Impact in Research: Advice from the Experts

A Summary of the Excellence in Impact panel from Advancing Research 2024

The age-old discussion about how research can have impact* has taken on added urgency in recent years. So, at Advancing Research 2024, I convened a panel of researchers I admire ( Megan Blocker , Mujtaba Hameed , and Victor Udoewa ) to get their thoughts on the topic.

It feels unfair to the panelists and the nuances of the conversation to summarize it as I have, but such is the nature of research and reporting… ?? As much as possible, I’ll rely on using direct quotes, many of which have been edited for concision and clarity.

Can you be a good researcher and not have any impact?

We hit a significant point of disagreement right out of the gate. The conceit of the panel was that I was a researcher who’s been doing good work but not having any influence and I’ve brought together some friends for their advice. But they didn’t agree on what “good work” looks like.

“You can't be good at research unless you're also good at getting that research across. I think you need to see these things as being inextricable from each other: advocating for the research is part of research.” -Mujtaba

“I think you could be an amazing researcher and have zero impact. I think you can be a bad researcher and have amazing impact.” -Victor

To bolster his case, Victor referenced Bloom’s Taxonomy .?He observed, “An executive can learn-understand something, even learn-remember something, but never learn-apply it, right? Maybe I produce some insights that they learned something from, but did they actually create? [In order to bridge that divide between understanding and doing,] I spend more than 50% of my time doing things that are not taught in research programs. So yeah, I want to say that impact in an organization has nothing to do with research skills.”

Mujtaba clarified that, as he sees it, impact and change are not necessarily synonymous. If you presented to senior executives, “you had ‘a seat at the table’ and whether or not they… It's like you led the horse to water, right? The horse didn't drink, but that's fine. You did your bit. And I think that's where you should draw the line at impact.”

(BTW, I opened up this question to others on LinkedIn. You can see what others had to say here and my opinion here .)

Clearly there’s some tension around what outcomes qualify as impact. I think that’s telling and important. Is researchers’ impact a function of driving decision making or of contributing to something larger, less tangible, and less valued by our organizations? It may be personal, a reflection of our values. Or it may be akin to how light is both a particle and a wave, possessing characteristics of both depending on the context in which it’s observed.

So what is “impact”?

It’s essential to understand what “impact” means to our panelists because it’s shaped by their professional context.

As Victor sees it, impact in the public sector is less about helping organizations prioritize effectively than helping organizations align their work with their social mission. While businesses look for the overlap of business needs and user needs and (should) prioritize efforts there, for public sector orgs, that Venn diagram of business needs and user needs should overlap to the point where it’s just a circle—and impact in Victor’s work is about aligning those circles. It’s a subtle but important distinction. What helps with those efforts? Victor suggested a book called The Service Organization (link to the authors’ website here ).

Mujtaba, in turn, works as a “boutique consultant.” As such, drawing on principles from David Maister's book, "The Trusted Advisor ." Mujtaba emphasized that trust is built on credibility, reliability, and intimacy, balanced against self-orientation. "If you have research skills and craft to pull out really strong insights, you establish credibility," he explained. For Mujtaba, impact is about becoming a trusted advisor instead of just a service provider.

For Meg, impact is multifaceted and more than just convincing an organization to follow your recommendations. Meg says, “We shouldn't necessarily think of impact as only when our research leads to a concrete decision that we can see in the product or service that our organization delivers, [...but] helping to shift the ways of thinking and working in the organization.”

While their definitions of impact may differ, there is a common thread: the interconnectedness of impact and relationships. And that’s a thread we continued to pull throughout the panel.

How to have impact in your organization

The above differences aside, the panelists were generally aligned on how to have influence in one’s organization. Namely, that the secret to influencing organizational change lies in adaptability, strategies for engagement, and relationship-building.

Mujtaba recounted a story from his time assisting a research leader at a tech company that had plateaued because, as he described it, "they were just designing for people like themselves. They were designing for experts in engineering—you know, nerds." The company needed to broaden their understanding of customers, but that would require the company’s power core, engineering, to step into unfamiliar territory.

"We did really good work, and we helped shape these personas," Mujtaba explained, "but in that first share-out, we could sense the pushback in the room." Facing resistance, Mujtaba and the team pivoted to a hands-on workshop where engineering leaders were actively involved in the creation process. "Instead of creating a series of reports and physical artifacts for their offices, we decided to completely change it up and make it a hands-on workshop. Key engineering and design leaders were involved in making this, using our findings."

What's important here isn't just the engaging workshop, but the ability to read the situation and the willingness to adapt, using whatever approach is most effective in getting stakeholders not just bought in, but invested.

Meg observed that influence “begins well before you do the research.” She continued, “Anything you can do to give people a sense of ownership, a sense of their fingerprints on the work, is going to make the work more likely to land once it's done. Anything you can do to make your process participatory, open, transparent, collaborative, I think, is a massive way to secure buy-in before you've even begun.”

Victor pointed out, “Sometimes it has nothing to do with even how you communicate it. I just have a really good relationship with someone who's a decision maker, and boom. And this is what I mean, that sometimes it's just not even related to the researchers or some of the skills that we learned—that sometimes relationships really matter.”

Mujtaba took this observation considerably further, framing relationship-building in existential terms:

“This sense of relationship thinking is actually so integral to everything we do, especially with the specter of AI. In theology, there's this concept of ‘the god of the gaps’, which is that wherever we've progressed in science, whatever can't be explained still is attributed to god, and therefore, the more we learn, god is always retreating into the gaps. It's almost like this with AI. It's like ‘the humanity of the gaps’ where the stuff that was previously seen as being human is increasingly getting taken over. And I think this relationships piece is quite a nice little thing we can fall back on, like, okay, we can do the relationships piece and fight for ourselves to have that.”

Perhaps relationships aren’t just the secret to researchers influencing their organizations, they’re the secret to our humanity itself.?

Brass tacks

To sum things up I asked the panel, “If each of you were to give one piece of advice [...], what would that one piece of advice be?” Here’s what they said.

Meg Blocker: “Find your friends, find your people. Build those relationships, build trust. It will always pay off.”

Mujtaba Hameed: “Totally agree, Megan. I would add, learn to speak the language of the power core or the brahmins or whoever it is. Shape the framework that you make in a way that they can see it and they can see its value.”

Victor Udeowa: “I was going to say both of those together! I would say ‘work alongside the people.’ Instead of working apart from them, let them be part of the process.”

Again we see the importance of strategies for engagement and the power of relationships.

But isn’t that just having influence? Is there anything unique to research?

While the panelists’ advice was insightful and encouraging, most of it seemed true for any function seeking greater influence. So I asked them, “Is there any aspect of it that is distinct to those of us in research?”

This, for me, was the most inspiring part of the whole conversation.

Mujtaba: “With research, we have the potential, if we play this right, to have the most enduring impact. And that’s because we’re so close to uncovering truth as it pertains to strategy.” He cited Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy , which posits there are three aspects to a successful strategy: you need to have a diagnosis of the problem, you need to have a guiding policy, and then you need to have coherent actions. He continued:

“Good research can really be the best thing for that diagnosis of the problem. Quite often, people have this skewed understanding of the real cause of a problem and then, whatever actions they put into place to solve that problem, they don't stick and the sands shift beneath their feet and they end up having to do it again and again. This sense of perpetual crisis and upheaval is built on poor insight. Strong, compelling insights, that we can find as researchers, are the solution.”

Meg, agreed, shared that a credo where she works is ‘fall in love with the problem, not the solution. “The secret sauce that researchers bring is that adherence to falling in love with the problem and not the solution.” She also challenged researchers to push beyond our proscribed boundaries: “If you focus on things that go beyond the traditional scope of defining a problem, exploring it through research, and presenting insights… If you really start to think of your job as having influence, changing the organization, it starts to creep into all these really cool ways of working that just help your job grow, and suddenly you're cross-functional and you have all these opportunities.”

And Victor pointed out, “There are other framings that exist that don't involve problems. You can be moving towards a future, a hope, a goal, an aspiration, etc. And some of these non-Western framings also use other types of knowledge that are not just mainstream institutional knowledge. It's not specific to research, but I do think whatever I am calling research, which is a bit broader, does exist everywhere across the world.”?

Hence Victor’s call for radical participatory research to replace the siloed, zero-sum approaches that leave us focused on how our function can have impact instead of how our organizations can help people.

In a way, it felt like all the panelists responded to my question of what about this is unique to research by saying, ‘It’s not about research. It’s about something bigger.’?

Thanks for reading—and thanks to the panelists

I didn’t do justice to the depth and play of the conversation, but hopefully I conveyed the core messages and the astute wisdom of Meg, Mujtaba, and Victor. If you found this helpful, let me know. (And if not, let me know!) Also, I encourage you to get involved with Advancing Research in the future. We have free, public community calls and a big conference in the spring to facilitate conversations like this. You should be a part of it. We’ll have a few laughs, maybe even advance the practice and profession of this thing we research. I hope to see you there.

* Author’s note: I seriously dislike the term “impact” unless we’re talking about a collision between two solid objects or dentistry. IMO, “impact” is vague, violent, cliché, and insufficiently tangible, actionable, or measurable. If we want influence, let’s just call it what it is. If we want something else, let’s say that. It’s hard to align around, plan for, or achieve ambiguous goals. I actually thought I’d titled the panel ‘Excellence in Influence’ until I saw it on the website.?? I guess I got lazy with my language. After this recap I’ll be making a concerted effort to stop. I hope my doing so impacts you impactfully. ??