give you a snapshot of your company’s data storytelling culture. Just click on the image below of follow this link. (FYI, the scorecard is powered by Daniel Priestley 's most excellent ScoreApp platform. We can’t recommend it highly enough).

I’m on the road again …

November’s been a super-busy month of delivering insight and data storytelling training with purpose, with the best part of two weeks split between Wilmington, Delaware, and Cambridge, England. There we worked with almost 100 insights and analytics professionals from 阿斯利康 . A real privilege to work with some of the brightest minds in a business that’s touched hundreds of millions of lives directly in the course of the past three years, helping them to sharpen how they move from data to insight and insight to action, telling more powerful, purposeful stories with data.

Thanks so much to Greg Fazzaro and colleagues for this first engagement. Our journey continues in the New Year with the first cohorts of trainees, and we can’t wait to be back both sides of the Pond with your colleagues in Spring and Summer 2024.

As this was my first visit to the U.S. since the pandemic – a market I used to visit at least twice a year for the previous half-dozen years – I took advantage of being Stateside to visit friends, family, and familiar New England haunts at the end of the U.S. leg of the learning journey. Here I am outside the gates of Harvard in ‘the other Cambridge’, an institution I’m so proud to say was run by my splendid, deeply-missed brother Jeremy, who was Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences from 1991-2008. His old office was just across Harvard Yard, behind my back, above the statue of the university’s founder, ‘original Cambridge’ alum, John Harvard.

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New course via MRS for 2024

Earlier this year, it was my tremendous honour to be named a Fellow of the Market Research Society (MRS) – and me not even a market researcher. Thanks so much to CEO Jane Frost CBE and the board of the Society for recognising and elevating me. That lunch on a hot June day at Smith & Wollensky’s in the Adelphi Hotel, Covent Garden, is such a happy memory and highlight of 2023.

Part of the case I made to the Society as to why I might be considered for Fellowship was my commitment to training and developing those in the research and analytics business. Since 2015, I’ve delivered dozens of courses for the MRS on data storytelling and insightful thinking. And – from May 2024 – the Society has chosen to take the third of my core training courses: Asking Smarter Questions. The course is based on the Six Universal Principles of Asking Smarter Questions from my 2022-3 book called – if you didn’t know or hadn’t guessed it already – Asking Smarter Questions.

MRS courses are open access – for members and non-members alike. If you or members of your team would like to make it more likely you’ll get your hands on truly relevant data, you can sign up already for this course. Click on the image above or follow this link. It’s a cracking course, the perfect place to start on a journey to make genuinely smarter use of data, and suitable for novices and veterans alike.

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The Data Malarkey podcast

In the past month, it’s been my huge pleasure to welcome two further guests to Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. One of the very real appeals of the pod is the very wide variety of guests – from so many different walks of life – who get to explain how they make smarter use of data.

And listeners and viewers – because we drop in video format every fortnight, too, on our YouTube channel @Data Malarkey – get to join the dots between the very different uses of data. From psychologists to forensic scientists, political pollsters to digital marketers, diversity and inclusion experts to Emmy Award-winning creatives, AI gurus to medics, academics of many different stripes to the former head of the U.K. Space Agency.

In November, we were delighted to welcome Shai Reichert , the Co-Founder of digital marketing agency The Experience Design Studio , and Alexis Kingsbury , Co-Founder of business wrangler and de-stressor, AirManual . Two, cracking, deeply practical episodes. Alexis rounds out Season Three, and there’ll be a round-up episode dropping just before Christmas.?

We come back with a bang with another great Season – Four, already – in the early New Year, starting with the Director of Sense about Science , Tracey Brown . And – of course – plenty of unscheduled cameos from Quincy the Office Cat, just turned two and snoozing almost all day, every day, on the Insight Agents’ office sofa.

Any suggestions for guests – if you think you’d make a good guest or you know or work with someone who’d tell a great story about how they make smarter use of data – drop us an email at [email protected] or complete the simple application form at https://www.usingdatasmarter.com/guest

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Oh, and Happy Christmas, too!

For those of you taking a break over Christmas and New Year – whether you call it that, the Saturnalia, or Winterval – have a great break, recharge the batteries, and see you again in the New Year for more (or perhaps better – less!) Data Malarkey. Thanks so much for your consideration, attention, and engagement! I trust you like the festive header to this newsletter. Many thanks to Mally Brigden for the help with banner artwork and all our partners Convertico - Helping Experts Automate Growth – including the PDG, Adam Bonner – for help building and growing the Using Data Smarter world this year. Here’s to even greater heights in 2024!

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